Stopping People From Bidding On Your Trademark - At Least On Google Adwords

Nice. hypocrite… The rss seems to be growing leaps and bounds…

Now you can pimp yourself?

nice.. the real advantage is to block other people from bidding your trademark.
there is no point for you to bid on the term shoemoney since you are already top of the result

Congratulations on the Patent Jeremy. Laminated it. Looks nice.

Well done Jeremy. It was a smart thing to do as your Adwords campaigns will cost a whole lot less when you don’t have a heap of competition for your own name.

I have been looking into trademarking, but it also takes several months over here. And we can’t actually stop anyone using our name unless they were using our logo, or trying to pass themselves off as us.

Congratulations on the trademark! Now log into Google Webmaster Tools and also get your 2 bad sitelinks removed

congratulations!

Congrats. I know the process can be pretty costly, having done a few myself, but I also know it feels great to have it done and know your name is secure.

Just because you’re the top result isn’t a reason to completely neglect the paid search stuff, in my opinion.

Good for you, I don’t know how much your trademark application cost? But good for you anyway.

Hey, Google began policing trademarks again? I remembered working with their legal team way back when and they helped us monitor and removed trademark in AdWords. I thought they did away with this service? Guess it’s back! Nice.

Yeah, but you wont be protected for ’shoe money’. Thats also a keyword with a lot of volume

Nice! I remember you talking about doing this last year!

Cool man, I bet some people will have some sad faces when they find out that they can’t bid on the term shoemoney anymore. It will be like, what the hell just happend

yeah well, he will be at the top of google for his own brand, even if the others have way better seo practices applied to their sites, it just how google magically works.

….hey who is that… arghhh ! google agents… noooooooooooooo!

I’ll second this question. Would you mind giving us a ballpark figure, shoe?

Interesting how shoemoney.com holds both the first, and second search results.

If this makes you happy, so be it. A “good” trademark lawyer will charge you $5k. For something that takes 45 minutes to research and file. If anyone is looking to trademark, I would recommend that they do it themselves for $200. If your application gets rejected then I would encourage you to seek a lawyer and pony up the cash. I went through this exercise a couple of years back and found that yes it is nice to have a nice legal certificate from the USPTO, but on the other hand was it worth it? Hmmm, maybe or maybe not.
If you are willing to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees I would argue that a certificate reflecting a Patent would be much cooler to have.

correct me if I am wrong here — what i understand with trademarks is that someone else can come up and use the same name if they can prove that they are using it for another purpose either than the category you registered for. so basically multiple people can have/ use the name shoemoney if it is used for different purposes — unless of course you go ahead and trademark every possible use/ purpose/ situation for it. which may run you into tens or hundred of thousands.

again — correct me if i am wrong but that is how i interpreted it doing research on the web.

what i understand with trademarks is that someone else can come up and use the same name if they can prove that they are using it for another purpose either than the category you registered for. so basically multiple people can have/ use the name shoemoney if it is used for different purposes — unless of course you go ahead and trademark every possible use/ purpose/ situation for it. which may run you into tens or hundred of thousands.

again — correct me if i am wrong but that is how i interpreted it doing research on the web.

Sorry to deflate your bubble, but there’s a John Chow ad now appearing when you search for “shoemoney”…

^^ Screenshot of above: http://i12.tinypic.com/4drgoz4.jpg

(I’ll be pausing/deleting the ad later tonight…)

lots of big companies tend to agree. ebay being one.

Can I tradmark ShoeMoney jr. and not get sued?

I just saw the update…nice catch ghoti. That sucks it is still posting other ads.

those two are great…

Great little soap opera these two have going on…

Just to clarify, John Chow didn’t put up that ad…I did. It was just to show that people can still bid on the keyword “shoemoney”.

What Google did for Jeremy was to prevent anyone from using the trademark ShoeMoney in the ad text. That’s why the email from Google says: “the ad texts in question no longer include your trademark: SHOEMONEY”. But Google does not prevent anyone from bidding on trademarks in the US or Canada.

