Broad Match Can Cause Unintentional Trademark Abuse

Lori Weiman does a good job laying out an important issue that many search markerters have fallen trap to in her blog post on Search Engine Land called "Does Auto-Matching Cause Unintentional Trademark Abuse?"

"Google and Yahoo, by way of the auto-matching feature, can show your ads on keywords that you did not intend to sponsor."

At imwave we have run into this a number of times.  With Google they will take your broad match terms and display the ads on competitive trademarks you didn't ask for or know they were going to choose.  Running a broad match term like "sneakers" doesn't mean you will only show up under terms like "basketball sneakers" and "tennis sneakers", but they may match your ad up to shoes, boots, sandals, or terms like nike, adidas, etc...  At Yahoo the situation gets even worse!  Not only will they start displaying your ad under these brand terms, they will actually sometimes adjust your ad copy (without telling you) to include these keywords in headlines so that they get higher click through rates!!!  This can be very annoying when you have agreed to follow strict brand guidelines, and then Yahoo decides they know better!

What is the solution?  You can stop running broad and advanced matching, but that is going to leave A LOT of opportunity on the table.  The only other solution I know of is to work with your clients to establish a good list of negative keywords that you know you don't want your ads to appear on.

I'd love to hear your experiences with this issue.

Comments

[Matt Enders]

Good post Adam. I see this at least on a monthly basis between all of the programs we manage. Most of the time, affiliate bidding violations on branded terms does turn out to be an honest mistake due to broad match. My advice is twofold:

For affiliates:
- Do as Adam recommends and implement a strong list of negative keywords. That alone can save you a good amount of headache down the road.
- Have a good working relationship with your affiliate managers. If the manager knows you, you will likely be given the benefit of the doubt if an issue such as this pops up.

For affiliate managers:
- Have a good working relationship with your affiliates, particularly the big players who are driving significant sales via PPC. If you know who your affiliates are and trust them, you can afford to give them the benefit of the doubt, as I said above.
- Don't jump the gun and send a nasty email to an affiliate who is in violation of your terms, even if you are catching heat from your superiors. It takes a long time to build good relationships, and only one stupid email to ruin those relationships.
- Invest in PPC monitoring software so you can proactively watch the bidding.
- Keep a log of violations. Giving the benefit of the doubt to a partner is great, but not keeping logs and possibly being taken advantage of is not okay.

It all comes down to relationships and knowing who you are working with. The SE's sometimes create issues that can easily be avoided, and never should have existed in the first place.