The guidelines to the policy changes state that the following companies/sites can use trademarks in text if they are:

1. A reseller of trademarked goods or services. Google compares this to flipping through the Sunday circulars and instead of actual products listed it offers “dicount cola” or “snacks on sale” Now resellers will be able to call out the specific products they are selling.

2. Sale of components, replacement parts or compatible products corresponding to the trademark.

3. Informational sites. Comparison shopping is a fundamental piece of the internet, and now Google will allow these sites to draw in more customers. These sites cannot be competitive nor sell a competitors product.

This move not only deepens Google’s pockets, but also helps sites that rely on reselling other companies products. While at first that seems like a win-win for the trademark owners who rely on these sites to push product, at what cost to their own campaigns? As more resellers and affiliates start taking advantage of the policy change CPCs will start increasing, minimizing the efficiency of these terms. While you have little control over resellers and informational sites, implementing guidelines for affiliates can ensure that they do not begin hijacking your own performance.

By using AJAX to build their interface, Google has created a platform that now uses common sense technology. If you see something you wish to change you click on it and change it. For example, in the old system if you wanted to update bids on a term you would check the term and click “edit keyword settings” and then make your changes and click “save changes”. While the page refreshes were relatively quick, to make changes you had to follow only this process. With the new platform, keyword bids changes can be made on any screen where that keyword appears, including reports. Additionally, the idea of bread crumbs have been eliminated and you can navigate between adgroups, even across campaigns, with one click and no loading, allowing more time for reporting and optimizing.

This is a huge leap from the technology found in Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search or Microsoft’s AdCenter. Yahoo! for example, actually takes Google’s setup and converts it to another document that then needs to be uploaded into their platform. This makes no sense. If you create the technology to convert it, why not just upload it straight in. As for making bid changes, tedious is not a strong enough word. While the process is just as many steps as Google, the average page load takes upwards of 10 seconds. This is fascinating since it takes Yahoo! 0.13 seconds to return 216M search results on the term “allergy”.

At least Yahoo! can allow you to upload something into their system, MSN has tried and failed miserably at creating a system for uploading new campaigns. Therefore you have to rely on people to do it for you, which can take days. And for the little amount of volume it typically brings, who has the patience for that?

I am not surprised that Yahoo! lags so far behind, it did take 3 years for them to implement a performance bid model, but MSN has no excuse. Microsoft, arguably the technology leader, should have the resources and the intelligence to create an interface that makes it easy and manageable to run a search campaign. Solving the dashboard issue won’t create searches, but if the plan MSN has to become a real force in the search world succeeds, the worst thing they can do is create a speed bump with their advertising interface.

My recommendation: For Microsoft and Yahoo! to please sign-up for Google’s new AdWords platform and try to learn a few things and accept the fact that Google knows what they are doing.