Congratulate yourself! When competitors bid on your company name or trademarked products as Adwords keywords, congratulate yourself! It usually means that you have a great product or company. Your competitors want to be associated with you, your company, your products, and services.

It also means that your competitors are running scared! Bidding on a competitor’s company name or trademarked products as Adwords keywords looks desperate. And it feels pathetic — if I’m searching for Company A, and I see that Company B is bidding: that very act speaks volumes about who they are as a company, what they think of their own products, and how they might treat me if I became a customer. 

• Yuch. “I know you’re interested in A, but I’m only going to show you B.”
• Yowsa! “I don’t have much confidence that being honest and straightforward will work.”
• Yikes! “If there’s anything we can do to trick you, we’ll do it!”

That cheap, tacky, icky feeling: that’s why I recommend that my clients never, ever buy the their competitors’ names as keywords. It makes them look second-rate.

Policy, schmolicy. Now, Google Adwords policy is that competitors can bid on your company name and trademarks as Adwords keywords. And you can buy their trademarks. It’s fair game. It’s all legal. 

But it’s still a bad idea. After all, the same policy says that your competitors can’t use your company name or trademarks in their Adwords ads. This makes the ad quite weak. It is not likely to get much clickthrough.

But you still might be concerned about impressions – someone is looking for your site on Google, and there’s your competitor’s ad. You don’t want people thinking that you’re somehow associated with them, do you?

If you’re really concerned about competitors bidding on your trademarks as keywords, here’s an example to show what you can do to position yourself more positively — without engaging in dirty tricks or industry in-fighting:

Create a “Insert-Your-Company-Name-Here” campaign. Add your company name as the only keyword phrases in this campaign. (Remember to use exact match and phrase match for each keyword phrase!)

Write your Adwords ad to say something like:

Company A
Accept no imitations!
Visit Company A‘s official site.
(CompanyA URL)

There are quite a few benefits to this approach:

• Google bolds your company name in the Adwords Ad, garnering extra attention that will make your competitors all but invisible.
• Positions your company & products positively: as something others want to imitate.
• Subtly positions your Adwords competitors as “less reputable”.
• Makes savvy searchers doubt the legitimacy of your competitors.

And sometimes, this approach even gets sleazy competitors who bid on your company name to back off — because it just makes them look so desperate!

How do you handle it when competitors bid on your company trademarks?

Adding brackets and quotes to every keyword phrase in your Google Adwords ad groups can help you run a more efficient and profitable campaign. In the Adwords dashboard, Google refers to this as “exact match” and “phrase match”.  According to Google, using these formats can make your advertising “more precise.”

Two minutes is all it takes — maybe less. Here’s a free exact match, phrase match generator tool I like to use. There are maybe a gazillion others. Make sure to use one you like when you identify the keyword phrases you use in each ad group. You’ll thank me later.

But let’s pause to think about something disturbing:

Why doesn’t Google make it easy to add exact match and phrase match to your keyword lists? After all, it’s kind of a hassle to type them in individually! Especially when an ad group may have dozens of phrases…

Hmmmm….Perhaps Google makes more money from advertisers when they are less precise and a little more sloppy with their keyword lists. Can anyone thing of another reason?

Let’s face it: an online keyword generator embedded within Adwords would be a done-in-a-minute kind of project for Google. It would create “more precise” ads, and create a better customer experience for Adwords customers.

Until Google gets more concerned with ad relevancy, a bunch of little online tools that automatically add quotes and brackets to your Adwords keyword phrases have cropped up all over the internet. They’re filling the gap that Google neglects.

So spend the extra 2 minutes it takes to use on of these tools, and you can run more effective, tighter, and productive campaigns. And of course, this means you’re more likely to save money on Adwords campaigns while delighting your customers.

Google announces a new keyword analysis feature for Adwords clients. The new feature lets you more fully diagnose your Adwords campaigns’ quality scores.

Among other relevance factors, quality scores indicate how close your campaign keywords match your landing page content. This can impact your sales and other conversions. In the past, the Google Adwords quality scores have been rather cryptic. “Poor”, for example, doesn’t tell you much — or give you any insight on what action to take to improve
The new Keyword Analysis feature not only gives you a quality score, but indicates what action you might need to take to improve your scores. However, I smiled at the example that Google gave in its blog: it suggested eliminating a keyword, because it didn’t match the landing page.

Other relevance factors. What about recommending moving that keyword to a more relevant Ad group — and developing another landing page for that keyword — and then testing it to see how it functions? While the new keyword analysis feature may provide some foundational advice, it may not be comprehensive enough to be much good.
Use the new feature, but take the advice it gives with a grain of pepper and see if you can sneeze out some better options!

You are spending too much on Google Adwords. And you know it.

But maybe you just don’t know what to do about it.

After all, the reason you even spend a dime at Adwords is because you see results. Or do you?

What happens if you spend a ton — like eBay does — and you get into a fit of picque and decide to yank all your Google Adwords — like eBay did — what happens?

Do you watch your traffic plummet?

That’s not what happened at eBay! They didn’t see any difference in their traffic!