Ok, so Google will remove officially removed protection from advertisers bidding on brand-owners’ trademarks. However, you still will not be able to have these brand name terms visible in the AdText portion of the ad.
Are you prepared? Are your clients?
Are you going all out aggressively to bid against competitors trademarks?.
Are you going to start bidding against your own brand as protection?.
Perhaps a mixture?. Or are you going to wait and see what your competitors do?
So what does this mean for affiliate marketing? Well - I feel it’s pretty simple:
MERCHANTS SHOULD EMPLOY SEARCH AGENCIES TO PROTECT THEIR BRAND
So if affiliates bid on a brand and go via their own site, merchant’s can still stipulate that they don’t want that. But each merchant will have to do the calculations on their ROI between monitoring and responding to brand name “abuse”, hiring a search agency to conduct a review of the possibilities and implement a solution and just letting market forces dictate the way forward.
If there is going to be mass-scale brand name “abuse” then won’t this have an impact on the profitability of the channel for the merchant? Won’t this in-turn have the possible result of lowering commissions in certain circumstances?
But overall, I see the results as:
- More affiliates randomly bidding on brands without checking what the merchant wants;
- Merchants devoting more time to policing their brand;
