Not too long ago, Jeremy Shoemaker wrote about his successful attempt at trademarking the ShoeMoney brand. This in turn allowed him to submit documentation to the Google AdWords team so that using ShoeMoney within ad titles and copy wouldn't be allowed. This inspired me to see if I could find a way around Google's trademark protection system which I ended up accomplishing within 10 minutes or so. My experiments with this technique are over so I figured I'd share the trick. I imagine other people have already discovered how to do what I did so maybe it isn't much of a secret anyway.
Google seems to use a basic matching algorithm that, from my experiments, checks for an exact match of the protected trademark. So if xyz is the trademark, Google will check an ad's title and description for the existence of xyz. I've seen it also check for the plural version of xyz and adding an apostrophe + s at the end of the trademark isn't enough to fool Google.
There is also a feature called dynamic keyword insertion that uses this syntax {Keyword: default keyword}. Google will replace this special tag with whatever the searcher has typed in. If the search is too long or some other rule is triggered that prevents it from displaying, the default keyword is displayed instead.
So to get around the trademark protection system you use the keyword insertion syntax to split the trademark. For example, Shoemoney would be represented like this in an ad title: Shoe{Keyword:}Money. By not including a default keyword, nothing will be added to the title and so the Shoe and the Money will be joined to form the trademark that you aren't allowed to use. This will work in an ad's body text as well.
There are some things worth noting:
- For one of my experiments, Google eventually rejected my ad. I don't know why, but I suspect it is because I used the keyword insertion tag in a bad spot. If you can, use it to split the trademark in such a way that on either side of it are real words e.g. shoe and money.
- Minimum CPCs are at best going to be $0.10 rather than $0.05 which is common for high quality score ads. Since the full keyword doesn't appear in the ad title or body, you'll lose some points when the quality score is calculated.
- Any company with an active PPC effort will eventually notice their trademark being used which will likely lead to the termination of your ad.
Of course, this sort of thing most certainly goes against Google AdWords' TOS so I don't recommend you use it, but at least you'll know how other people might be getting ads out with your trademark in them.
- Google Fails to Block ShoeMoney Ads
- Google AdWords Quality Score
- AdWords for Site Traffic
- When Affiliate Marketers Go Too Far
- AdWords Arbitrage Getting Harder
Entries (RSS)