It is a beautiful sunny morning in London town on this bank holiday morning, a perfect day for sitting alone in an open plan office in North London catching up with some work and keeping an eye on our friend Mr Google! It is just over 4 weeks since it was announced that Google would be relaxing its trademark policy and essentially anyone would be open to bid on anyone’s brand, although to have the brand name in your copy you would still need authorisation. Well after 4 weeks of deliberation the day of reckoning is here and from today the new trademark policy is live.
I’ve been in this industry now for nearly 6 years and the search landscape has changed considerably in that time. When I started in affiliate marketing as a fresh faced graduate the search space was completely open to anyone. Very few, if any clients ran their own search campaigns on their brands or their competitors brands so there were no policies in place for affiliates, it was simply a free for all. This worked well at the time as many clients did not have good SEO rankings either so the affiliates were capturing traffic that would have otherwise been lost in the World Wide Web.
The only issues we had in the early days were with brokers / early aggregators bidding on clients’ terms but sending the traffic elsewhere. This is where affiliates became increasingly important in the client’s search strategy as they could price out the aggregators or push them down in the ranks to make sure that the client was receiving the traffic from their own brand.
Today clients’ search strategies are very sophisticated. Most big brands will fill the SEO listings for their brand term and with the ability to trademark their brand as well they could dominate the first page of results for the brand. If a client can do this then an affiliate is not necessarily needed on brand terms except for to protect the broad match space which is where most clients need the “back-up” of affiliates. However, with the new Google policy clients can no longer guarantee domination of the search space on their brand as anyone can bid to appear. This does therefore create opportunities to use affiliates again, like back in the beginning of this decade.
I have lost count of the numerous conversations I have had over the last few weeks with my colleagues, affiliates, clients and I did even try to explain it to my parents! The general consensus, and our opinion at dgm, is that there is no blanket solution for what to do in this situation. It will depend on the sector, the size of brand, the clients search strategy, competitors search strategy and the cost / ROI of bidding on brand.
So after 4 long weeks of contemplating what will happen, putting strategies in place, putting contingency plans in place, 5th May has arrived and the new policy is live. As it is bank holiday I can’t see that a lot will happen today as I imagine most people are enjoying the bank holiday with campaigns perhaps ready to go live tomorrow. A quick search on a few terms confirms this, no changes as far as I can see at the moment, but it is only just passed 10.30am…….
