Think you've got Trademark bidding under control? Think again!

Posted by Richard Stokes on April 30, 2007 to

I often tell our customers to not rely on data gained from an occasional "spot check" of Google or Yahoo search results, but sometimes I need the same kick-in-the-pants myself. I've recently been spending a bit of time monitoring the term "AdGooroo" within Google as an affiliate advertiser has been illegally using our trademarked brand name in their ad copy...

It's been about two weeks since I filed a trademark infringement complaint with Google and the ad is still showing up, so I decided this weekend to check up on it using our Trademark Infringement service. I was surprised to learn that 16 other advertisers (see below) were also bidding on our term. None of these advertisers had ever appeared during my spot checks, either because their ads appear so infrequently that I never saw them, or they are geotargeting their ads so they don't appear on Google searches performed by our office location.

Lesson learned: let the technology do the heavy lifting for you. Humans aren't meant to do repetitive, tedious tasks ... computers are, and they do it much more effectively than we do.