Community service and volunteering are an important part of BrandVerity’s culture. We volunteer 1% of our time each quarter to serving our community. We feel it’s our responsibility to give back to the communities that house us, our families, and our business.

The search engines’ rules around trademark use in paid search ads in the United States are nuanced and complicated. Unless you work with them every day, as we do, it can be difficult to know when an ad complies with the rules.

What is crystal clear though is the frustration you have when you see a competitor showing up on the search engine results page (SERP) using your branded keywords. Infuriating? Yes, but is it allowed? It depends.

As part of our celebration of International Women’s Day, I thought it would be fun to sit down with Georgia Gier, our VP of Customer Success. Georgia was the first woman hired at BrandVerity six years ago. She started as a Customer Success Manager and now leads a geographically dispersed team of eight and is a key member of BrandVerity’s leadership team.

In January, Microsoft and Verizon Media announced a major update to their partnership. Starting in March, Bing Ads will be the sole advertising platform for Yahoo and AOL ads. We’re excited about these changes because it will become easier for Paid Search Managers to run their campaigns.

We are excited to announce that BrandVerity has been selected as one of Built In Seattle’s Best Small Companies to Work for in Seattle! This distinction is awarded to companies that have gone the extra mile in creating an awesome work culture that empowers employees to live their best lives.

The Rise of Google Shopping

Most paid search experts believe Google Shopping is a big opportunity for online retailers and it will continue to play an important role in years to come. According to Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report for Q4 2018, while text ad spending fell 9% Y/Y following three quarters of single-digit growth, spending on Google Shopping ads grew 42% Y/Y in Q4 2018. This was the highest growth rate for Google Shopping spend since mid-2016. For retailers, Google Shopping ads accounted for 63% of all Google search ad clicks–an all-time high as well.

We recently asked six paid search experts what they thought were the most important PPC trends for 2019. While there were a variety of answers, the clear winner in terms of impact on SEM for the coming year was automation. Like it or not, automation is unavoidable and search engine marketers need to learn how to thrive in this automated paid search world.

Noticed anything different when setting up call-only ad campaigns in Google Ads? In December, Google made changes to their call-only ads policy. While the changes may appear relatively minor, they have implications for advertisers wishing to use this type of ad. These updates are in line with Google’s philosophy of providing a smooth customer journey and ensuring that people engaging with ads on their search engine are finding what they want.  

Buzzfeed published an article last week largely based on a study conducted by Adthena, a paid search competitive intelligence company. The main point of the story was that Amazon engaged in a targeted strategy to aggressively bid on competitors’ branded terms over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday period.

We found the article and the supporting research to be misleading. Nothing in either piece supports the point of view that Amazon was doing anything intentionally aggressive or even differentiated. The purpose of this blog post is to provide more context as well as correct information on competitive brand bidding and Google’s trademark policy itself.

For the last couple of years, we have used BrandVerity’s Paid Search Monitoring tool to examine brand bidding during the busiest online shopping days of the year – Black Friday through Cyber Monday. We set up monitoring on some of the most anticipated gifts of the holiday season and see how advertisers take advantage of the holiday search volume surge to attract clicks. In many cases, we find ads that mislead customers and win commissions on unearned clicks.