Affiliate Bidding On Your Brand on Search Engines
September 28th, 2006 by Larry Joseloff | shop.org Posted in Affliate Programs | Search Engine Marketing
This issue of restricting key words your affiliates can bid on continues to be hot-button issue. Just a few years ago it was common best practice to just let your affiliates do whatever they darn well please.
However, as the revenue and the ROI continued to grow with search marketing efforts, many retailers chose to protect their branded words from affiliate bidding on these words. This resulted in a drop in revenue for retailers affiliate programs, and left some affiliates searching for programs with more lenient policies.
As an affiliate manager for a major retailer (prior to joining Shop.org) I had the experience of allowing affiliates to bid on all words and then pulling back and restricting them from our branded terms. The results were not exactly what we had hoped for. In place of where the affiliates once showed up, now we had our competitors, shopping comparison engines, eBay, and other strange matches that had nothing to do with our brand.
We knew we had to find a happy medium of controlling our brand but allowing our affiliates some leeway. So, this how we solved the problem:
- We found three search based affiliates that we had the best relationship with. Not necessarily the top performers, but ones we could trust.
- Helped them build a site that only displayed our products. We gave them access to a URL that we owned that was similar to our brand, but sub-licensed it to these three affiliates.
- Let them bid on our brand terms, but gave them the conditions that they could not out-bid our own search efforts, they could not call themselves the “official site” in any way, and they could not display any specific sales or promotional language.
This solution worked very well. Now our affiliates were showing up on our brand, but they were under control and had sites that only featured our products. Plus, the three affiliates that we let bid on our terms were also self-policing and let us know if any other affiliates were breaking the rules.
So if you are faced with this issue, try not to think of it in terms of black or white. There are many options on how to make bidding on branded terms work for your affiliates while still protecting your brand.
Anyone interested in continued affiliate fraud can get some great details here: http://www.benedelman.org/
Spyware / Theftware, whatever you want to call it, continues to be used to highjack and redirect sessions for profit through affiliate marketing networks. We recently installed spyware and witnessed an affiliate sponsored re-direct to a competitor after typing our own URL directly into the location bar. The competitor was not aware of the affiliate acting in its name as a sales agent. If you look close enough you may see similar theft going on…. whether or not use are part of an affiliate program. Scary?
It’s a shame that such a great idea is left open to this level of corruption.
An old topic but one that stuck a chord with me. Don’t let fear of your affiliates keep you away from letting them bid on your brand, products, services, or related keywords. Find a few that you trust and build a program in which you both can support your customers in search.