So the unthinkable is finally upon us and Uncle Google has stopped protecting our trademarks. I have a few thoughts to share on this, based on what I’ve observed so far.

When did it actually change?
Google told us that the change should have happened on Monday 5th (‘5/5’, as the people at buy.at were calling it). But perhaps Google realised that changing it on a public holiday was daft. I searched high and low and saw no difference on Monday.

Expanded broad match is going crazy
Looking at many of the ads on trademarked terms, it struck me that Google’s broad match was causing a lot of the chaos, rather than specific brand-bidding. I mentioned this briefly on Patrick Altoft’s blog. He has lots of screenshots to illustrate this, which I don’t have the time now to reproduce.

I also read on the Affiliates4U forum how long since forgotten adgroups are springing back into life now that the trademark ban is lifted.

It’s going to take time for advertisers to get back control of their campaigns.

The Quality Score demon is coming
It can sometimes take 24/48 hours for Google to determine an ad’s quality score, but this is coming very soon. Advertisers who’ve managed to get some cheap trademarked clicks in the last day may suddenly find they have steep minimum bids to contend with by the end of the week.

That’s the main things for now, please add any of your own observations in the comments.