Importance of monitoring Twitter for affiliate activity

• Your affiliates will use any tool at their disposal to drive sales, and Twitter has become a favorite one
• Just like with a search engine ad, affiliates display an advertiser’s URL or brand name in their tweet but then send the clicker through their affiliate link (for the sale credit)
• All affiliate managers need a tool that monitors tweets every day of the year and allows the user to easily notify affiliates or vendors that a rule violation is occuring

What The Search Monitor captures for affiliate activity on Twitter

SmartCrawler™ is our exclusive auto-detection technology that finds infringing ads.

SmartCrawler keywords are brand-plus keywords that are commonly abused by affiliate marketers who are brand-bidding against your policy.  Examples include ‘brand’ + ‘free promo’ or ‘brand’ + ‘free shipping’.

Super Affiliates, or preferred publishers, are publishers who you have granted special rights and privileges.  Examples include:

• Brand-bidding permission on paid search
• Unique coupon codes that only the publisher can use
• Bonus commissions for hitting certain goals and numbers

You can utilize your super affiliates for paid search to assist you in protecting your branded keywords against unwanted competition.  If you have competitors bidding on your branded keywords, and you have not been successful with search engine take-downs, then your next option is to get your affiliates to share the paid search pages with you.  You can grant your super affiliates permission to  brand bid on specific keywords.

URL hijacking (or affiliate ad hijacking) occurs when another advertiser creates an ad that looks like it’s your ad.  It happens within paid search ads, contextual ads, and in display network image ads.

• Paid Search Hijacking.  When URL Hijacking occurs in paid search, the hijacker will use your URL as the display URL in its ad. This is problematic because search engines only allow 1 paid search advertiser to show in search results per display URL.  This means that if you and an affiliate or a competitor are both using the same display URL, your ad will only show a portion of the time, and the remaining portion of the time the other guy’s ad version with your display URL will appear.  We call this getting ‘knocked-out’.   Our system will tell you the percentage of the time that you have been knocked-out of the search listings by a competitor.
• Display Hijacking.  When URL Hijacking occurs in display ads, the hijacker will use your URL in the ad, your brand name, and your colors.  This is problematic because the advertisements may contain improper messaging or may interfere with ad serving of your direct campaigns as they do in paid search.

Why does URL Hijacking Occur?

All of our packages come with the ability to geo-target search engine monitoring by ZIP, city, state, region, and country in every location. This includes global search engines such as Google, Bing, & Yahoo and local ones such as Baidu, Yandex, and Naver.

Why You Must Geo-Target Your Ad Monitoring

Plenty of reasons. When your affiliates bid on your branded terms, they drive up the CPCs you pay for ads that show for those terms.

Further, you lose clicks. Our analysis shows that you can gain 16% more clicks by simply stopping affiliates from bidding on your branded keywords.

Absolutely. Just tell the system which affiliate IDs should be treated as ‘friendly’ and our system will ignore them when identifying potential violations.

The Search Monitor has been monitoring affiliate activity on search engines and other webpages since 2008. While our data shows that most affiliates do comply with their advertiser’s guidelines (72%), unfortunately the remaining 28% do not.

Some do not realize they are violating their advertiser’s rules, while some simply know they won’t every get caught. Examples include URL hijacking, trademark bidding, and rank violations.