Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn’t list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like “Buy discount cola” and “Snacks on sale.” The ads wouldn’t be useful since you wouldn’t know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

That is why, in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google’s policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard.

Google announced today that they are making updates to the their trademark policy. In the past advertisers were allowed to bid on trademark terms but were not allowed to use trademark terms in their Google Adwords adcopy. However Google has opened up their trademark policy for a few exceptions.
Read on to See Google Trademark Policy Exceptions

A quick warning. Google has included Canada as part of the general geo-targeted settings in Google Adwords. Previously only the United States was targeted by default. Though most advanced users may notice this change, it is something easy to miss. New users in Google Adwords may also easily look over this small update or figure it is common practice to target both regions.

Many may respond to my statement above by saying that no one would make such a simple mistake. Believe me, many will. You will be surprised. I can promise you Google will profit quite a bit off of this little change. Even if only 1 out of 1000 people overlook this change, in a pool of 100,000 advertisers, a million advertisers, that is a good chunk of change.

As LeadQual promotes international clients including in Canada, this comes to us as a disconcerting news as it may artificially raise competition in Canada.

Yahoo has always targeted both US and Canada by default.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Setting up SEM Campaigns
One of the most overlooked aspect of running a SEM campaign is how important the structure of the account is for both management purposes and for performance. There are numerous factors to consider when deciding how to structure your account.

How can I make my structure tight?
What type of keywords am I targeting?
How should I best group my keywords?
Is targeting by product type more important? Geo-type?
How does creatives factor into all this?
Do I need to split out keywords with good history vs ones with bad history?
How does keyword combinations affect content campaigns?
Should I structure search campaigns differently from content campaigns?
How do I factor in budget constraints and budget management issues?
What landingpages do I have for use?
The list is endless…

Tip of the Week
Today we’ll throw out one tip to consider when organizing your accounts after you have collected some data. After you have collected a good sample size you probably are starting to get a better idea on what keywords are performing. If you have cast a good enough umbrella of keywords you would easily find some surprising performers as well as surprising duds. So how can you sort through all this data for management purposes?
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