Report: Brands May Lose 10K to 60K Visitors Per Month To PPC Trademark Bidding

Monitoring firm BrandVerity has released its fourth-quarter look at how brand terms are targeted in paid search across the major networks.

The company monitored the core branded keywords of over 250 well-known B2C brands from 10 different industries during Q4 2014 to evaluate trends in how brands are targeted. As is clear from the chart below, not all paid search networks address trademark usage the same.

Source: BrandVerity, Q4 2014 Branded Keywords Report

Google continues to have tighter restrictions on trademark usage than the Yahoo Bing Network and AOL.

BrandVerity found that though usage varies by vertical, the typical brand can expect to lose between 10,000 and 60,000 visitors per month to advertisers bidding on their core brand terms. Education is a particularly competitive vertical, with large numbers of advertisers bidding on across each network.

The study also looked at trademark usage during the holiday period to see if there were noteworthy fluctuations. In several verticals, including clothing and apparel and consumer electronics, trademark usage increased fairly significantly between Black Friday and Christmas compared to the month leading up to the holiday retail frenzy.

For more insights at the category level, you can download the full study.