If you are running a domestic campaign in Google, it’s normally quite straightforward to find out who are bidding on your brand to hijack your customers. Simply go to Google, key in your brand term, and do a quick search. But, this sometimes doesn’t show you the whole picture.
You may miss out some competitors who:
- set a low daily budget so that their ads do not show all the time, or
- advertise on a specified time periods (day parting), or
- advertise on a different search engine as Google doesn’t dominate every single search market, or
- geo-targeting outside your office region
So, next time when you do a competitor analysis, take the above factors into consideration. Here is one quick tip:
- Search on your brand terms on multiple search engines across multiple domains. For example, if your company is in Singapore and your business targets UK and US, you should search in Google.co.uk and Google.com as well.
A better way is to have your online marketing department work with technical guys to design a script to automate the whole process. Take all the major search engines and variable domains into consideration along with proper proxy settings as both access domain and searchers’ IP matter in geo-targeting.
Can you trademark your brand terms in Google? Maybe. In US and Canada, you can’t stop other advertisers bidding on your brand keywords. Outside US and Canada, you can try. Mail or fax your trademark complaints to Google; find out the Google trademark policy. Before you trademark your brand terms, make sure you are not stopping your affiliates bidding on the brand terms at least.
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