Update to U.S. ad text trademark policy

Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn't list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like "Buy discount cola" and "Snacks on sale." The ads wouldn't be useful since you wouldn't know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

That is why, in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google's policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard. Under certain criteria, you can use trademark terms in your ad text in the U.S. even if you don't own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it. This change will help you to create more narrowly targeted ad text that highlights your specific inventory.

For example, under our old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text. However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. We believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S.

Please note that this policy update will only apply to ads served in the U.S. on Google.com and to U.S. users on the Search and Content Networks. Also, while we will start accepting new ads that contain trademark terms as of 11am PDT on May 15th, those ads will not begin showing until June 15th.

If you have ads in your account which were previously disapproved for trademark policy and that comply with the new policy, you may submit those ads for re-review and eligible ads may begin showing in the U.S. starting June 15th. For instructions on editing your ad text, click here.

In order to help advertisers understand whether their landing pages meet our policy guidelines we've added some new functionality to our Search Based Keyword Tool. If you visit www.google.com/sktool and enter your website URL, you may see a list of brands on the left side of the page if your site contains those brands. When you click on any of those brands you'll notice a column titled "Extracted from webpage." Those landing pages may be opportunities for you to show re-sale or informational ads.

We believe that this change will offer you the opportunity to provide users with more relevant information, choice and options while respecting the interests of trademark owners.

For more detail on our updated trademark policy in the U.S., please visit the FAQ in our Help Center.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew