Google Adwords and Trademarks – 5 Things You Didn’t Know

I recently had the experience of dealing with Google Adword’s trademark team for a Pharmacy Industry client. It turns out that after a long time of running the same ads using the client’s trademarked name, something set off the alarms for Google and the ads were disapproved. This was the strangest part for me. Why, even though the ads were not new, did they suddenly get disapproved? It turns out it was a bit of a painstaking process to find out why and get them re-approved.

Here is some of the what I learned in the process:

1. If a trademark owner makes a complaint against anyone running their trademarks, Google shuts off everyone who is running these trademarks.
2. This can even trigger issues in previously approved Adwords advertisers.
3. To be authorized to run trademarked names in your Google Adwords you need to have the trademark owner fill out this form.
4. Only the trademark owner can make the request to get you approved. The form clearly states: “We only accept authorization requests directly from the trademark owner or from the contact person listed on the trademark complaint.” Don’t let anyone tell you different. Even people at Google!
5. If you are using a MCC (My Client Center) account use this to get approval. That way any account under this master account will also be approved. This makes life easier if you have multiple accounts for the client.

So if you do run across an issue where your ads have be disapproved for trademark issues, save yourself some trouble and grab the form mentioned above, go start to your client and get them to send it to Google. After I finally was able to track down the person in charge of trademarks for the client and had them fill out the form. It barely took any time at all to get the ads approved.