Aren't you allowed to bid on competitor brand names? Why is it that some competitor brand names can be bid easily on and some keep raising the min. cpc to extra high amounts when there is no competition? Is there a way I can protect my brand name too like this?
You're supposed to respect other people's trademarks, but plenty of people don't. In practice, you can stop other people bidding on your trademarks. According to Google, you should contact the people directly, and ask them to stop, and if they refuse, tell Google, who will sort it out. You can get Google to stop people using your trademarked terms in adverts and their keyword list, though I don't really know how easy it is. As an example, you can't use 'Google' in your adverts (but Adwords is OK).
Some "clever" people try to bypass the trademark rule. For example, instead of Google they write Go0gle or instead of Ipod, they write lpod (using small letter "L" for "I")
No, you can only stop the USE of your trademark in an ad, but not prevent people from bidding on your term. The bid raises just because of quality score issues. If you can't use their trademark in your ad, you may not get a high enough CTR (or Google's bot may realize that your page has nothing to do with the search term) to warrant appearing on the term without paying more. I've seen this happen on generic search terms before, where there will only be 2 ads or so, with Google kicking everyone else for QS.
There are a few competitors that don't allow anyone to bid on their name and brands... one example is 'Sony' another is 'ipod' But many allow it... the only thing that may be a setback is that the ad will not be relevant to your keywords and neither will the landing page. Because of that, Google usually hits competitor keywords with a poor quality score causing your minimum req. bids to increase.
What are you talking about? For US advertisers, you CANNOT prevent people from bidding on your trademark/brand name. I see other ads on both of the terms you mentioned.
Let me clarify... it is possible to have a name like "sony" or "ipod" in your keyword list and bid on it... however, you cannot put the name "sony" or "ipod" or any other term that a company requested not to be used due to trademarks in your headline and description.
actually, you can have trademarks in your ad text, people do it all the time. search "psp game download". qs is not that highly determined by ad text, so not having the trademark name in your ad text will not allow for a substantial increase in min. bid price. theres gotta be another way?
you cannot have trademarks in your creative if the company who owns the trademarks makes a request to google to remove it. However some manufacturers don't care which is why you will still see some that allow it.
ah thats wut it is. makes sense to me. so if i dont want competitors even bidding on my trademarked name, i can request google to protect it? because it seems like bidding on trademarks is tricky too, since some you can easily, while others min cpc start at $10+! so technically, i think it is not allowed to bid on all trademarks...
If you want to protect your trademark go to the following google information page. It will tell you how to file a complaint and protect your own trademarks http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html you still cannot prevent the competitor from bidding on the keyword, but now the creative, CTR and landing page will be untargeted so therefore google will normally raise minimum CPC and lower your quality score, making it harder for the competitor to turn a profit on those terms.