The AdWords trademark policy is outlined at http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/12/adwords-trademark-policy-part-1-of-2.html

FYI, other advertisers can bid on your trademarks (in the US and Canada). What they can’t do, though, is used your trademarks in the ad text. That should result in a lower Quality Score, so their minimum bids should be higher, if that’s any consolation.

See: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50006

Good point dude!

I realize you don’t have much experience with trademarks, but filing for an application has relatively little to do with an actual hold of the mark through use in commerce. I have extensive litigation experience with this through my domain name dealings. Basically, anyone can file a TM for anything they want. Proving it to be applicable is an entirely different story.

For example, Apple probably has a TM for the word “apple” but people still sell granny smith apples and red delicious apples. People just can’t sell computers called Apples or anything in the gray area that would confuse consumers assuming the mark is neither descriptive nor generic. So, your registration at the USPTO has relatively little to do with your exclusive rights to the PPC terms but it’s not a bad first step to protecting the mark.

If you cross your fingers, you might

What was the minimum cpc on shoemoney before to get the number 1 spot?

what was th minimum cpc on shoemoney before this for the number 1 spot?

You can still bid on it by bidding broad

Usually the bid will be next to nothing for your trading name anyway (because of quality score), even if you don’t block other bidders you can pay 5p p/c to be top while the person at number 2 could be paying £1.50

that clickshield layout is a+

That what I thought. As long as you don’t use the trademarked term in the ad copy you can still bid on that keyword.

Where does it say that they can’t bid on your trademark? “Your complaint
has been processed and the ad texts in question no longer include your
trademark: SHOEMONEY.”

It was my understanding that you could only prevent others from using your trademark in their ad text.

yea and ebay has a multi million dollar ad budget. Why cannibalize your organic listings when you are dominating the first 3 spots.

I will add this to my arsenol of weapons when I need it.

They’ve done studies that show both ctr’s improve when you have both the paid and organic results appearing high. By they’ve I mean some random blog I read, but it was pretty reputable.

If it’s a trademark/service mark and you dont’ have it in your ad text, then they won’t let you big on the keyword for relevancy reasons.

Its great to know
btw you also got approved for your other trademarks like nextpimp?

Even though it has already been shown that this won’t prevent someone from bidding on “Shoemoney” as a keyword, it’s still a good tip, as it does ensure that their quality scores will decrease, and the relevance of their ads will be lower (less likely to get a click from a user). Still a decent tip.

dang

you are right. i totally forgot about the quality score.

The first thing that comes to mind after reading this post is to search google and see to that google does not display any of the ads on the right.Yes I did verify myself.

Hey Shoe, how much does filing a trademark cost?

congrats! this is one instance i am happy that the trademark policy is being enforced!

Ha ha! Very clever. Well done.

Good to know that Google respects trademark protection. Including legal fees trademark application runs around 1100-1500.

Wow so no sponsored ads in google when i search for your trademarked “Shoemoney”

Congrats for that Jeremy!

Looking good on this issue tonight! The only ad I am seeing is you Shoe!! Did you contact John to have him pull the ad or did Google take care of it?

I’ve been wondering if I could get the name of my webcomic copyrighted somehow, especially since I own the domain name as well. Hmmm….this is food for thought. Thanks.

what’s the point? lol

I never knew you could do that.

[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptSo now that we got our shiney new registered trademark I thought I would give it a test run and file with Google. I filled out this form and today I received this from the Google Adwords Team. (still waiting to hear from Microsoft and … [...]

[...] the entire article titled, Stopping People From Bidding On Your Trademark - At Least On Google Adwords, here. If you have been successful at building your brand name, don’t let it become a generic [...]

[...] brand. This in turn allowed him to submit documentation to the Google AdWords team so that using ShoeMoney within ad titles and copy wouldn't be allowed. This inspired me to see if I could find a way around Google's trademark protection system [...]