In an ideal world, guarding your most valuable asset, your brand, would be effortless. But take off those rose-tinted glasses, and you wake up to the reality that competitors are posing threats to your brand in search every day of the week.

You’ve risen to the top of the search rankings. Hurray! But realize your trademarks and brand equity aren’t protected in search. Booo! Thus, competitors can steal valuable clicks from you, diminish your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and threaten future budgets.

Does this sound familiar? Are you finding it hard to fend off brand infringements?

You are not alone. Many companies find it increasingly difficult to fend off rivals using their branded terms, trademarks and ad copy in search. For example, software company Sage had over 89,000 infringements from one single partner in one year. The repercussions were more than undesirable, as they inflated CPCs and impressions and damaged the brand. The results tend to be synonymous among all industries.

This article will cover how you could automatically monitor all infringements, guard against competitors and maximize ROAS. Sounds good, right?

Before we get into the technicalities, let’s dive into the problems you may be struggling with in more detail.

What seems to be the problem, marketer?

Adthena’s customer research has revealed that search marketers are experiencing countless challenges in controlling the use of their trademarks.

Two common themes are:

“The process of controlling trademarks is tedious and time-consuming.”“The practical difficulty of finding real-life trademark infringement examples is too difficult to do manually.”

Our research shows that you could waste around eight hours a month on collecting and processing the trademark violation data required to send to Google, as it takes around five minutes to fill out each Google complaint form.

However, there is a way to automate the aggregation and submission of specific infringements across devices at scale, allowing you to confidently protect your brand and save time and effort to boot.

We can sense you edging to the front of your chair, so let’s get to the fun part.

What’s the solution?

Automation is at the forefront of the world of paid search, with Google’s Performance Max solution heading the charge. New products are continually being developed, including a new tool from Adthena called Auto Takedown.

It allows you to map and monitor all competitive and partner activity around your brand terms. You can efficiently respond to trademark infringements and report those examples directly to Google for removal. All with the push of a button inside the Adthena app. Time and effort: saved.

What value does Auto Takedown bring to the table?

The tool adds value in three key ways:

Automatically monitoring your brand trademark search terms at scale, 24/7.Submitting evidence of trademark violations directly to Google for you. Adthena will also keep track of the responses from Google and communicate this to you if there are any questions or resolutions.Saving you up to 8 hours per month in manual monitoring, allowing you to focus on strategy and growth instead.

After just five days of using Adthena’s Auto Takedown, Sage saw a 75% decrease in CPCs for brand terms and a 33% decrease in partner impression share.

Protect your trademark today

When the clicks are down, and you know why, take back control and fend off unwanted competitors to protect your valuable assets.

Check out this easy guide, Brand Crashers: 5 steps to optimize your brand in search to get started.

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