How To Identify And Eliminate Brand Bidding From Your Affiliate Channel
Of merchants that run affiliate marketing programs, most also engage in search advertising. Standard practice is for a merchant to bid on known search terms, while affiliates explore creative and unusual extensions. For merchants, this approach is valuable in reducing cost: Often, a merchant’s own trademark can be bought at a modest per click. A merchant wouldn’t want to pay a substantial affiliate commission for trademarked search terms it could have bought for just pennies per click.
A second reason for this approach is that merchants shouldn’t be asked to bid against their own affiliates for their own trademarks. In search advertising auctions, every bidder pushes up the price for every other bidder. If a merchant is the only advertiser bidding on its trademark, it will get a good deal. If numerous affiliates begin bidding on that term, the price will increase, with no benefit to the merchant.
Some merchants have other reasons to further limit affiliate bidding. Merchants may want their offers presented in specific ways in search engines, and only certain affiliates have been trained and approved to do this properly. Meanwhile, merchants often want to limit bidding on other companies’ trademarks – for example, to limit or prohibit bidding on key competitors, suppliers, or distributors.
Unfortunately, unscrupulous affiliates often embrace brand bidding as a path to quick profits. By bidding on prohibited terms, brand bidders drive traffic that may convert – but that a merchant could have bought cheaper itself, or that a merchant has decided not to buy.
Techniques for preventing brand bidding
Affiliate merchants have three basic ways to detect brand bidding:
- Monitor search engine results. Regularly search for your brand’s name and related keywords on popular search engines. Check for affiliate ads that show up in the paid results section. This sounds straightforward, but it can be tricky. Consider an affiliate that directs its prohibited ads only to certain geographic areas (“geotargeting”) – often excluding the merchant’s headquarters (“negative geotargeting”). Other affiliates serve prohibited ads only at certain times of day (“dayparting”), potentially avoiding the business day when the merchant is most likely to check. Even if you’re looking right at a prohibited ad, it may be hard to tell – the display URL can look just like a legitimate ad. And you wouldn’t want to click all the ads – which would drive up your own advertising costs.
Look in affiliate logs. A decade-plus ago, this method was common, because a user’s search terms would often appear in the HTTP Referer header of an affiliate’s traffic – hence visible in an affiliate network’s dashboard or in the merchant’s web server log files. But search engines have been concealing search terms for years, plus rogue affiliates found ways to redirect traffic without carrying forward a Referer. So this method won’t look.
Analyze affiliate activity. Some merchants try to infer brand bidding from a spike in traffic. But many things can cause spikes. And a savvy affiliate can expand its traffic slowly to avoid a telltale spike.
- Ask affiliates. It’s easy to ask, but will affiliates answer? Truthfully?
The limits of these methods led VPT to build trademark monitoring tools to help merchants monitor search ads for their keywords. Our automated tools help brands identify and eliminate brand bidding. We have all the features you’d expect: We check from multiple locations around the world, at all times of day, using a range of device types. We organize reports in an easy-to-use dashboard. And we allow “whitelists” of specific affiliates authorized to bid on specific search terms. But we go beyond the basics. We’re particularly proud of efforts that catch affiliates that are trying to hide. Some brand bidders conceal their redirect through tricky JavaScript and the like. We’ve built automation to circumvent their defenses and find all the perpetrators using these methods. VPT customers use our brand bidding solutions to catch rule-breaking affiliates – increasing a merchant’s ROI, and keeping affiliate budgets available for legitimate affiliates that deliver genuine value.
