Trademarks: Where Does the Liability Lie?
At the end of the day, Google is a for-profit company. Over time, a misconception has somehow arisen that Google’s mission is providing the best search results possible out of the goodness of their heart. Not so; in reality, excellent search results provide two things: 1) a vast and continual source of information about consumers and 2) a built-in base of ad viewers. In fact, despite some diversification, AdWords remains Google’s main source of revenue, with $42.5 billion in 2012 advertising revenues.
Part of the ambiguity derives from Google’s tendency to throw money at the problem, resulting in most cases settling out of court without a judgment, and part to conflicting opinions in different jurisdictions. Without a clear precedent delineating if bidding on trademarks will be considered illegal, Google has attempted to preemptively absolve liability through their Terms of Service Agreement. However, while the Terms may protect Google, marketers may be increasingly exposed to liability for trademark infringement they may not even be aware is occurring.
You probably work with a lot of “good” people. They know how to do their job and do a fine job of it. No complaints. However, if you’re lucky, a few of the people you work with are truly great. The basics of doing the job—knowing the programming language, being able to write a coherent email, getting stuff done on time—are present in any decent developer. And, while some developers know more languages and others are faster at completing tasks, what makes a truly great developers goes far beyond the technical knowledge needed to do a job.
We know you. You love analytics. You love the graphs and charts and statistics. But often too much of our time in Google Analytics is spent pulling up reports, debugging and testing implementations.
The following are some browser tools and Google Analytics features that will save you time when reporting, troubleshooting, auditing and testing GA implementations. After all, the less time we spend doing this stuff, the more time we’ll have to spend on what’s really important: analyzing data and taking action.