Google Opens up Brand Keyword PPC Bidding on Adwords

Google have announced today that they will allow open keyword bidding on all PPC terms for it's Adwords Service

They justify this as bringing the UK & Ireland in line with the policy they have adopted for North America since 2004. They go on to say that due to trademarked text not being allowed to appear in the accompanying copy, trademark owners will still have an advantage. It is also interesting that this change is at the moment only applying to the UK and Ireland, the rest of Europe will still enjoy trademark protection on their bids.

Putting all this together with the fact that Google's paid advertising clicks have shown decline over the last two months for the first time ever, a more cynical interpretation begins to emerge. This seems like an attempt by Google to increase bid values and volume of bids on a huge range of terms. This is very difficult to justify in terms of Google's avowed policy of trying to serve the consumer by increasing relevance. By introducing this policy you could type in a search for a particular brand and be confronted with nothing but a sea of competitors.

This is going to have a major effect on digital marketing budgets over the rest of 2008. The speed of introducing this change and the lack of consultancy make it difficult for clients to realign their budgets to ensure money is available for the increased spend on brand keywords that this will undoubtedly require. It will be interesting to see whether this policy is rolled out throughout Europe in the near future.

Equi=Media is well prepared for this development having run campaigns in the US for some time.