Tesco not to bid for competitor keywords
April 30th, 2008 by anurag
The recent decision by Google to allow brand owners bidding for keywords that are trademarked by rivals has not been welcomed by certain sections of the industry. UK’s largest supermarket chain – Tesco is the first major advertiser to have shown its discontent in this sudden change brought about by Google.
The latest rule by Google that comes into affect from May the 5th is expected to bring a lot of change and conflict amongst UK’s biggest and highest spending advertisers. Consumers who search for specific brands such as “Tesco” will for the very first time be given sponsored listings for its competitor brands.
Tesco taking a moral stance has made it openly apparent that they will not bid for on any search terms that are related to its competitors. Tesco currently is spending more than £2 million every year on its online advertisements campaign and hopes that other UK brand owners will take a note of its decision which is to prevent unnecessary rise in the money being spent on paid search ads.
High profile brands such a Diageo, Mercedes-Benz and O2 have already started anticipating the major change that this rule will bring about in the market and have begun revising their approach towards Google paid search.
Bidders will now have to pay more as this change is most likely to result in the prices of branded paid search listings to rise. In the past advertisers had the chance to purchase trademarked search terms at a lower price which enabled them make considerable gains from their sponsored search advertising activity.
