Enjoyed a zoom meeting with others via the National Association of Addiction Treatment Poviders, a video conference meetup. Interesting to see Google ads being a bit responsive to some of the issues that have been plaguing many rehabs and others in highly competitive adwords situations.
While I am glad that Google is taking it seriously and creating new rules that can be used to stop some of your competing treatment centers from abusing your brand name in some advertising – I already see how the new rules fall short.
Although I am hopeful that the gravity of this issue is extended beyond ads and into the trademark dissolution, brand confusion, and outright fraud against the consumers that some web sites are employing via organic top search results and some of the google ads / PPC campaigns.
Still it was good news to find that a new terms policy along with reporting and removal policy are happening – so we will now be able to report ads that are using a our brand in banned ways.
This may put a stop to a good chunk of the abusive ads that are trying to steal business using others’ brand names. I do not believe this will stop 100% of these issues, especially since I can see some ads going outside the new policy anyway.
I’m still hoping that Google and perhaps the FTC gets more involved and fixes more of this issue.
I also imagine some nefarious ad managers could agency hop with using the thousands of small agencies around the world – I brought this up during the QnA part of the video meeting.
I was still happy attend this meeting and glad to hear the progress. I could tell that John McGhee of WebConsuls Design and Digital Marketing agency was quite familiar with this problem, cares about it a lot, and has been an advocate for addressing this issue with Google.
Kudos to those who are trying to make the online world a better place. It’s something I strive to do everyday. Now if I can find those old screen shots of the organic search results issue with some places adding a ‘who answers this call’ note – and some not – of course both issues not understood by most internet searchers I believe.