Brand Protection: The complete guide by Adthena

The strongest paid search strategy builds on your brand’s unique value. Here, you control the customer experience and messaging, driving traffic that converts from search, via Google Ads. 

Your brand terms, message and unique selling points are yours to leverage – and in paid search, they should be your safe haven.

But with fierce competition, protecting your brand in paid search is crucial. Let’s unlock the secrets of brand protection, safeguard your reputation and optimize your campaigns for success.

What is brand protection?

Your brand deserves to be in control. But competitors, resellers and affiliates can exploit your brand for their own gain in paid search. How?

• Keyword bidding: They might bid on your brand terms, causing your ads to drop in search results.
• Trademark misuse: They could use your brand name or trademarks in their ads, misleading customers and diverting traffic.

Brand protection is your shield. It safeguards your online presence and reputation by:

• Keeping your brand front and center in search engines.
• Protecting hard-earned brand equity.
• Ensuring your customers find you first.

Why brand protection is important

Brand protection is an essential part of paid search. it helps safeguard your brand from competitors, affiliates and resellers capitalizing on your brand’s equity, potentially damaging its reputation and driving up costs.

• Trademark infringements divert as much as 21.5% of a typical brand’s clickshare to competitors. They’re stealing clicks that are rightfully yours.
• Search is a critical part of the funnel and can be the single point of failure for your entire investment if you let rivals steal demand.
• One lost customer (and associated data) can snowball into tens of thousands of dollars over that customer’s lifetime.

*Adthena industry average data taken from 450+ businesses’ text ads across the EU, U.S. and Australia. Includes brand terms and brand generic terms.

Protect your brand from affiliate ad-hijacking

Affiliate ad-hijacking is the process of affiliates creating fake ads that look like yours, using your brand name and targeting relevant search queries. Traffic is funneled to your website using UTM parameters, giving them credit for the sale, even though the customer landed on your site. This way, they essentially steal commissions unrightfully.

What are the risks of affiliative ad-hijacking?

Ad hijacking in paid search can be a real headache for businesses, leading to several risks and consequences:

• Wasted ad spend: Hijackers might outbid you on your own brand keywords, forcing you to pay more just to appear in search results for your own brand name. This eats away at your budget and reduces the effectiveness of your campaigns.
• Lost traffic and sales: If hijackers’ ads are displayed instead of yours, potential customers could be directed to the wrong website. This means lost traffic, leads and sales.
• Brand damage and confusion: Hijackers might use misleading ad copy or even impersonate your brand entirely. This can confuse customers and damage your brand reputation.
• Channel conflict: If unauthorized affiliates are hijacking your brand terms, it can create conflict with your other marketing channels.  Customers might get mixed messages or have a negative experience, hindering your overall marketing efforts.
• Reduced click-through rates (CTR): Even if your ads appear, hijackers might use tactics that make their ads more appealing, leading to a lower click-through rate for your legitimate ads.
• Erosion of brand trust: Repeated exposure to hijacked ads can make customers wary of clicking on your ads in the future, impacting brand trust.

Strategies to protect your brand from Ad-hijacking

• Set boundaries: Agree to codes of conduct that specify what terms your partners can use and how you want your brand to be represented. Include search terms you don’t want to be associated with and consider alternative terms of value to whitelist so you’re not competing for the same clicks.
• Prove it and don’t over pay: Make sure you’re only paying for traffic that you wouldn’t win otherwise. Capture evidence to enforce your contractual terms.
• Use Adthena’s Ad Hijacking Detection solution: Monitor and report thousands of instances of affiliate ad hijacks across hundreds of affiliate networks with Adthena’s Ad Hijacking Detection. Automatically detect when an affiliate impersonates your ad and get evidence of fraud including ad screenshot and affiliate ID.

Protect your brand from trademark infringements in paid search

Trademark infringement in paid search happens when a competitor or another advertiser uses your legally protected trademarks in a way that’s likely to confuse customers about the source of a product or service. Here’s a breakdown of the key points:

• Trademarks: These are unique words, symbols or phrases that identify the source of your goods or services. They help distinguish your brand from competitors.
• Using your trademark: In paid search, infringement can occur when someone uses your trademark in several ways:
  • Bidding on your brand terms: This involves using your brand name or related keywords in their ad campaigns. While some platforms allow bidding on competitor terms, the focus shouldn’t be on misleading customers.
  • Trademark in ad copy: They might directly include your trademark within the ad text itself, creating the impression that their product or service is affiliated with yours.

