Bidding on competitor brand terms in Canada

The argument in most agency meetings runs together three things that have different authorities behind them. Whether you may bid on the term. Whether you may print the name in the ad. And whether the resulting traffic is a good purchase.

The first is a Google advertising policy question. The second is a Google policy question with a legal shadow behind it. The third is arithmetic, and it is the one that usually settles the matter once the first two are cleared.

Keeping them separate is not pedantry. It is the difference between a campaign that is fine and a campaign that is fine except for one headline, which is a two-minute fix that nobody makes because the conversation stayed abstract.

Nothing here is legal advice. Trademark disputes are fact specific and the practical questions in a real one are for a lawyer. What follows is what the published policies and the statute actually say, so the conversation with that lawyer is shorter.

Google's trademark policy draws the line at ad text rather than at keywords. The policy states that using trademarks as keywords is not restricted.

Ad text is where the restrictions live. Google restricts trademark use in ads where the use is confusing, deceptive or misleading, while permitting uses such as landing pages that sell or provide informative details about the trademarked goods or services.

The complaints process is narrower than most people assume. Google states it will only accept complaints against specific advertisers identified on the basis of their URLs, within the countries and industries in which the trademark owner has demonstrated trademark rights. Rights are territorial and sectoral, and so is the enforcement.

Practical consequence for a Canadian account: a complaint from a rights holder in another country, in another industry, is not automatically a complaint that applies to you. It is also not a reason to be careless, because the same asymmetry works against you when the rights holder is Canadian and the rights are in your sector.

Not the keyword. Section 52 of the Competition Act says that no person shall, for the purpose of promoting the supply or use of a product or any business interest, by any means whatever, knowingly or recklessly make a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect.

Two phrases carry the weight. A representation to the public, which is your ad and your landing page, not your bidding. And false or misleading in a material respect, which is about whether the impression changes a purchasing decision.

The statute also directs that the general impression conveyed by a representation be taken into account, as well as its literal meaning. That is the sentence that should govern how you write these ads, because an ad can be literally accurate and still leave a customer believing they clicked through to the company they searched for.

The Competition Bureau publishes its own material on deceptive marketing practices, which is the readable version of the same principle and a reasonable thing to put in front of a client who wants to argue about a headline.

The keyword insertion row is the one that catches competent teams. Insertion prints the keyword that triggered the ad, so an ad group holding competitor keywords and running insertion will put a competitor's name in your headline without anybody writing it there. That is a specific, avoidable failure, and it is why insertion needs guardrails that almost nobody sets.

The near-miss row matters because the general impression test is about what the customer understands, not about whether the string matched a registered mark exactly.

Registered rights are worth checking rather than assuming. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office publishes the trademarks side of this, and a search there is a cheap step before a campaign rather than an expensive one after a letter.

Competitor traffic is expensive because you have low relevance for a query about somebody else's brand, and it converts poorly because the searcher had already chosen. Those two facts compound rather than cancel.

It works in specific conditions. When you have a concrete, substantiable difference the searcher would care about. When the competitor is not defending their own brand terms. When your landing page answers the comparison directly instead of being your homepage.

It works badly when it is defensive, which is the most common reason people do it. Retaliating because a competitor bid on you is a decision about feelings, and it usually produces two companies each paying to reach customers who had already chosen the other one.

Run the arithmetic before the argument. Take the conversion rate on your own brand terms, take the conversion rate on competitor terms, and compare cost per acquisition on each. In the accounts I have looked at, that comparison ends the discussion faster than any policy citation.

Put competitor terms in their own campaign. Not their own ad group, their own campaign, so the budget is explicit, the results are separable, and the whole thing can be switched off in one action when somebody asks you to.

Never enable keyword insertion in it, and never let those keywords sit in a shared ad group with anything else. The ad text for that campaign should be written once, deliberately, and reviewed by whoever would take the phone call.

Read the search terms weekly rather than monthly. Competitor keywords widen into adjacent brands and into their product names, and those are exactly the terms you did not decide to buy. That is a search terms report reading habit, and the exclusions that come out of it belong in a negative list you can still explain in two years.

Keep the evidence. If somebody complains, the useful reply is a dated record of what the ads said, what the landing page said, and what was excluded. That record is worth more than the argument you would otherwise be having from memory.

Most Canadian mid-market advertisers I work with should not be running competitor campaigns, and the reason is not risk. It is that the same budget in their own non-brand campaigns reaches people who have not yet chosen anybody.

The exception is genuine displacement markets, where switching is normal and the searcher is comparing on purpose. In those, competitor terms are a legitimate part of the mix and the ads can be written honestly because the comparison is what the customer wanted.

The other exception is defending your own brand, which is the mirror image and a much better use of the money. Owning your own name is cheap, it converts, and it stops the version of this argument where you are the company being bid on.

If a competitor campaign is running and nobody can say who approved it, what it costs per acquisition, or where the ad copy was reviewed, that is ground an account audit covers before anyone touches tactics, and it is usually settled in an afternoon.