This is an area that seems to be getting more exposure lately with articles starting to pop up in online marketing magazines and more and more companies requesting Google to add restrictions to their own business trademarks and related keywords to stop competing businesses using these in their ads.

I personally feel that this is a negative aspect to Google Adwords which unfortunately due to legal issues I’m sure Google is required to comply to some degree but I’m not a lawyer so I wouldn’t know so don’t sue me!

Why I find this a frustrating issue is that many online business selling products are in fact being penalised by the companies that supply them. For example manufacturing company Widgets Inc (not a real company that I know of) makes widget chairs and an online shop owner Wadgets Online shop (another fictional shop) sells these widget chairs using Adwords as part of their campaign but when they want to use the keyword ‘widget chairs’ in their campaign keywords or ad text, they get a big no no from Adwords because this keyword has been restricted by the trademark owner, forcing them to use a less relevant keyword to try to sell these chairs.

Umm sorry but I don’t think that benefits the end user, online shop owner or the manufacturing company who applied the trademark restriction in the first place. So the user can’t find the product they want, the online shop owner loses a sale and the manufacturer sells one less widget. So you tell me, who wins now?

For legitimate reasons Google does allow you to request an exception which will be reviewed by the Adwords team however you’ll have to cross your fingers and wait for the outcome.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Google Adwords, PPC, Robert Mirabito. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.