In pay per click advertising, brand abuse tends to be a common method for competitors to try and steal a brand’s visibility and potential customers. While the terminology may not be familiar you’ve most likely witnessed brand abuse without even realizing it. If you have ever clicked on a pay per click ad looking for one business or product and gone to a site that was for a completely different business or product, you’ve experienced brand abuse first hand.
When it comes to brand abuse in pay per click advertising, every brand and business is fair game and don’t look to Google for protection. Since April 2013, any advertiser worldwide is allowed to show for any word or phrase in Google including competitor brand names. This means any of your competitors can bid on your business name in an attempt to steal your visibility, traffic and even revenue. And since Google isn’t going to take action to protect your brand that means it’s up to you.
The good news is that online brand abuse can be detected in only 5 minutes.
There are three common types of brand abuse:
- Resellers who pretend to sell a product or service. These are businesses who lure your potential patients to their site by bidding on branded keywords when they don’t even offer the searched for service or product. In addition to resellers who pretend to sell a product or service, there are also unauthorized resellers who actually do sell a product or service but illegally.
- Brands who bet on other brands’ keywords. For medical and dental practices, this is most likely the type of brand abuse you’ll experience. This is when your competitors bid directly on your brand keywords to attract your potential patients to them by showing up highly in pay per click advertising and falsely indicating that they are your practice.
- Spammy websites looking for traffic. These sites present interesting ads to lure searches to their website simply to boost website traffic. Their entire goal is simply to steal your website traffic.
Utilize a brand protection tool to discover which competitors are actively committing brand abuse with your brand. The easiest method is to use a platform that searches the web and provides you with precise analytics on the status of your brand. Additionally, make sure the tool you use will also immediately alert you if someone starts to bid on your business name.
In addition to leveraging a brand protection tool, make sure you know your company’s vulnerabilities and proactively bid on all of your brand terms in order to ensure that you have continued visibility when potential patients are searching for your brand online. Even if you have good organic visibility, pay per click advertising can still rank higher and you don’t want one of your competitors ranking ahead of you.
If you want to protect your visibility, reputation, traffic and, ultimately, revenue it’s imperative that you prevent your brand from brand abuse. One of the easiest ways for brands to abuse your brand is pay per click advertising so make sure that you continually monitor your brand online, have a flexible brand abuse protection plan in place and actively bid on your brand terms to make sure that you always have visibility even if it is among other brands falsely showing as your brand.
For more ways to protect your brand against brand abuse check out the infographic below.
About Alan Moore: Alan started his career in 1999 as an Marketing Consultant and is the owner of www.ExtraPatients.com. Over the years, he has migrated his focus of expertise to everything digital. His mission is to help you increase your revenues and decrease unproductive advertising expenses through proven, online marketing strategies. He manages over $3,600,000 in yearly marketing budgets and has worked with local businesses, agencies and the US government. Give him a call to schedule a Free Online Marketing Consultation for your practice.
To read more of the article that inspired this blog, please visit:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ppc-101-5-minute-guide-detecting-online-brand-abuse/114123/
