URLs for keywords?

One of our competitors using ours?

[Gundamknight]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday, while doing a Google search for site: www.ourdomain.com we noticed that a competitor's AdWords ad appeared on the results page. There were no other ads, just the one. We were kind of wondering why, and what we can do about it.

Now, our domain is keyword1keyword2.com (no spaces), so it's possible this happened by accident if they deliberately put the misspelled term in their campaign. But if that's the case, our own ads would appear too, along with every other advertiser bidding on that search term.

Curiouser still, other searches for our domain name don't yield any AdWords ads. Why would that ad just appear in the site: www.ourdomain.com search?

Is it possible that the competitor who showed up there is using our domain name or even URL as a keyword in their AdWords campaign? Does anyone else advertise on their own or competitors URLs?

How would we ask Google to put a block on our domain name and URL being used as search terms?

Thanks in advance for advice and opinions.

-- Gundam

[eWhisper]

Is it possible that the competitor who showed up there is using our domain name or even URL as a keyword in their AdWords campaign? Does anyone else advertise on their own or competitors URLs?

This is a very common stratedgy. Find your best competitors, and bid on their domain names. Its amazing how many people know the url of a site, and still goto G and input the url to find the site.

How would we ask Google to put a block on our domain name and URL being used as search terms?

If your site name is trademarked, and therefore the advertiser is infringing on your trademark, you can file a dispute with G about it, and they will look into the matter.

If your site is not trademarked, then there is nothing you can do about it except to trademark your site, and then file a dispute.

[Gundamknight]

Thanks for the info =)

Any ideas as to why they were the only advertiser showing up?

[kwasher]

Google doesnt like it when people do this simply as a 'trick' to get competitor clicks, so you might write them about it. Of course, Google loves comparison sites, so one could compare their product to another on their site, and then legitimately use the competitors domain name and such.

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A thought: As for your ads not showing, if you are not running your campaigns at full blast (maximum daily budget), then your ads dont come up every time. They are distributed according to your daily budget.