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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

> When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?

Also how often are the metrics inflated by people who were going to purchase anyway? I was booking a holiday yesterday and knew the company I wanted to book from - I typed in their name and clicked on the top result as that was the company I wanted.

When I clicked back I noticed that they had the top two results - the first was an ad and the second was the organic link.

I wonder if things like this really inflate the calculations companies do on how many acquisitions they get through the ad and their spend on the ad. I went back and clicked on the organic link instead and then checked out - but still wonder if somehow that counted as a “sale” from an “advert” in google analytics rather than me just wanting to find the company and book through them.

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I read a lot of companies buy advertising specifically for their own name, because if they don't, a competitor will, and will appear first when someone googles the company name.

You are right - That’s another practice is morally dubious (And imo should be outlawed!)

(Not on the purchasing companies side, but on google selling keywords for someone’s brandname which effectively forces companies into bidding for their own name)

> You are right - That’s another practice is morally dubious (And imo should be outlawed!)

Where this gets tricky is when a business has a name along the lines of [city name] [generic product category].

If this was outlawed, a competitor to a business named Foo-town Yard Care would be effectively blocked from advertising on Google.

Another interesting policy is that Google's Ad policy says "We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.", however they will protect against ads on their own product search terms and trademarks.

I work for a company where our competitors are paying for ads over our brandname, but try to do that for Google...

> Another interesting policy is that Google's Ad policy says "We don’t investigate or restrict trademarks as keywords.", however they will protect against ads on their own product search terms and trademarks.

Sounds like an anti-trust issue.

Can you get a trademark for Foo-town Yard Care?

Why wouldn’t you be able to?

Specific-word plus generic word(s) seems to be a good formula for trademarks.

$mycity lawn care would be just fine. But it would make it difficult to let’s others advertise for lawn care in $mycity.

That would be classed as a descriptive mark and is unlikely to be granted registration.

> Descriptive marks are a type of trademark that are usually composed of a word or words that merely describe a product or that identify the characteristics of a product and are generally considered weak marks. In other words, these are descriptions that could be attributed to the goods or services offered by a business. Generally, such marks are unlikely to be granted registration or protection under trademark law. However, descriptive words may be registered and protected by the law if they acquire “secondary meaning.” This happens when the original or primary meaning of the descriptive words becomes exclusively associated with a particular business.

Source: https://www.kirkpatricklawpc.com/blog/what-descriptive-trade...

But don't consumers have a right to see options. To me it's like a competitor buy a billboard or the location next store

Eh, I see it as different to a billboard - a lot of people use google as the only way to find your site where they type in a brand name to find your business (ie lots of people don’t use urls).

This is putting a step inbetween someone trying to access your website where they HAVE to read about a competitor (because they have to read to see if it’s your site or not). Your competitor can even choose the wording of their link and description, while you are stuck with something google has arbitrarily chosen.

It’s more akin to hiring people to stand outside the entrance of your competitors store, and when they see people going in they go up and try to convince the people to your store rather than the competitors.

There was a freakanomics podcast 2-part episode on advertising which discussed this, and many other things.

At least in one case (eBay?) they discovered this kind of brand advertising had essentially zero effect. Turns out if people search for eBay, they are going to click the result for eBay, whether it is first or not.

Makes sense, we use Google for both summon and search.

Surely that's fraud.

They don't pretend to be the other company. They just make sure an ad for their company appears when you search for the other company.

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