At BrandVerity, we’re always looking for ways to improve our service and make our tools more useful. We know that compliance can be incredibly demanding, and our goal is to continually increase your efficiency and effectiveness.
That’s why we’re pleased to announce these two new features in PoachMark, our paid search monitoring service. One update is to our policy creation process, and the other is to our reporting, so they actually bookend the service rather nicely. Without further ado, here’s a quick rundown of what these updates are and how they should make your compliance efforts just a bit easier.
A Simpler, More Flexible Way to Flag Ad Copy Violations
Which advertisers are using your trademark in ad copy? Are they authorized to? By using your brand name, are they capturing clicks that would have otherwise gone directly to you? It's very common to need visibility into how other advertisers are referencing your brand. And although we've supported that functionality for quite some time, it hasn't really been a particularly intuitive or extensible part of the system.
To make ad copy simpler for you to monitor and manage, we decided to change that. So we’ve added this optional step to the policy editor. (Keep in mind that the feature is entirely optional, and will have no effect on previous policies). Here, you can choose to enter your trademark terms and their variations. Remember to enter them one per line just like in the Keyword, Your Website Domains, Whitelist, and Blacklist sections of the policy editor. You're free to include as many brand names as you choose in each policy, but depending on how you plan to use our reporting, you may want to be discerning about which terms you include (we'll explain more below).
If any of the terms you enter in this box are used in the ad copy (either in the headline or description) of the ads found in your policy, they will be flagged as “Brand Matches” in your BrandVerity reports. The more terms you include, the more Brand Matches you're likely to flag. You’ll also notice that we’ve updated our reports with a new column for “Brand Matches Found.” That’s our shortcut for drilling down into the specific ads that include your trademarks in ad copy. Similar to the Alerts and Adhijack columns to its left, the Brand Matches column can be used to navigate deeper into our reporting interface. Just click on the number in a particular row, and you'll see a report of all the brand matches from that particular day.
We’ve also included an option where you can select “Only notify me if my brand terms are found in ad copy” in this section. When this box is checked, you’ll only receive alerts for ads that included one or more of your brand names AND meet all the other criteria of your monitoring policy. Any ads that fail to meet each and every one of your policy's rules will be filtered out—so remember to use this feature strategically.
This addition should make it simpler to target some of the more complex subsets of ads that you may be looking for. At the same time, it also eliminates some of the redundancies in policy creation—and streamlines the process of monitoring for ad copy violations. Of course, if you have any questions (or you’d just like a quick refresher on building policies), we’re happy to give you a quick walkthrough. Just contact our support team.
See If Your Search Engine Complaints Are Getting Traction
When it comes to certain ads that abuse your trademark and go against search engine policies, BrandVerity's interface has included a standard feature for filing complaints to the search engines. The feature was able to simplify the process of sending bulk complaints. But unfortunately, once you sent a complaint, you wouldn't get much feedback from the engines.
To close the loop on that process, we've added a new update that tracks the success of the complaints that you file. Here's how it works: every complaint that you file gets recorded in our system—the date, the ads you complained about, the search engine(s) you complained to, and a copy of the letter that you sent. After you've sent the complaint, our system will comb through the new data that comes in each day, checking to see if the same ad has appeared again. If the same ad resurfaces, we know that the complaint was probably unsuccessful.
The tracking is supported by some new reports that are available to you in the Case Management (Case Mgmt) tab at the top of our interface. Simply navigate to that tab, and then "Complaint Letters" to explore your options. Here, you'll be able to see the history of complaint letters you've sent, the ads you've complained about, and the success of your complaints over time. You'll even be able to check whether a specific ad has been seen again within a given timeframe. Plus, you can filter these reports by date, keyword, search engine, and more.
Our hope is that by providing this information, you’ll be able to invest your time more efficiently in your outreach to the engines. We know that sometimes the search engines can seem like inaccessible black boxes, so the more feedback you can have in the process, the better. The one thing to keep in mind is that this reporting will be most accurate for accounts that have a relatively high search frequency, since higher frequency means we're more likely to immediately catch an ad when it shows up again. If you're unsure whether your account qualifies, don't hesitate to reach out to our team. We look forward to seeing your results!
Need a Walkthrough?
We’d be happy to guide you through these features and suggest some ways for you to get started with them. Simply send a brief message to our support team and we’ll set up a time to walk you through the updates.
A Sample Brand Matches Report
As we mentioned above, when you click on the number in the "Brand Matches Found" column, you'll be taken to a report of all the times your trademarked terms (the ones you entered in the Your Brand Names box) were used in ad copy on that day. You can also generate these same reports by selecting "Brand matches only" in the Ads report within the Paid Search tab.
For example, here's a sample report where we included "Paid Search" as our brand name. As you can see, each ad in this report includes that term somewhere in the ad copy.
