• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 12, 2015

In the Consumer Finance industry, the estimated traffic loss for a typical brand is 13,208 clicks monthly. Clothing & Apparel is about 36,200 for a typical brand with 1 million monthly branded searches, per a report, which details potential losses in about 10 industries across AOL, Bing, Google, and Yahoo.

Those numbers differ from Home Services -- which by comparison, hovers around 64,091 clicks lost per month. For popular brands that consumers search for more frequently than 1,000,000 times monthly, the traffic loss can quickly rise.

BrandVerity's Q4 2014, report suggests that trademark bidding is more common on longer tail trademark-plus terms like brand names attached to the keyword "coupons," compared with core brand terms. The study focuses only on core brand terms, so the typical brand may experience even higher rates of traffic loss on its whole set of branded keywords.

The study evaluates trademark use in paid search for core branded keywords of more than 250 consumer-facing brands from 10 industries. BrandVerity monitored these brand terms to evaluate trends in how brands target and use the trademarks. The study aims to provide brands with a benchmark of the advertisements that appear on search engines when potential customers query their brand, and how much traffic brands might lose because of trademark use by other brands.

Not all search engines treat trademark paid-search keywords the same, per the study, which details industry segments from Clothing & Apparel to Internet & Telecom. All categories show at least some presence of ads with No Trademark, but the levels vary dramatically in different industries. In the Consumer Electronics category there were 1.37 No Trademark ads ads per search engine results page (SERP) on AOL, compared with 6.56 ads per SERP on AOL in the Education category. There were high figures on the other engines, however, including 1.09 ads per SERP on Google.