When Google search results cost small businesses customers

A Durban florist's Valentine's tale of woe went viral in February, after she related how orders were redirected to online rival Netflorist, undoing all their hard work during the so-called month of love.

It seemed like a real-life David versus Goliath battle, with Flowers on Kensington's Roxane Gordon garnering huge support after she posted a tearful video on TikTok.

Sharing her story happily resulted in a record number of Valentine’s orders for Gordon's flower shop, but there was negative fallout for the big market player.

When consumer ninja Wendy Knowler alerted NetFlorist MD Ryan Bacher to the video, he told her that, like most businesses, they use Google's AI algorithms to decide keywords to "bid" on, and then design their marketing around that.

By the next morning, NetFlorist had added "negative keywords" for Gordon's Flowers on Kensington to stop bidding on it, and the MD said he was checking with Google to find out how this happened.

RELATED: How florist went viral after orders 'hijacked' in search engine optimisation jam

This week, Bacher got back to Knowler to say Netflorist had finally received an official reply from Google about how a competitor’s name featured in one of their ads.

The Google response confirmed that they did nothing wrong, he said.

"What happened was a result of Google’s technology and of Flowers on Kensington not trademarking their brand. We were vilified by the mob without any justification and we took a big internal morale and brand hit.”

As per Google’s very technical explanation, it all comes down to Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI).

The appearance of the local business name in the Netflorist copy is a classic example of Keyword Insertion functioning exactly as its automated design intends, the search engine provider said.

"It’s an advanced Google Ads feature that automatically updates an ad's text to include one of the advertiser's keywords if it matches a user's specific search terms. The system may dynamically insert the keyword into the ad's headline or description to make the ad hyper-relevant to the searcher if the user's search query is matched via the keyword."

The Result: If a user searches for a specific competitor or local brand, and the algorithm determines it is highly relevant to the broad keywords the advertiser is bidding on, the system can automatically insert that specific brand name into the generated ad text.

In this case it was the word “flowers” in the local florist’s business name – Flowers on Kensington.

Apparently it’s an automated, algorithmic matching process rather than a deliberate, manual attempt by the advertiser to target or mislead customers using a specific business's name, says Knowler.

How a small business can protect protect their brand name online:

File a Trademark Complaint: If the business owner has a registered trademark for their business name, they can submit an official complaint to Google.

Once a valid trademark complaint is processed, Google should actively restrict unauthorised advertisers from using that trademarked term in their ad text (this includes automatically blocking the term from populating via Dynamic Keyword Insertion).

Where to file the complaint: support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en

And, if a company learns that the algorithm is targeting other companies' brand names, it can add that name to its campaigns as a NEGATIVE KEYWORD.
That instructs the algorithm to completely ignore searches containing that phrase.

What consumers can do:

When you are searching for a particular company’s offerings online, always check two things:

Look for the "Sponsored" or "Ad" label at the top of results and, crucially, verify the URL.

If you're searching for a specific local business but the link goes to a big chain like netflorist.co.za, stop and search again or go direct to their site.

This protects small players and ensures that your money goes where intended.

For more detail, listen to the interview audio at the top of the article