In an ideal world, guarding your most valuable asset, your brand, would be effortless. But take off those rose-tinted glasses and you wake up to the reality that those pesky competitors are posing threats against your brand in search, every day of the week.

You’ve risen to the top of the search rankings. Hurray! But realize your trademarks and brand equity aren’t protected in search. Booo! Thus giving competitors the opportunity to steal valuable clicks from you, diminish your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and threaten future budgets.

Are you in a similar situation where you’re finding it hard to fend off brand infringements?

You are not alone. Our friends over at Sage, an award-winning software company, were struggling too. When expanding into new markets, they were finding it increasingly difficult to fend off rivals who were using their branded terms, trademarks and ad copy in search. To put it in perspective, Sage had over 89,000 infringements from one single partner in one year. The repercussions were more than undesirable, as they inflated CPCs and impressions, and damaged the brand.

Despair not! In this blog, we’ll cover how Sage were able to automatically monitor all infringements, guard against competitors and maximize ROAS – and how you can too. Sounds good right? Read on.

Before we get into the technicalities, let’s dive into the problems that you may be struggling with in more detail.

What seems to be the problem, marketer? 

Adthena’s research revealed that search marketers were experiencing countless challenges when it came to controlling the use of their trademarks. 

Two common themes we heard from our customers were:

  • “The process of trying to control the use of trademarks is tedious and time consuming.”
  • “The practical difficulty of finding real life trademark infringement examples is too difficult to do manually.”

Our research found that it takes someone around five minutes to fill out the Google complaint form. Meaning you could be wasting around eight hours a month on collecting and processing the trademark violation data that is required to send to Google. 

However – news flash – there is a way to automate the aggregation and submission of specific infringements across devices at scale, allowing you to confidently protect your brand and save time and effort to boot.

We can sense you edging to the front of your chair, so let’s get to the fun part…

What’s the solution? 

Auto Takedown is Adthena’s brand new add-on feature as part of the Brand Protection product, enabling you to protect your most valuable asset: your trademark. 

It allows you to map and monitor all competitive and partner activity around your brand terms, meaning you can efficiently respond to trademark infringements and report those examples directly to Google for removal. All with the simple push of a button inside the Adthena app. Time and effort: saved. 

What value does Auto Takedown bring to the table?

The brand new Auto Takedown feature adds value in three key ways:

  1. Automatically monitoring your brand trademark search terms at scale, 24/7. 
  2. Submitting evidence of trademark violations directly to Google for you. Adthena will also keep track of the responses from Google and communicate this back to you if there are any questions or resolutions.
  3. Saving you up to 8 hours per month in manual monitoring, allowing you to focus on strategy and growth instead.

But wait, whatever happened to Sage in this story?

How did Sage reduce their CPCs by 75% in just five days?

It’s not a trick question. You guessed it! By using Auto Takedown to monitor partner and network competition to stay on top of their competitive landscape.

After just 5 days of using Adthena’s Auto Takedown, Sage saw a 75% decrease in CPCs for brand terms and a 33% decrease in partner impression share. Adthena now helps Sage maximize ROI from its brand terms, maintain brand protection, and give stakeholders visibility into the competitive environment. Read the full case study.

Adthena helps us objectively quantify and validate just how competitive our market is and when our position is at risk. That insight has been vital to securing stakeholder support to adequately fund paid media budgets and stay on top of our market.” Regional Paid Media Manager UK & Ireland

Protect your trademark today

When the clicks are down, and you know why, take back control with our award-winning market-leading platform. Ready to fend off unwanted competitors to protect your valuable assets? Request a Demo today.