Should You Bid On Your Competitors’ Brand?

Writing by Pay Per Click Journal on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 Comments (1)

Pay per click advertising is keyword-based advertising. Your ad content is based on a carefully selected campaign made up of the best keywords for your business. Do those keywords entail your competitors’ brand names?

This has become a controversial practice in pay per click advertising. Your competition has worked hard to build a brand (as you have). Then along comes someone who outbids them on their brand name as keyword and threatens to take their business away. How would you feel? That’s likely how your competitor feels too.

Is it right? Well, there are currently no laws that say you can’t bid on brand names as keywords (at least in the U.S.). That doesn’t mean you should do it. Of course, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either. But many companies are now trying to protect their copyrights and trademarks by pursuing the search engines and advertisers whenever their brand names are used for advertising. If you compete with a huge company with deep pockets then you could lose. That’s a risk that you’ll have to take (if you want to).

In TV advertising, you can’t use a competitors’ brand name. In pay per click advertising, you can (with a few limitations). But it is risky and you should weigh the risks carefully before you do it.

Comments (1) Category: PPC Bidding Strategies

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1 Comment

Comment by Christian Del Monte

Made Friday, 26 of September , 2008 at 9:38 am

Hi Nick,
Thought I would chime in:)

As far as Google PPC goes, if your trademarked term shows up on a competitors “ad text,” they will notify the other company of the issue if you bring it to their attention. (You have to prove to them that it’s trademarked though….which you also have to do if you want to put the trademark symbol in your ad.) However, Google won’t step in if the keyword is just in their keyword list and they are bidding on it. If a company feels strong enough to go after them anyways, the best thing to do is send them a cease and desist. That will take care of about 90% of those issues.

But based on my experience and ethics, I don’t support companies that bid on competitor keywords. Its a short lived bottom feeding strategy in most cases. However, in certain cases such as a travel aggregator like “Expedia” bidding on “hilton hotel” kewords, I feel that its more acceptable. Anyways, that’s my two cents!