Editorial Articles

The market for online counterfeit goods is worth £875 million annually (NetImperative). As a result most major brands will be familiar with the concept of brand protection, a multi-million pound industry that has been built around the issues of counterfeiting, piracy and trademark infringements.

Few brands are however aware of how severely search (in particular PPC) is affected by these issues. This fact makes it relatively easy for counterfeiters and rogue affiliates to get away with severe trademark infringements, causing millions of pounds in lost revenue annually.

The shapes of trademark infringements

Illegitimate use of trademarks in ad copy is a widespread issue amongst big brands. If a trademark complaint has been filed, rogue affiliates and competitors can still use trademarks within their ads with methods such as replacing letters with numbers, combining words and using punctuation (e.g. Coca.C0la) circumventing Google’s trademark filters.

Affiliates bidding on your brand terms can be illegitimate or legitimate, depending on your affiliate policy. Either way, many affiliate managers have issues with rogue affiliates breaking their guidelines, be it not to appear above certain positions, not to link directly to your site or simply not to bid on brand terms.

Ad hi-jacking is the threat which can cause the most severe impact; someone imitates your ad using your own display URL and redirect users either through an affiliate ID or to a counterfeit website to steal your traffic. If executed well it can be very hard to discover.

How you can identify and prevent infringements

With the exception of ad hi-jacking, trademark infringements can generally be spotted by searching for your brand terms and scanning through the results. Affiliates can be identified through their affiliate URL and once identified you can either contact your affiliate agency or network, or go directly to the affiliate with your complaint.

For competitors illegitimately using a variation of your trademark, the best route is often to ask them to take the ad down directly (a threatening letter could work well) and then submit the trademark variation they have used to Google’s trademark team so that no-one can use that variation again.

Spotting ad hi-jacking is often problematic, as to the naked eye the ad looks exactly the same as your own. Sometimes the only difference is the destination URL. The best way to identify hi-jacking without clicking the ad is to view the click URL Google uses which usually contains the offending affiliates ID. Find an affiliate ID or someone else’s website in the click URL and there is a good chance your ad is being hi-jacked. Once you have spotted a hijacker the next step is to contact Google to get the offending account removed.

How to avoid trademark infringement & hi-jacking

The above issues are worsened by the fact that rogue players often operate outside office-hours when no-one is monitoring AdWords. We have seen many cases where big brands have lost almost all brand traffic to hi-jacking without knowing, causing thousands of pounds in losses over short periods of time. In other words: get it wrong and you are likely to suffer commercially over longer periods of time.

If you have an agency managing your PPC campaign, they should have the brand protection covered. If not, you should investigate the available tools that enable you to track Google AdWords 24 hours a day, which is essential to understand exactly when trademark infringements are happening. With few tools currently available, Market Defender is recommended as the most comprehensive solution. Better to find out who is stealing your traffic now than when it’s too late!

Author: Torstein Langeland, Director, Stickyeyes