Bidding on Competitor's Trademarked Terms in AdWords

The trademarks, company name, brand names and product names bring more traffic to our website. It is good that we can bid for our own terms so that we will be shown both in organic and paid search if anyone search the terms.

At the same time, we can bid for the competitors trademarks and brand names as long as we are not using those terms in our Ad text. This policy changes from country to country. We can bid for competitors trademarks in US, UK, CA, JP...

There are few exception countries where we can not bid for the competitors trademarked terms.

Ad campaigns targeting Australia, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Macau, New Zealand, North Korea, South Korea, or Taiwan are restricted in using trademarks in keywords (except for accounts that have been authorized to use that specific term). 

The trademark terms can be used in the Ads with the companies acceptance. This will allow the partners of a company to bid and use the terms in the Ad text.

If the competitor complain to Google, Google will not take action on any of those complains as long as we are not using it in the Ad text.

It doesn't mean that the competitors will not go for legal action. They may take steps and we have to be ready to face it. Similarly, our competition also will bid on our trademarks and we have to be prepared for that.

The various types of terms that we can consider are

• Competitor Company Name
• Brand Name
• Trademarks
• Product Name
• Product model names / numbers, Part Numbers
• Website name

The usage of trademark terms in the display URL is allowed. Google will not restrict the URLs. If we are using the trademarks in the Ad text, it will be blocked and a notification will be sent to the advertiser. In the case usage of trademarks in the Ad images, a review will happen before the image goes live and if there is any usage of trademarks, it will be rejected.

Saravanan

Atlassian 2012 Revenue Projection

Atlassian an Australian based tech. company, which is selling products like, Project and bug tracking software, Collaboration software and version control system software. They are doing on-premise and on-demand business.

The company was started in 2002.  They have reached their 100 M + revenue in 2011 from $17 M in 2007. This year the prediction is 47% growth that is they will do around 148 M in revenue. This is one of the biggest growths in the software industry in 2012. 

They achieved this without a sales person in their company. The products are selling on their own. The number of active customers is more than 23,000.

There is a rumor that they will go for IPO in 2012. The valuation of this company is between $700 M to $ 1 Billion.

Atlassian, which makes software for programmers to collaborate on projects, has added three new board members to prep itself for an initial public offering. 

Joining as Atlassian’s board chairman is Doug Burgum, former board chair at SuccessFactors and CEO of Great Plains Software. Also joining the company’s board is Murray Demo, former CFO of Adobe Systems, Dolby Laboratories and LiveOps, and  Kirk Bowman, venture partner at Accel Partners and former executive vice president at EqualLogic and VMWare.

Saravanan

Innovation and Acquisition - The Growth Driver for Trimble

Trimble an engineering products, navigation and surveying company, growing continuously for the past few decade steadily. From 100+ M in early 1990s to 1.6 billion in 2011. The growth is not an exponential one as they have concentrated on their core business of engineering products, surveying and complementing business.

They are doing business on surveying, navigation and construction instrument production. Later they introduced the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) into their surveying and navigation. They are the first company to introduce the GPS technology into commercial and traditional products. They were investing more on this technology.

In 1990 they went on public the first GPS company to go on public and started growing gradually. Their growth during 90s was vey slow and in 2000s it had ups and downs with the world economic fluctuations.

Their growth rate started increasing from 2000 onwards due to more concentration on investing on innovation of new technology and acquisition of complementing companies.

As per their CEO Steve Berglund,

“Continued innovation is a primary driver for us”

In addition he says acquisition also contributed for their growth.

" Acquisitions have played a role in our strategy, principally as mechanisms to establish beachheads in new market spaces, fill in product line gaps, or add new technologies to our solutions portfolio."

Their current IP portfolio has 850 US and international patent and they have acquired more than 35 companies. They are investing continuously on R&D that is 10-15% of their revenue is spent on their R&D every year. 

They were concentrating on the below to grow 

• Investing on R&D and do more Innovation
• introducing the latest technology into their existing products 
• Acquiring companies that are complementing their products
• Joint venture with companies to provide solution to enterprise 

Their major acquisitions are

• Spectra Precision Group - Offers Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), optical total stations, data collection hardware, field and office software
• Applanix Corporation - products for mapping and positioning from mobile platforms (air, land and sea).
• GeoNav GmbH of Wunstorf, Germany - A provider of customized field data collection solutions for the cadastral survey.
• Apache Technologies, Inc. of Dayton, Ohio. Apache designs, manufactures, and distributes professional laser products for construction leveling and alignment applications.
• Tekla Corporation - a leading provider of Building Information Modeling ("BIM") software
• Yamei Electronics Technology, Co. Ltd, PeopleNet, GEOTrac Systems Inc....

