PPC Trademark Bidding In Q1 Fell Sharply After The Holidays; Highest In Home Services Industry

BrandVerity issued its third State of Branded Keywords in Paid Search report this week. The report looks at trademark usage on the core branded keywords of more than 250 consumer brands in 10 different industries in Q1 2015.

Instances of advertisers bidding on trademarked terms in industries such as Clothing & Apparel and Consumer Electronics fell sharply in Q1 after the holidays to levels closer in line with Q3. However, BrandVerity says, brands continued to lose significant traffic to trademark bidders.

On average, Consumer Finance advertisers, which had the lowest rates of trademark bidding among the industries measured, lost more than 13,000 visitors a month to other advertisers on their trademarks in Q1. Home Services, which had the highest rates of trademark bidding, saw advertisers lose nearly 63,000 visitors on average.

New this quarter is the inclusion of Bing Mobile (I’d expect they’ll be adding Yahoo mobile in the next report or two). BrandVerity found that, as with Bing desktop, there are significantly more occurrences of advertisers bidding on other trademarks in Bing Mobile than on Google Mobile. The firm also took note of how few brands are bidding on Bing Mobile in general. It had the lowest rate of brand trademark ads, where as Bing desktop/tablet had the highest rate of brands bidding on their own trademark terms of any engine.

Source: BrandVerity

AOL continued to lead the pack in allowing trademark usage, after overtaking Yahoo in Q4 2014. It’s also the engine with the fewest brands bidding on their own terms.

The full report breaks down performance benchmarks for each of the ten industries measured, including the top advertisers using brands’ trademarks in each vertical.