It’s important to note that the laws around trademark infringement can vary depending on your location. However, most search engine platforms have policies in place to prevent advertisers from misleading users through trademark misuse.

What are the risks and consequences of trademark infringement in paid search?

Infringement carries significant risks for both the infringer and the brand whose trademark is being misused:

• Legal trouble: Trademark infringement is a serious offense. If another advertiser misuses your trademark and you take legal action, they could face significant financial penalties and be forced to stop using your trademark.
• Brand damage: Confusion caused by trademark infringement can erode your brand reputation. Customers who click on a misleading ad might feel frustrated or deceived, potentially damaging your brand’s trust.
• Wasted resources: If customers are directed to a competitor’s site due to trademark infringement, you lose valuable leads and potential sales. This can negatively impact your marketing ROI.
• Account suspension: Most search engine platforms have strict policies against trademark infringement. If you’re found to be infringing on another brand’s trademark, your ad account could be suspended, hindering your online marketing efforts.
• Negative customer perception: Even if you aren’t the one infringing, being associated with such tactics can paint a negative picture of your brand to potential customers.
• Reputational hit: Engaging in trademark infringement yourself can seriously damage your brand’s reputation. It can portray you as unethical and untrustworthy.

Strategies to protect your brand from trademark infringement

Don’t get sucked into bidding wars on your own search terms. The most effective long-term strategy against competitors infringing on your brand is to harness the power of search intelligence to understand their Google Ads strategies on a granular and continual basis. Then you can take action with Adthena’s Infringement Tracker.

Monitor bids and infringements on your branded search terms:

• Make informed budget decisions on your brand terms.
• Proactively monitor your entire digital brand landscape.
• Prevent partners and affiliates from cannibalizing clicks.
• Spot infringements and protect your brand value.

Map and monitor competitive and partner activity around your brand terms

Search marketers experience many challenges when it comes to controlling the use of their trademarks. The two themes we hear most often:

• “Trying to control the use of trademarks is tedious and time-consuming.” 
• “Finding real-life trademark infringement examples is too difficult to do manually.” 

Manually collecting and processing the trademark violation data required to submit Google complaints properly can take up to eight hours each month. 

By automating aggregation and submission of infringements across devices at scale, you can confidently protect your brand and save time and effort. 

Take control with Adthena’s Auto Takedown

Adthena’s Auto Takedown allows you to map and monitor all competitive and partner activity around your brand terms. This lets you efficiently respond to trademark infringements and report examples directly to Google for removal. 

With the simple push of a button, you can:

• Automatically monitor your brand trademark search terms at scale, 24/7.
• Automatically submit evidence of trademark violations directly to Google. Adthena will also keep track of the responses from Google.
• Save up to eight hours per month in manual monitoring

Measure the success of your brand protection strategy 

Now that you’ve implemented your brand protection strategy, it’s crucial to track its effectiveness. By tracking these metrics and focusing on both preventative and reactive measures, you can effectively gauge the success of your brand protection strategy in paid search and ensure your brand maintains control over its online presence.

Reduced infringement:

• Manually track brand mentions in search results for potential trademark misuse. A decrease shows success.
• Use automated tools like Adthena’s Infringement Tracker to detect infringement alerts. Fewer alerts indicate a winning strategy.

Metrics showing control:

• Look for increasing brand search share, pushing out hijackers.
• Maintain a healthy click-through rate for your brand terms.
• Ideally, your cost-per-click for brand terms should decrease as competition lessens.

Indirect benefits:

• A strong brand protection strategy can enhance brand image and awareness.
• Prevent hijacking to improve conversion rates for your paid search campaigns.

Key considerations:

• Integrate search engine and website data to identify user behavior discrepancies.
• Brand protection is continuous, so regularly monitor metrics and adapt your strategy.
• Focus on preventing infringements, not just reacting to them.

Protect your PPC brand terms with Adthena’s Brand Protection solution

Take a quick platform tour of Adthena’s award-winning Brand Protection solution and see how you could safeguard your brand.

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