Trademark Protection Using AdGooroo

In my last Industrial Strength post, Using Competitive Intelligence To Protect Your Brand, I wrote about how to use tools like Hitwise to protect your brand. I am going to explore this topic a bit more, but this time show some of the unique features of AdGooroo.

Since I did not show an example of an infringing bid in the prior article, let’s take a look at an example of one now:

Notice how Cheapest-Flights-Direct.com is bidding on the keyword “Travelocity,” and they are using the brand name “Travelocity” in their ad text. While bidding on someone else’s brand is something that Google generally (but not always) permits, using a brand in an ad is generally not permitted (unless you have official permission from the brand holder to do so).

AdGooroo has some neat tools for dealing with this problem. Let’s start by taking a look at an overview report:

This serves as the dashboard for digging into trademark issues related to your brand. The overview report also lists out the infringements by brand and infringements by advertiser, making it easy to get a snapshot view of what is going on.

You can then drill down further using the Infringed Trademarks report. This shows which trademarks have been infringed over time. Here is a sample of that type of report:

Of course, once you realize that your trademarks have been infringed upon, you want to see the infringing ad, so you can see how bad it is:

Notice how it shows you the ad text, the display URL, and the destination URL. As a result you get a recorded snapshot of the actual infringing ad. This is a valuable tool for helping determine which follow up actions to take on such infringements.

You can also look at similar data, but organized by advertiser, in the PPC Trademark Term Advertiser Report:

So you’ve sussed out an infringer, and have captured all this great detail—what do you do about it? You want to stop it from happening. After all, it’s your trademark and you should protect it. To do that, you should file an infringement complaint with the search engines.

It’s important to keep in mind the actual trademark policies of the engines. You can see the details for them for Google and Yahoo here:

• Google Trademark Complaint Policy
• Yahoo Trademark Complaint Policy

Google also provides a Trademark Complaint Form. This form can be used to file a formal complaint, but AdGooRoo also provides some additional functionality in this area. You can auto generate an infringement claim letter. This can be a real time saver:

AdGooRoo’s suite of tools can significantly lower the cost of protecting your trademarks. First, discovery of infringements is simplified. Since the tool monitors trademarks automatically for you, it will be done much more zealously than it would if you tried to do it yourself.

In addition, the recording of the infringement details is also invaluable. Should you end up having to go to court to protect your trademark, or should one of the search engines require more detail, it is immediately and readily available to you. Finally, automating the process of generating a complaint is also a quite valuable time saver.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide. The Industrial Strength column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.