How To Bid On Trademark Terms In Google AdWords

This method is very powerful and can make you a lot of money with very little effort in a short time.

It could also get you banned from AdWords and your Network really quick, so use it with caution and only if you absolutely have to.

For example, if you can’t pay your Hosting, use it to make $200 quickly.

It is well known that Trademarks and Brands are the most profitable keywords, this is why most companies do not allow their affiliates to bid on them.

If you try to bid on a trademarked term using Google AdWords, the system will not allow you to do so. This is because the company owning the brand has asked Google to restrict it.


Step 1: Keywords

When you enter the trademarked term as a keyword into your Adgroup the system will detect the term and it will not display your ads.

So, to get around this, when you enter your keywords into your Adgroup,

for the keyword write

“t.r.a.d.e.m.a.r.k”

or

“t-r-a-d-e-m-a-r-k”

instead of

“trademark”

This should work most of the time. (There are exceptions.)

The system will not recognize the branded term, but when it comes to matching your keywords it will just ignore the dots or dashes and display your Ad for the search term “trademark”.

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Step 2: Ad Text

If you want to enter the trademark into your Ad text the system again will recognize the term and not allow you to do it.

The way around is the {ifsearch} parameter.

I will not explain here what this parameter is for and how it works, but you can look it up if you are interested.

The way you write your ad is this:

Trad{ifsearch}emark
Looking for Trad{ifsearch}emark?
Buy Here Now Today!
www.trademark.com

instead of:

Trademark
Looking for Trademark?
Buy Here Now Today!
www.trademark.com

As you can see, you have to insert {ifsearch} somewhere inside of the trademark term.

Now the system can not detect the trademarked term in your ads, but when the ad is displayed to the searcher the {ifsearch} will not be displayed and the searcher will only see “Trademark”.

Keep in mind however that the {ifsearch} is counted to the number of the allowed characters in your Ad text, so for the Headline you have only 15 characters left since the {ifsearch} already uses 10 characters.

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Step 3: Referer

So far, so good. Now you have to fake the referer. If you do not fake the referer the company owning the trademark can look at the records of the network and see that your clicks are coming from Google Search and the keywords you have used.

I do this using a Perl script. I have tried Meta Refreshes and double Meta Refreshes, but Perl has worked most reliably for me.

This has also been confirmed by my Aff. Manager at CJ.

This is the script, save it with the extension .cgi

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# redir.cgi
$| = 1;

use strict;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use HTTP::Request::Common qw(GET POST);
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->agent(”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)”);

my $url = ‘INSERT YOU AFFILIATE LINK HERE’;
my $req = GET $url, Referer => “http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=non-trademark&btnG=Google-Suche&meta=”;
$req->header(’Accept’ => ‘text/html’);
my $res = $ua->request($req);

if ($res->is_success) {
print “Location: $urlnn”;
} else {
print “Error: ” . $res->status_line . “n”;
}

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There are three important parameters here:

$ua->agent

This will allow you to fake the user agent, you can change this to whatever you like.

my $url

Here you put in the URL you want to redirect to, your affiliate URL.

my $req

This enables you to change the referer. In the above example this is what the referer would look like if the searcher would be be coming from Google Search Germany, using a German Browser and would have searched for the term “non-trademark”. You can look at the url field of your browser after doing a search to find out how this should look like in your situation. You could also change the referer to “http://www.facebook.com/”.

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Since Google AdWords is my bread and butter I only use this very sparingly, because I don’t want to get banned and go through the hassle of getting a new account.

There are several ways to use this, you can bid on a large brand that has a lot of traffic, and only do it for 30 minutes or only in certain geographical areas. Be sure to exclude the location of your network, the location of the company owning the brand and possibly their advertising agency.

When I first did this i could not stop the campaign soon enough and made 500 in commissions in 30 minutes. Very suspicious, but I got away with it.

Also, big companys often monitor ads very closely or use software to monitor them. Only run your ads in the late evening or on the weekends.

The other, safer method is to bid on smaller company brands, since they are generally not able to monitor the search network so closely.

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As I said in the beginning this is extremely profitable.

The cool thing is that your advertising costs will be almost zero, since technically it should not be possible for you to bid on these terms and you will only be bidding against the brand owners inhouse advertising team or their agency.

I usually bid fairly high, like 4,97 per click and I will use position bidding on position 1. And I will only pay 0,01 to 0,05 per click.

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One last word: Don’t use this for ringtones, or weigthloss or anything fishy that could trigger a manual review of your campaign. Also if your Ads get rejected for some reason, don’t re-submit them as this could also trigger a manual review.

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Important Additional Information!

I just realized that I forgot something vital:

When setting up your Ad Text you will first do a search for the term you want to bid on and look at the Ads the company/agency is running.

Then you will copy the Ads of the company/agency exactly.

This way, if they check Google, they will not realize that there is your Ad being displayed unless they click on it.

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