How to Stop Competitors from Bidding on Your Brand Name in Google Ads 🛑

So we get asked all the time, hey, my competitor is using my brand name in their ad. How do I get them to stop? Check this out. So Therapy Pet. All right? And I have nothing to do with this situation, but I just thought this was a good case because I get asked this quite a bit. Therapy Pet is a brand. It is a website. Check this out. ESA by Therapy Pet, question mark. Therapy Pet. You say letter reviews. Okay, that seems pretty deliberate when I click this. Check this out. And again, sorry for picking on whoever this is. I know nothing about it. This doesn't really pertain to me. But this is a very good example of this case. If we look at the UTM tag here. Look at that. ESA reviews competitor, ESA letter. Ooh. So that, to me means they're deliberately. Whoever's running this is setting up a competitor campaign. Therapy Pet is a competitor of theirs, and they have Therapy Pet directly in their ad. So to me, this is a case where you have to take action. Okay, so what do you do? Right? So we get asked all the time, hey, my competitor is using my brand name in their ad. How do I get them to stop? Fortunately, there's not a whole lot you can do. But in most cases, we are able to get the brand to take down our client's name in their app. First step, and is actually the best step is to actually just contact them. So in this case, I would just go find their contact information here. I would email them, find them on LinkedIn if I needed to, and just say, hey, don't threaten. Don't come off and accuse them. Send them a screenshot. So in this scenario, I would show a screenshot of this ad and the search term and just say, hey, you know, I represent Therapy Pet. In this case, we see that you have our name sort of deliberately in your ad. We understand that this could be an agency running your ads and you didn't know about it. We understand this could be a campaign. Maybe it's a dynamic search ad campaign that's running and you have no control of that. We would like you to please take this down and any other ads that you may have with our brand name in it. Most of the time, people will respond to that and they actually will take it down. And if. Especially if you do it in like a nice, friendly manner, if they don't, or it's crickets and you get nothing from them. Next step is if you actually own a trademark on your brand name. Google does take that pretty seriously. You can submit a trademark complaint. I'll put this link in the description. This is a actual Google support link, so you can go directly to their form fill here. If you don't have a trademark, well, it gets kind of tricky then. So then you can report the ad. I'll have this in the description as well for you. You can go down here, complete report an ad form, come here and then you'll go through the stages. Unfortunately, at this stage Google is really slow, very unresponsive and you know, it could take forever before you hear anything back. And usually it's. It's not a scenario you want to find yourself in. And so I hope you don't have to come here again. Most of the time we can get it done contacting the website themselves, you can contact Google, but if you don't have the trademark, if you have the trademark, you're fine. Or it's a better situation working with Google if you don't have the trademark. It can be a bit of a struggle then the last option, which I hope it doesn't come to this, but the last option is to hire a lawyer. A lawyer will generally send a cease and CIS letter or start there. Normally if someone's getting a cease and desist letter, they will take action right away, but you have to pay, obviously a lawyer to make that happen. I've actually, in all of my years, I think I have a decade in this industry, in all of my years, I've never had a client actually have to hire a lawyer again. Most of the time contacting the website has worked and they just played fair and took the name down and vice versa. We've accidentally had competitor names of our clients in their ads through dynamic search ads. Normally a competitor would complain to our client, our complex. Our client would come to us, say, hey, what are you guys doing? Oh, whoops, sorry. We would explain the situation, we would take care of it. So usually people play fair. If they don't, the last step is lawyer. I hope that doesn't come down to it for you because that's not a fun situation for anyone. But if not, contact, fill out the Google forms and I wish you best of luck. Thanks.