Yes, your affiliates are your partners in marketing. However, they will bend your program rules if it makes an extra buck. In addition, it can be tricky to know if an affiliate is brand bidding on purpose or accident. This gray area occurs because an ad can appear on a search engine results page (SERP) due to match type and a feature called ‘auto-apply recommendations.

Affiliate compliance begins with a well-crafted and well-thought-out affiliate agreement. This is not legal advice and is intended as business advisement. Many programs require customized contracts. These are examples of restrictions to aid you in deploying an effective compliance strategy:

When it comes to trademarks, there are three types of uses that brand owners need to watch out for on paid search:

1. Keyword Sponsors. This is when an unauthorized affiliate sponsors your brand as a keyword so that the affiliate’s ads appear when a user searches for your name or products.
2. Ad Copy Use. This is when an unauthorized affiliate uses your brand within ad copy text.
3. Display URL Use. This is when an unauthorized affiliate uses your brand as part of its display URL.

Lesson 1 | Brand Protection Crash Course

Lesson 1: Why is PPC brand protection important?

Unless you are entirely new to PPC, getting the significant gains we once saw is tough. PPC has matured as a marketing tactic for years, and few “easy wins” remain. Many categories are dominated by prominent players (e.g., Amazon), long-tail keywords have become expensive, and the most advanced marketers have complex technology and costly agencies.

Especially with first-page CPC bids on the rise, it can be tempting for advertisers to look for any opportunity to reduce costs, and sometimes branded campaigns get the ax.

Branded pay-per-click ad campaigns—in which you bid on your own brand keywords—are the cost-effective means of driving sales and leads. For less-than-ethical affiliates, targeting your branded keywords can prove to be a temptation too powerful to resist.

If you’ve seen a decline in the impressions, clicks, and conversions of your branded ad campaigns, then you may be the victim of an affiliate ad hijacker.

The Search Monitor is a powerful set of tools that empowers even the largest brands to stop trademark abuse in online advertising, saving them potentially millions of dollars in ad spend.

Avery Products Corporation, a label manufacturer that generates $175 million in revenue every year and employs more than 20,000 people, started using The Search Monitor to fight back against brand bidders who were abusing their trademark and driving up ad costs.

We are excited to share our latest whitepaper that covers six common challenges in optimizing PPC campaigns and how to solve them.

Optimizing search campaigns is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of every PPC team. However, it is also one of the most difficult to get consistently right. In this 6-step guide we are going to look at some of the most pressing challenges that face the PPC team when it comes to optimizing campaigns, why they’re happening and how to tackle them.

SuperBowl Sunday is almost upon us and with that, a flurry of large wagers will be placed on who will be victorious in Los Angeles after the final whistle has been blown. Experts predict this could be the biggest Super Bowl ever for online betting. No one knows whether the Rams or Bengals will win. But one thing we can be sure of – sports betting companies will all win big.

Sports betting is becoming big business in the United States. It is currently live and legal in 30 states plus Washington DC. Now that legal betting is expanding from online websites to mobile apps, the market is set to expand even more rapidly in the years to come. Just look at the money spent on sports betting in June 2018 vs. October 2021:

Q4 2021 looks set to be the most important and eagerly anticipated trading quarters in modern history. Following the restrictions on business due to the global pandemic that has resulted in thousands of brands disappearing from malls around the world, the retail stakes have never been higher. Research conducted by DigitalCommerce360 predicts ‘U.S. consumer spending online to grow 12.1% year over year this 2021 holiday season’, further underlying a renewed consumer confidence and perhaps, a return to the good times.

However, competition for customers online is reaching new heights. Data from Statista for 2020 showed that over 800,000 businesses launched in the US alone. A high number for sure, but in fact it accounts for just 10.7% of the world’s start ups last year. In a marketplace with no borders and boundaries competition comes from everywhere and anywhere.

‘No-Brainer’

Geo-targeting ads is a ‘no-brainer’ for search marketers. It makes sense to tailor your ad copy, offer, and landing page for the user’s location. The ability to see how your marketing partners and search competitors behave by zip code, city, country, and even language give incredible insights into what is happening in the market, and the ability to adapt your strategy accordingly. But geo-targeting has other, often-overlooked applications in the world of search marketing.

Unexpected Benefits

Not only does it make your offer more compelling to the customer, but also conveys the feeling that this company understands me and the things I care about. Seeing a localized ad that ties in with local knowledge and cultural aspects I care about, means I am more likely to have a feel-good factor about the brand and their willingness to connect with me. This ‘customer-centric’ approach to marketing is not new, it’s been utilized in marketing for a long time, but in modern, scalable digital marketing has sometimes been lost in the day-to-day grind for more clicks and conversions. So not only can Geo-targeting your products and offers help secure more customers, it can also give additional softer marketing benefits that cannot be overlooked.