Auto Takedown explained

Auto Takedown is an add-on feature of Adthena's fleet of Brand Protection solutions that allows customers to identify competitors who are using a registered trademark without permission and report those examples directly to Google for removal with the push of a button inside the app.

Auto Takedown saves time and effort by generating a brand new report that is filtered on the unique rules needed to identify a trademark violation found on Google. The Adthena system monitors the hourly terms in the account and focuses on the core trademark to identify if it appears within the title or description of an ad. Once identified, the Adthena system will record all relevant details Google requires to investigate the use of the trademark and Adthena will submit those details directly to Google on your behalf. 

• Number of ads by competitor
• Active, Reported, Expired and Ignored
• Settings
• FAQ

Number of ads by competitor

This page will show you a consolidated view of all the trademark violations that have been found on your hourly terms. Clicking on the All rules drop down box will give you the option to view infringements at device level (Desktop or Mobile).

• Dotted line - Competitors
• Bar graph - Ad instances
• Settings - Edit and view the rules
• Download button - Download the chart data image as a JPEG, PNG, or SVG vector image.

Each point on the chart can be clicked on to open a label which shows the date, number of competitors and Ad instances.

Active, Reported, Expired and Ignored.

Important! Before reporting a competitor for infringing to Adthena, please review Reasons for Google rejected ad takedown requests.

In the top left you can see the total number of competitors, unique ads and instances within the list. All lists can be downloaded as a CSV file for the selected date period.

Active

This list shows all of the ready-to-report infringements we detected during the selected period grouped by competitors. 

• Competitor - The competitor we detected infringing.
• Ad - Display url. Clicking on the Preview hyperlink will open a new tab that displays a screenshot of the infringement from Google's SERP.
• Unique ad copy - The most frequently detected ad copy is shown for every competitor.
• 'XXX' ads - Number of unique ads captured.
• 'XXX' Instances to report - an instance is one detection of an ad, so there can be many instances of the same ad. 

In the Action column, you can optionally:

• Report ads - Simply click on this button to report the trademark violation to Google and Adthena will take care of the rest. Note that due to a Google limitation, infringements that are older than 10 days cannot be submitted. Instead they will be moved to a new column called 'Expired'.
• Ignore a competitor - Click on '...' to ignore if the competitor. Any competitors you have marked for ignoring will be stored in the Ignored tab.

Reported

Google is more likely to block a competitor if we can provide multiple ad copies. For this reason, when you report some ads, we don't send them immediately. Instead we aggregate all of the infringements and send everything once a day.

This list shows all of competitors you reported. 

• Reported - The date we reported the infringement to Google.
• Case ID - Google case ID can be helpful for you to further track with your Google representative what happened with this submission

Expired

This view shows the expired infringements. If no action is taken within 10 days, these automatically expire according to Google's policy.  

Ignored

The Ignored view simply stores infringements you marked for ignoring.

Settings

You can monitor any term in a rule as long as it is in your Hourly Terms Group. Current hourly terms will be available to select and changes can be managed in Search Term Settings.

Two rules for desktop and mobile are automatically created when the feature is enabled.  At that point all of your hourly terms will be included.  Note that if any subsequent changes are made to your hourly terms group and you want those changes to be reflected in your Auto Takedown rules, you will need to manually replicate those changes in each rule.

Rules

Clicking on a rule will allow you to edit the hourly terms you wish to monitor, add competitors, advert text, and set up email notifications for infringement alerts.

Advert Text

You may report an advertiser misusing your trademark term in ad title and description only.

Google does not accept complaints about trademarks being used in an advertiser’s display URL because it does not automatically indicate misuse or deception. Advertisers may use another brand name in their display URL for valid business purposes, such as:

• Selling the brand’s products: If an advertiser is an authorized reseller or distributor, it’s reasonable for them to use the brand name in the display URL to indicate that they sell those products.
• Referencing or reviewing the brand: A website may mention or discuss a competitor brand in blog posts, articles, or reviews, which can also justify the use of the brand name in the display URL.

Trademark Details

In this tab, you can view your trademark details. If any of the Trademark details need to be changed, click on the Request Changes button in the top right corner of the Trademark Details page. This will open a new window where you can submit the changes to our support team, who will get them updated.

FAQ

Why does a competitor have ‘nothing to report’?

Only when a new unique trademark violation has been found will they be able to click on the report ad button. Google can take weeks to process the request, so instead of showing identical ads over and over again to report, we will only display instances of new ads to send to Google.