It's a rather shortsighted viewpoint you put forth. The reality is that Tesco and Sainsbury aren't necessarily worried about each using the other's brand. They are worried about the many fraudulent websites that attempt to lure you to their sites based on a trusted brand name. At the end of the day, Google shows they are only in it for the money and don't care if they support and encourage fraud along the way.

Thanks for your comment. I disagree that I am being short sighted. I'm well aware that Tesco and Sainsbury aren't bothered about each other. The point I am making is that the change Google has instituted means that online businesses will be encouraged to focus on what their competitors are doing, rather than focusing on their customers. It's not about "fraud"; it's about customers.

What? Fraud? If someone was had up for fraud every time someone ended up on a website they didn't intend to be on, I think the courts would be rather full!

Anyone who does arrive on the wrong site won't be out of pocket anyway. It's the advertiser that pays for the click, not the person viewing it, so how have they been defrauded? I think our anonymous friend fails to understand the mechanics of pay per click and the definition of fraud. And let's not forget that Google insist on a 'display URL' showing where the ad goes through to, on every single ad to avoid misleading people.

Pay per click is just a form of marketing (a blindingly obvious fact which many people manage to miss) and in any form of marketing communication, you need to tell your prospect what you can do for them. They don't want to be in the middle of a squabble between you and a competitor, so any mention of competitors needs to be subtle at best. Consumers are generally sceptical of any mention of a competitor, so I hardly think any floodgates are about to open.

What I think has happened here is that Google have simply relaxed a rule that was proving increasingly hard to police. Millions of companies worldwide now use Adwords - can Google really keep a list of ALL of their advertisers' competitors? Especially if we continue with Tesco as an example - they sell just about everything these days, they must have thousands of competitors.

Clearly, Google know as well as you do Graham that this will make barely a scrap of difference. If they felt it would I hardly think they would put their multi-billion pound advertising model at risk for the extra few quid they will make from people who think there's a huge opportunity here.

Absolutely Rob, I agree. Thanks for your excellent comment which puts things into perspective. I suspect that the Tescos and the Sainsburys of the world will not be in the least bit bothered by Google's move. However, many small businesses may be tempted to use competitor names in their adverts and they are the ones who will waste time worrying about how they can steal clicks from their competition, rather than focusing on serving their customers.

Sorry, but your post is clearly flawed on a number of areas. Let's look at the first line.

Google quietly changed it's terms and conditions for advertising yesterday.

It wasn't very quiet - it was announced about a month ago and it's been in the press quite a bit since, I believe even the FT ran an article on it.

You then go on to say..

Let's take a look at some statistics. Wordtracker tells us that every 24 hours just over 1,200 people type in the word "Tesco" and a mere 500 or so type in "Sainsbury" or "Sainsburys".

Firstly Wordtracker is outdated and you should not take that figure as gospel - it's better to use MSN's figures (that use real search numbers). These show that last month on MSN the keyword "tesco" had 158,875 searches. If you do some calculations based on their market share information it actually means that the keyword "tesco" that you mention gets 1,200 searches a day actually gets more like 143,118 searches per day.

Quite a bit more and as your post is based around those figures I think it makes a big difference.

With that being said - I don't think terms like Tesco are going to be impacted too much, but terms suddenly available now such as "ipod" (with about 7k a day in searches) will have an impact.

Time will tell though - it's certainly going to be an interesting few months ahead.

James, thanks for your comments. However I don't agree that my article is flawed. Let me address your comments individually.

Firstly I used "quietly" to indicate they did this without announcing it to AdWords customers. True there were press announcements, but it was a "quiet" introduction of a policy change if you thought you'd hear about it via AdWords directly.

Secondly, I don't take any figures as gospel, so why should I take MSN's as valid either? The exact numbers themselves do not matter. It's the proportions that matter. Even with the hugely inflated figures that MSN suggests, more people are searching for the products and services that Tesco sells, than for the company itself. This means that if they are using PPC keywords merely for their brand name - they are missing out.

I am saying nothing different to the theory proposed in the leading business book, The Long Tail. That tells us - along with plenty of other examples - that focusing on your competitors is doomed. People should focus on their customers.

Whether you want to use your numbers or my numbers, they point to the same thing. Anyone worrying about the use of brand names in their PPC adverts is barking up the wrong tree.

Finally, where do you get the notion that Wordtracker is out-dated? True it uses a different process to MSN and it comes up with other figures, but it's not the raw numbers that matter. What matters is the general indication that these tools provide.

Thanks for your reply.

In terms of Wordtracker vs. MSN, I would say that MSN is more reliable - the figures are taken from actual search numbers in the previous month.

Some people still use Overture even though it's about 6 or 7 months old and wordtracker uses it's own metric and is still relatively new to the UK - it's more of a sample than real results. Saying that, my wordtracker login shows a heck of a lot more than 1,200 searches a day for Tesco so unsure why it's so different to your own..

With all that said - I appreciate and agree that merchants should concentrate on their own customers, but as part of an overall PPC campaign I think it's fair to say that competitor and product keywords that were previously trademarked can now have a big impact on the ROI - this can be both positive and negative.

Let's look at one each one.

Negative - in that your own brand becomes more expensive to bid on. As a paid search agency we have seem that bidding on your brand, even when you rank number 1 organically can have an impact to your sales - so of all of a sudden this becomes a lot more expensive.

Positive - As mentioned in my previous example, retailers who sell ipods can all of a sudden start bidding on a product that they sell, which is not a bad thing. There are plenty of other examples of where this could work and we've already seen (before the changes) that competitive terms convert, sometimes very well.

It's all part of a balanced keyword campaign :)

James, thanks for the clarification. From what you say, I can see we are in agreement. The difference in our Wordtracker results may be because of the use of different databases. The "compressed" database can produce different results from the "comprehensive" database, for instance. But I don't think we need to get hung up on precise numbers. Your iPod example is a good one which shows that focusing on the products people want to buy is probably going to be more successful than focusing on the Apple brand name, for instance.