Are Trademark Issues Keeping Your Google Ads from Showing?

Nancy C. McCord, Owner of McCord Web Services LLC
Nancy C. McCord, Owner of McCord Web Services LLC

There are two scenarios I see often in Google Ads – trademark infringement and site suspension. Today I am going to chat about trademark infringement.

For Medical Spa owners one of the biggest issues is getting ads to show using the term Botox.  Even if you are a medical doctor who is able to provide Botox injections, you will not be able to advertise with the word Botox without getting an approval.

Here is the process. For more information check out Google’s help page on getting an approval to use a trademark.

  1. You will need your rep to pass the form for trademark use approval to the makers/suppliers of Botox at the corporate level. Your rep’s signature will not be enough to get ads to run.  Authorization Form
  2. Once a company principle has signed the form – make sure you have supplied your AdWords account number as part of the request process. They will send this online back to Google. Google will then mark your AdWords account as having the ability to show ads with Botox in the ads.

Now Google is pretty picky about the word Botox. They may flag your website and ads as disapproved for use of a Medical term and they may even suspend your website and all advertising for it.

The best thing is to not use the word Botox in your ad text. If you are advertising in the US you may still be able to use Botox in your keyword list, but if you have Botox on your website, you may get a site suspension forcing you to get an approval or remove all content.

If you do use Botox in your keyword list, make sure you do not use dynamic keyword insertion or you will surely run into a shut down issue.

Other words that have similar problems are all facial fillers and injectables like Restylane and Dysport.

If you need savvy help check out our services for Google Ads. We’ll use what we know to try to assist you in getting running again.

What Happens to Sales and Traffic When Your Website is Not Mobile-Friendly?

McCordWeb.com Results
McCordWeb.com Results – Our Site is Fast, Speedy and Mobile-Friendly

In our new world where over 65% of all Google.com searches are done on smartphones, what happens to a website that is not mobile-friendly in regards to lead conversions, store sales, and organic placement?

The PPC Picture

Google has lots to say on this topic of mobile friendliness. For sites that are not mobile-friendly and the business owner is advertising in Google Ads, Google flags the account with messages such as this:

Avoid losing customers on mobile devices by improving your mobile site. Recommended because 98.57% of your mobile clicks go to non-mobile-friendly pages on your site. 68.97% of clicks from all devices come from mobile. 98.57% 138 of 140 clicks go to pages that are not mobile-friendly.

As Google Ads is incredibly focused on relevance and offering the best user experience, I expect in the future ads that are not showing mobile-friendly pages to start to receive very poor quality scores driving up the click cost and reducing exposure due to a low ad rank.

Google has been pretty forthcoming in regards to page speed as well. A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. For a store generating $60,000 in sales a month, that is a loss of $4,200 in monthly sales. In a year, that translates into $50,400. A non-mobile friendly site is not optimized for speedy download and may be virtually impossible to use on a smartphone driving away potential customers. Many will never come back to visit. This is a very serious impact for Google Ad activity.

For sites that do not have a mobile-friendly website, conversion numbers are dropping in Google Ads. Mobile activity is a very big part of the conversion path now for sales and leads.

WordStream has done a very nice visual on sales, conversions, and cost per conversion in mobile and it is clear that mobile is big business. Without a mobile website you are missing out on a huge sector of growing and converting traffic.

For some websites that are not mobile-friendly using Duda Mobile to do a scripted redirect to a Duda Mobile mini site worked – but no longer. Google Ads is aggressively disapproving ads for our clients that are using this approach and we are now having to remove the code from those websites effectively making them now not mobile-friendly for organic or for pay per click activity.

The Organic Picture

For organic traffic, know that Google now spiders the mobile version of a website and this is the content that now determines your site’s organic ranking on Google.com for all devices, not just mobile.

By not updating your website to be mobile-friendly Marketing and Growth Hacking says you can kiss your Google rankings good bye.

Additionally, Marketing and Growth Hacking states “Based on the blogs Google is putting out, we can confidently assume companies who don’t optimize for mobile will see their rankings disappear. At the same time, companies who adopt and take advantage of mobile-friendly sites early-on have and will continue to see higher rankings.”

I agree that if you mean to be in business, grow sales, and compete effectively, your website and store must be mobile-friendly.

For more information about our services please visit us at www.McCordWeb.com.