Many of their acquisitions happened in the last few years and that is one f the reasons for the growth.

Their joint venture is with the following companies

• Catterpiller Inc.
• Nikon corporation
• China Aerospace Science & Industry Academy of Information Technology (CASIC-IT)
• China Railway Eryuan Engineering Group Co. Ltd. (CREEC)

By providing enhancements to the existing products and adding complementing products (by direct R&D or Acquisition or by joint venture) any company can have a steady growth for decades. Of course the execution is one of the factors. Trimble is the best example for that under Steve Berglund (President and CEO from 2000 to till now).

Saravanan 

Oracle Acquiring more Cloud Based Companies - Acquires Instantis

Oracle has invested more on acquiring cloud based companies in the recent past. Lats week they announced acquisition of cloud based Project & Portfolio Management company Instatntis for an undisclosed amount.

Instantis has EPPM product that provides a single-system solution for managing multiple project portfolio types.

Oracle acquired Primavera one of a major project and portfolio management softwares in 2007. Now this acquisition shows their concentration on cloud business.


In the last one year Oracle has acquired the following cloud companies

• RightNow Technologies for $1.5 billion- Cloud based CRM
• Collective Intellect - Social Media Analytics and CRM 
• SelectMinds - Social talent souring and alumini management solution 
• ClearTrial - Clinical trial operations and analytical products

The cloud business has now started to consolidate. Many big companies are acquiring related cloud companies and started providing solution for enterprise. 

Oracle's previous big acquisition includes

• PeopleSoft for $10 billion
• BEA Systems for $8.5 billion
• Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion
• Siebel Systems $5.8 billion
• Hyperion Corporation for $3.3 billion
• Taleo for $1.9 billion
• Primavera

In the next couple of years cloud business is going to be hot and all the early entrants who are able to provide end to end solution for enterprise will see a exponential growth. 

Saravanan

Google is Aggressive in Marketing

In the recent past every company is very aggressive in their sales and marketing activities. Google is not the exception. They were sending direct mailer for the users last year. In the recent past they have aggressively showing Ads in the AdWords especially Display network.

After their drop in Q3 revenue growth y-o-y, these are the approaches they are working on increasing the new customer base. The drop in CPC makes them to concentrate more on the increase in the number of new customers.

In the content network, they are showing the Ads just before the starting of the content. In that they have started showing Ads for AdWords. In addition, they have stared promoting free credit of  Rs. 2000 on Sign Up. This is the traditional marketing approach that they are trying.

On he other hand showing Ads in the content area will confuse the reader and it may have negative impact.

Saravanan.

Increasing New Customer Base - Companies Approach

Today it is great challenge for the companies to increase their new customer base. Different companies follow different system to achieve this.

Yesterday, I was talking to one vendor for decorating a hall (it is a theme based decoration), he was ready to do it for Rs. 5000. I was wondering, the same decoration that we have made some times back on our own costs Rs.2500 (materials alone) and nearly seven of our friends worked on it one whole night. Then I asked the vendor, whether he has any set already? He said, that he doesn’t have one. 

I asked him about his profit, he responded that as I am a new customer he wants only very less profit but he wants appreciation from us and our guests on the quality of decoration, so that he will get more orders latter.

This is how normal businesses will work. First time companies will give discounts/offers to increase their customer base. 

In the recent past companies like Google, BMC, Salesforce, and Solarwinds etc. acquire companies and increase their customer base. They do the acquisition by identifying companies that are doing business on products related to theirs. If they do acquire right products and project the right story, then they can cross sell the products and they can see the growth.

There is another approach in the cloud business. Many companies are integrating their product with other third party products so that they can provide a solution. So if you make your product highly extensible, many vendors will integrate their product with yours. This way you will get more exposure and you can increase your new customer base. 

Many vendors like Zendesk, BaseCamp, GetSatisfaction etc. integrated their product with JIRA a bug tracking software.

The third approach is product companies can develop new products that are related to the existing products and integrating it and provide it as solution. For this JIRA is an example. They have integrated their own products like Confluence, BitBucket etc with JIRA. 

In all the above cases, if we do a wrong approach, we will not succeed. In my view integration of salesforce with JIRA is not a big value addition compared to JIRA Zendesk integration. Some time even the acquisition of products will be a failure due to many reasons like integration problem, wrong identification of solution, culture problem etc. 

Saravanan.