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The new release includes design and functionality enhancements to improve usability and shorten the time to insights.

ORLANDO, FL November 7, 2017

The Search Monitor, the leader in precision ad intelligence and compliance monitoring, today announced the release of a new and improved user interface. The new design improves workflow, speed to insights and mobile device capability.  

Lori Weiman, CEO of The Search Monitor elaborated on the benefits.  “We combined user feedback with UI best practices to help customers quickly find competitive insights and remove brand or affiliate violations.”

Brand protection is essential for 2017 PPC success.

Are you a marketer or affiliate in Finance, Retail, Education or Pharmaceuticals?

If so, we recommend that you download the Guide To Managing Ad Partners in Regulated Industries to learn how to improve your affiliate programs and protect yourself from federal lawsuits. 

Marketers at manufacturing companies face a significant challenge in making sure resellers comply with minimum advertised pricing (MAP) policies. They must police a large group of disparate companies across a wide number of online shopping engines and Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and do it for thousands of constantly changing SKUs.

It’s a huge headache to do manually. Plus, it’s easy to miss an important violation.

*originally published on Search Engine Land

Did you know that your paid search ads are susceptible to the same type of fraud that affects other forms of digital advertising? And we’re not just talking about click fraud here.

Last month, The Search Monitor detected fraudulent PPC ads running on Bing, Yahoo, and Google. The fraudsters impersonated more than 300 advertisers on a global scale. The advertisers that were affected by the fraudulent activity spanned across several industries, including leading business in automotive (JC Whitney), furniture (Joss & Main), software (MobiStealth), printing (Tiny Prints), home & garden (Ace Hardware), travel (Booking Buddy), firearms (Brownell’s), and services (Deluxe).

How Did The Fraud Happen?

The fraud was perpetrated through URL Hijacking. URL Hijacking is the practice where the scammer impersonates an advertiser by using the advertiser’s URL as its Display URL in PPC ads, then linking the ads through an unauthorized link such as an affiliate link, a phishing link, or a cookie-stuffing URL.

Most advertisers are aware that the Federal Trade Commission, and its Bureau of Consumer Protection, is the watchdog agency for deceptive and unfair advertising practices.

In the world of credit card marketing, however, there is a different federal organization charged specifically with oversight into deceptive credit card advertising practices. They use a fairly recent piece of legislation called the CARD Act that every marketer at a credit card company should know, cold.

1. Compliance Tools.
   Compliance tools allow you to email a single row or multiple rows from trademark and/or affiliate reports to anyone – like search engines, affiliates, your legal, or other internal teams.  You can pick rows from different reports and across campaigns to include in the same email.  You can store and re-use templates.  You can view the history of sent emails in the ‘Compliance’ reporting area. 
2. Google Mobile.
   We now crawl paid listings on Google from the view-point of smartphones.  You will get data based on an average view of a mobile phone user.  This is a great way to gain insight to competitors, trademark use, and affiliate ads on mobile platforms.  GoogleMobile is now available as an engine choice from within ‘Campaign Setup’.

Check-out the following new features:

• Email Content Control.  You could always send violations and interesting reports via email from The Search Monitor.  Now you can control the subject and body of all emails and save them to re-use again later.
• New Charting Stats.  Chart the number of trademark violations and easily see trends over time.
• Restricted Keywords.  You could always get alerts with CSV file attachments via email for affiliates misusing your trademark on paid search.  The new Restricted Keywords report provides an added view available from within the interface.
• New Affiliate Crawling Technology.  We have enhanced our proprietarty affiliate detection and crawling technology to enable The Search Monitor to easily identify affiliate evaders who use rigorous bot detection tests in order to hide from crawlers.  These new enhancements are successful at catching all currently deployed affiliate evasion tactics. 

Compliance Teams, Affiliate Managers, and Trademark Enforcement Officers: The Search Monitor now has even more evidence for you in your battle against infringement and rule breakers.

We’ve made a few enhancements to our Trademark and Affiliate reports including: