FAQS

We have the data that demystifies the PLA!

PLAs are the talk of the town for retail search marketers and aren’t going away anytime soon. They are incredibly effective conversion tools but are often misunderstood. While marketers control the content of PLA ads through a data feed, the problem is a lack of visibility into which product is showing for a keyword query.

What We Monitor: We capture and report on all shopping listings that appear in worldwide search results. This includes Product Listing Ads (PLAs) on Google and shopping listings on Yahoo and Bing. We monitor them similarly to paid search ads, with multiple query checks per day. PLA monitoring is included in our SEM package offering and also within  .

Why It’s Tricky: PLAs require more intensive monitoring than other shopping listings. They change with each new search query (like paid search ads) which is different than shopping engine listings that change at a pace similar to organic listings.

PLA Stats We Capture

• Percent of keywords containing PLAs:  Some keywords do not have PLAs, while others do.  The percent of keywords that contain PLAs can vary per vertical.
• Number of ad units per keyword:  PLAs can show up as small as 2-unit boxes or as large as 6 or 8-unit boxes.
• Cross-media reporting: SEM, SEO, and PLA ad share, and the intersection of how often you appear on each ad unit.
• Seller Statistics: Rank, Share of Voice, frequency (i.e. % of the time a seller shows up in product listing ads), seller ratings and reviews, & list of all products promoted by the seller
• Product Statistics:  Price promoted by each seller, average price for a product, price range (low to high), & ad copy

Best Practices With PLA Stats

• Determine if your vertical is a heavy user of PLAs and you need to be there (agencies can use to recommend PLAs to clients)
• Determine if PLAs are pushing down your text ads, causing lower CTRs
• Determine if the products you want to display are actually displaying
• Determine if your product’s price is displaying within the range of prices in the PLA unit (too high is a big no-no for CTR)
• Determine if your product’s images look as good as the other images in the PLA

Other PLA Resources

• The Search Monitor’s blog posts on PLAs

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

• We monitor all tweets on Twitter containing an affiliate link (a.k.a. an affiliate URL redirect). We do not monitor every tweet posted.
• Metrics Captured:
  • Created Date
  • Twitter ID
  • Unique Tweet ID
  • Tweet Copy
  • Retweet or not
  • Merchant Domain Promoted
  • Entire redirect path from affiliate to merchant domain
  • Ad Network
  • Affiliate Id

Tools to use with twitter affiliate monitoring

• Download report to Excel
• Send compliance emails with evidence of the issue
• Schedule the report to run automatically
• Search for an affiliate – by keywords, Affiliate ID, or Twitter ID

Best practices for using Twitter’s affiliate activity data

• Find your affiliates who are using twitter to promote your website
• Explore the use of twitter by affiliates and compare your affiliates’ use to your competitor’s affiliates’ use.
• Monitor tweet copy for compliance to any copy policies in place for your affiliates
• Search through tweets for offers used by your (and other) affiliates

The Search Monitor crawls online ads looking for the keywords you entered into the system. You have two ways to provide these:

1. Custom Keywords

Enter your own list of ad monitoring keywords into the platform, from 1 to a million. Include every variation you’d like monitored (see examples below). Change the list as often as you need. Don’t worry, these keywords stay within the walls of your account.

2. Lighthouse Library

If you’d rather monitor the most popular keywords in your industry, we’ve got you covered. We created a keyword library containing millions of the most important keywords in paid search, SEO, and PLAs. This library, called Lighthouse, is organized into 1,200+ industry groups, each with dozens of sub-verticals. See grouping. We’ve been monitoring this list for years, so the history is already available.

See how it’s done! Request a demo and we’ll take your custom keywords, or a few of our Lighthouse ones, and show you what we know.

Keywords take on lots of different shapes and sizes, and you want to monitor all the valuable ones. A few examples:

Popular Ad Monitoring Keyword Variations

• Trademarks
• Typo variations of Trademarks
• Brand-plus keywords – a trademark plus a generic keyword, such as ‘nike shoes’
• Offer Codes such as coupons, promo pricing, or free shipping codes
• Phrases such as your slogan, or a string of offer text, such as ‘APR 10% for a limited time’
• Product names
• Competitor names
• High volume search keywords
• SEO keywords specific to your optimization efforts
• Long-tail keywords such as product descriptions, e.g., green winter north face jacket
• Keywords appended with a geo-modifier, e.g., Boston hotels

Offers, promotions, and product pricing are monitored in real-time as changes are made by advertisers, with hourly reports and alerts available.

Reports contain offers found in SEM ad copy text, on shopping engines, in PLA’s, and on landing pages.

Retail Offer Reports Contain the Following Information:

• Product Pricing & Price ranges
• Shipping Offers
• Coupon Codes
• Freebies
• Sales or Deals
• In-Store Promotions
• Seller SOV, Rank, and Ad Copy

Yes!

Pre-Click Data

• Pre-click data is information that you can glean by running a search on a search engine. To do it in large volumes requires querying search results pages via mechanical means to simulate the user experience.
• Accuracy requires repeat checks of keywords multiple times daily – monthly checks are not enough and will lead to great inaccuracies.
• Pre-click data gives us statistics and information, including page rank, frequency (how often does an advertiser appear), who shows up organically or on the paid side, what’s in the ad copy, where does the ad copy link the user (landing pages, redirects, and tracking URLs are discovered from these links), day-parting strategies, geo-targeting strategies, affiliate and reseller presence
• The Search Monitor is the source of pre-click data for Lighthouse

Post-Click Data

• Post-click data is information that is gleaned after a click occurs and is typically gathered via panels of users. Accuracy requires large volumes of volunteer users and incredibly powerful extrapolation algorithms to determine traffic volumes from the user set and apply it to the entire population of Internet users.
• Post-click data provides us with metrics such as click traffic, clickthrough rate, and search volumes. comScore is the source for post-click data.

The combination of pre-click and post-click data allows us to compute complex statistics such as:

• Ad Spend by Advertiser. Ad spend is a computation of clicks * cost per click. To get the clicks you need post click data, and to accurately assess the probable cost per click you need rank data. To account for how rank changes impact the CPC you need pre-click data.
• Traffic by Rank. Traffic at various ranks for keywords is important to know so you can plan and predict how slight changes in your bid or rank will impact your share of available traffic. It enables you to determine if it’s better for you to be in position five versus position two. Should you make a big move or not?To get this statistic, we need both pre-click data to interpret the proper rank for each advertiser, and the post-click data to glean the traffic received by each advertiser. By evaluating how each advertiser performs at each rank aggregated as a group, we can provide statistics on how a ranking change will impact your traffic results.

Want to know more? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how we do it.   Request a Demo

Precision starts with good data followed by time-tested algorithms pitted against real world experiences.

Good Data In

Want to learn more about our high-frequency, high-quality data?

Request a demo today!

CLICK FOR EXAMPLE

  gives you detailed click and spend data by vertical!

It provides historical paid search, organic search, and PLA statistics organized into vertical categories like Lodging, Apparel, Hobbies, Finance, etc.  Clients receive insight into unlimited competitors across 1,200+ verticals across millions of keywords for Google and Bing.

Lighthouse™ is sold by the vertical at a starting price of $300/month per vertical.  Platform licenses are available to all 1,239 vertical categories.

Data Consists Of 

• Paid Search Statistics.  Ad Spend, SOV, Clicks, CPC, CTR, Avg. Rank, reach, impression share, ad copy, and offers.
• Organic Search Statistics.  Ranking, page share, & listing copy across universal search results including organic, local, hotel finder, news, videos, images, shopping, and more.
• Product Listing Ads Statistics.  SOV, page share, product price, # of merchants, product descriptions, seller ratings & reviews, and PLA page placement

Learn More About Lighthouse

• BLOG: “Top 5 industry insights you can learn using Lighthouse”
• VIDEO: “How to improve SEM, SEO & PLA performance with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to defend Your PPC spend with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to improve prospecting using Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• Visit our Competitive Ad Intelligence overview page

Lighthouse for Travel

Hotels, Cruises, Resorts, Airlines, OTAs, and Auto Rentals have a unique need for geo-targeted information at the city level.  Lighthouse for Travel specifically provides a unique data set across more than 200 popular US destinations with historical data on Ad Spend, SOV, Rank, Ad Copy, Clicks, & CPC.

Lighthouse for Travel also includes Hotel Finder listings that appear in organic search results, with daily rate results coming in Q1 2015.

See a Demo With Data & Reports on Your Industry

Here’s a list of the online advertising currently monitored by The Search Monitor. Contact us to learn more, as we are adding new ones each month.

• Search Engines:
  • Google (Google.com, Google Mobile, Google Search Network, Ask, AOL, & Google Contextual Network)
  • Yahoo (incl. Yahoo Mobile)
  • Bing
  • Baidu (China)
  • Yandex (Russia)
  • Naver (South Korea) Learn more
  • See one that is missing? Tell us!
• Shopping Engines:
  • Product Listing Ads on Google & Yahoo
  • Amazon
  • Shopzilla
  • Pricegrabber
  • Google Shopping
• Display Networks & In-App Mobile:
  • 60+ Display Networks, across 150,000+ publishers, & 50,000+ mobile apps
• Social Networks:
  • Twitter is monitored for affiliate links
• Affiliate/Partner Landing Pages:
  • Content monitoring of publisher landing pages for offer promotions like coupon codes, promo codes, credit card offers, or telecom offers

Global Footprint

• Monitoring in nearly every country.  View list of countries monitored
• Monitoring of content in nearly every native language.  See list of languages monitored

Want to see what we capture for these desktop and mobile engines?

Request a demo today!

Many other tools get their data from sources that are not focused on quality data. The stronger the data source, the more accurate the stats or trends will be, leading to better decisions and more predictable outcomes.

• Small Sample Sizes: Most data sources don’t use a large enough sample population
• Low Frequency: Most vendors do not sample keywords with enough frequency, and therefore, they don’t see all of the advertisers. Accuracy in advertiser identification requires intense daily keyword queries. Most vendors only query keywords once per month. Lighthouse queries keywords multiple times per day. Lastly, infrequent querying of keywords leads to inaccurate predictions of rank and ad copy variations. Without an accurate prediction of rank and ad copy variations, you cannot compute ad spend, which requires an adjustment to CPC as rank fluctuates and as ad copy relevance fluctuates.
• Inaccurate Click Data: Most vendors use a data source that cannot provide accurate click data. In order to compute essential metrics like budget, you have to capture clicks. Ad spend = clicks x cost per click.

Learn more about Our Precision Data and see the 13 reasons why our data is the absolute best in the business.

Our crawling technology monitors two pages deep on the SERP (search engine results pages). Some other providers only monitor page 1 of the SERP and miss important competitor and affiliate activity.

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

• Find advertisers that are displaying your trademarks in their ad copy, but only in certain markets. You’ll need this proof to submit to the engines for removal!
• Find affiliates who break your rules in select locations, such as where your office is not located (since they think you only check there)
• Identify resellers that are unauthorized to advertise in certain cities
• Learn how competitors change their offers and landing pages by geography
• Identify new countries to enter for paid search

Industries That Benefit From Geo-targeting

Industries that benefit the most from geo-targeting include localized retailers, telecom, travel, automotive, and finance.

For example, travel clients may want to learn about advertised room rates, OTA activity, or brand infringements per market serviced. Clients who work in cooperative search marketing scenarios with resellers and distributors can benefit from ensuring rank compliance and keyword/ad copy synchronization.

The Search Monitor uses thousands of IP addresses across the globe to simulate a user in a specific location. We can target any country, city, or region, and the language of the ad.

Want to learn more? Ask us for examples of how geo-targeting can help your vertical. Or, request a demo with your list of geographies.

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We have the data that demystifies the PLA!

PLAs are the talk of the town for retail search marketers and aren’t going away anytime soon. They are incredibly effective conversion tools but are often misunderstood. While marketers control the content of PLA ads through a data feed, the problem is a lack of visibility into which product is showing for a keyword query.

What We Monitor: We capture and report on all shopping listings that appear in worldwide search results. This includes Product Listing Ads (PLAs) on Google and shopping listings on Yahoo and Bing. We monitor them similarly to paid search ads, with multiple query checks per day. PLA monitoring is included in our SEM package offering and also within  .

Why It’s Tricky: PLAs require more intensive monitoring than other shopping listings. They change with each new search query (like paid search ads) which is different than shopping engine listings that change at a pace similar to organic listings.

PLA Stats We Capture

• Percent of keywords containing PLAs:  Some keywords do not have PLAs, while others do.  The percent of keywords that contain PLAs can vary per vertical.
• Number of ad units per keyword:  PLAs can show up as small as 2-unit boxes or as large as 6 or 8-unit boxes.
• Cross-media reporting: SEM, SEO, and PLA ad share, and the intersection of how often you appear on each ad unit.
• Seller Statistics: Rank, Share of Voice, frequency (i.e. % of the time a seller shows up in product listing ads), seller ratings and reviews, & list of all products promoted by the seller
• Product Statistics:  Price promoted by each seller, average price for a product, price range (low to high), & ad copy

Best Practices With PLA Stats

• Determine if your vertical is a heavy user of PLAs and you need to be there (agencies can use to recommend PLAs to clients)
• Determine if PLAs are pushing down your text ads, causing lower CTRs
• Determine if the products you want to display are actually displaying
• Determine if your product’s price is displaying within the range of prices in the PLA unit (too high is a big no-no for CTR)
• Determine if your product’s images look as good as the other images in the PLA

Other PLA Resources

• The Search Monitor’s blog posts on PLAs

Precision starts with good data followed by time-tested algorithms pitted against real world experiences.

Good Data In

Want to learn more about our high-frequency, high-quality data?

Request a demo today!

CLICK FOR EXAMPLE

  gives you detailed click and spend data by vertical!

It provides historical paid search, organic search, and PLA statistics organized into vertical categories like Lodging, Apparel, Hobbies, Finance, etc.  Clients receive insight into unlimited competitors across 1,200+ verticals across millions of keywords for Google and Bing.

Lighthouse™ is sold by the vertical at a starting price of $300/month per vertical.  Platform licenses are available to all 1,239 vertical categories.

Data Consists Of 

• Paid Search Statistics.  Ad Spend, SOV, Clicks, CPC, CTR, Avg. Rank, reach, impression share, ad copy, and offers.
• Organic Search Statistics.  Ranking, page share, & listing copy across universal search results including organic, local, hotel finder, news, videos, images, shopping, and more.
• Product Listing Ads Statistics.  SOV, page share, product price, # of merchants, product descriptions, seller ratings & reviews, and PLA page placement

Learn More About Lighthouse

• BLOG: “Top 5 industry insights you can learn using Lighthouse”
• VIDEO: “How to improve SEM, SEO & PLA performance with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to defend Your PPC spend with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to improve prospecting using Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• Visit our Competitive Ad Intelligence overview page

Lighthouse for Travel

Hotels, Cruises, Resorts, Airlines, OTAs, and Auto Rentals have a unique need for geo-targeted information at the city level.  Lighthouse for Travel specifically provides a unique data set across more than 200 popular US destinations with historical data on Ad Spend, SOV, Rank, Ad Copy, Clicks, & CPC.

Lighthouse for Travel also includes Hotel Finder listings that appear in organic search results, with daily rate results coming in Q1 2015.

See a Demo With Data & Reports on Your Industry

Here are a few common benefits our clients see after using our ad monitoring tools. These can happen in as little as 30 days:

• A sharp reduction in CPCs after you stop partners from bidding on your branded keywords. One client reported that they saved $300K after detecting that re-sellers were bidding on their branded terms and stopped that activity
• Increase in CTR from learning which ad copy generates the best click rates
• Finding new affiliates for your program, ones that have been proven trustworthy and knowledgeable in your industry
• Improvement in sale attribution after stopping affiliates from hijacking your URL and claiming last-touch credit for a sale
• Save time: Detect trademark violations faster using our automatic email alerts
• Get better responses from the search engines – we’ll make sure you send them exactly what they need to stop violations

Many advertisers, agencies, affiliate networks, and OPMs believe they would be better off building a monitoring tool in-house versus buying a service from a provider like The Search Monitor. Below is a list of the reasons why buying is better than building when it comes to ad monitoring.

• Code Changes: The search engines are constantly changing their code. The Search Monitor, for example spends 10-20 hours every week detecting the changes, learning about them, contacting the engines, and then adjusting our technology so that our monitoring technology captures reliable results. The search engines are notorious for providing little notice and detail on changes they made. This can easily become an IT Engineer’s part-time job.
• Big Data: The data quantity you need to store is massive. Imagine 166 countries and 150+ different languages. Then imagine collecting data for every US state, metro area, and city. It’s huge. And if you want to crawl hourly like The Search Monitor does, it gets even massiver (is that a word? Probably not. But it gets the point across.)
• Easy Interfaces: You need an easy-to-use interface to access and filter this massive amount of data to produce something relevant
• Reporting & Exporting: You need flexibility in reports and exports. Some items need to be stored as URLs so they are easy to forward to the clients, partners, or the search engines
• Scheduling & Alerts:You need a scheduling tool for your reports and your tools that is triggered by some pre-set activity
• Team of Search Experts: You need a team of search engine experts to help make sense of some of the more confusing things that are captured.
• Client Validation: When you use a provider like us, you benefit from our ability to validate our data estimates (e.g., ad spend and CTR) against our network of 1,000+ clients across 22 different verticals.

If you require a custom branded solution, that is not a problem – we are capable of white labeling.  White Labeling Features Include:

• Branded Header & Footer.  Your brand is the only one that is seen, The Search Monitor branding is removed.
• Vanity URL.  Used for login pages, help center, and system sent emails.
• Support.  We support you.  You will provide direct support to your clients.
• Admin Center.  The admin center provides you with login access to client accounts, ability to view your full client list.
• Monitoring Frequency Control. Some packages allow back-door access to control crawler settings.

Many other tools get their data from sources that are not focused on quality data. The stronger the data source, the more accurate the stats or trends will be, leading to better decisions and more predictable outcomes.

• Small Sample Sizes: Most data sources don’t use a large enough sample population
• Low Frequency: Most vendors do not sample keywords with enough frequency, and therefore, they don’t see all of the advertisers. Accuracy in advertiser identification requires intense daily keyword queries. Most vendors only query keywords once per month. Lighthouse queries keywords multiple times per day. Lastly, infrequent querying of keywords leads to inaccurate predictions of rank and ad copy variations. Without an accurate prediction of rank and ad copy variations, you cannot compute ad spend, which requires an adjustment to CPC as rank fluctuates and as ad copy relevance fluctuates.
• Inaccurate Click Data: Most vendors use a data source that cannot provide accurate click data. In order to compute essential metrics like budget, you have to capture clicks. Ad spend = clicks x cost per click.

Learn more about Our Precision Data and see the 13 reasons why our data is the absolute best in the business.

Interactive Agencies

Automate repetitive research reports like competitive landscape information, trademark bidding, and affiliate activities. Use real intelligence to support business development efforts geared toward winning new clients.

Paid Search Managers

Use ad copy reports to get the heads-up on competitive promotions. Protect brand bidding by monitoring your trademarks. Watch for competition from your own affiliate program.

Multi-Market Local Advertisers

Automate the monitoring of your position on local search results across multiple markets. Watch competitors’ ad campaigns for unique geo-targeted promotions.

Affiliate Managers & Compliance Teams

Ensure affiliates are following the requirements of your affiliate program on search. Identify the strength of your competitors’ affiliate programs on search. Ensure that claims and offers in ad copy are truthful and up-to-date.

SEO Managers

Get the competitive landscape on universal search results. Use the data to tailor your organic strategy around page layout including organic, shopping, video, and local results.

Advertisers with Reseller Programs

Watch resellers to ensure that rank rules, keyword restrictions, and geographic requirements are followed. Ensure that current promotions are running and old promotions have been removed.

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

• Find advertisers that are displaying your trademarks in their ad copy, but only in certain markets. You’ll need this proof to submit to the engines for removal!
• Find affiliates who break your rules in select locations, such as where your office is not located (since they think you only check there)
• Identify resellers that are unauthorized to advertise in certain cities
• Learn how competitors change their offers and landing pages by geography
• Identify new countries to enter for paid search

Industries That Benefit From Geo-targeting

Industries that benefit the most from geo-targeting include localized retailers, telecom, travel, automotive, and finance.

For example, travel clients may want to learn about advertised room rates, OTA activity, or brand infringements per market serviced. Clients who work in cooperative search marketing scenarios with resellers and distributors can benefit from ensuring rank compliance and keyword/ad copy synchronization.

The Search Monitor uses thousands of IP addresses across the globe to simulate a user in a specific location. We can target any country, city, or region, and the language of the ad.

Want to learn more? Ask us for examples of how geo-targeting can help your vertical. Or, request a demo with your list of geographies.

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Our system makes it easy to move large amounts of data between your system and ours.

• Bulk Import & Export: Use this option to easily upload and export a file of some, or all, of your data
• Excel Web Query: This option simplifies getting data from the system to excel. Creates connection with excel that is a time saver for anyone creating a weekly or monthly report with pivots, charts, or formulas
• API Option: This option allows automatic creation of campaigns and retrieval of UI reports. Creates a connection between our system and client’s database making the process of getting data fully automated

Want to learn more about exporting your ad monitoring data?

Request a demo today!

If you choose to just sign-up for our SEO monitoring plan, you will have access to all of our data and insights on organic listings captured on Google, Google Mobile, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu.

See full list of SEO monitoring features. Data is captured for every country and for more than 150 native languages.

You can monitor results for up to 750 keywords at a time and can update this list (yourself) whenever you’d like.

If you choose to just sign-up for our shopping monitoring plan, you will have access to all of our data and insights on ads placed on three of the biggest comparison shopping engines: Google Shopping, PriceGrabber, and ShopZilla.

See full list of shopping monitoring features. Data is provided for every country and more than 150 native languages.

You can monitor results for up to 750 keywords at a time and can update this list (yourself) whenever you’d like.

If you choose to just sign-up for our paid search monitoring plan, you will have access to all of our SEM data and insights from Google, Google Mobile, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu in every country and more than 150 native languages. You will also receive data and insights on Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLAs) – see PLA monitoring features.

You can monitor results for up to 250 keywords at a time and can update this list (yourself) whenever you’d like.

Absolutely. Many of our clients need both types of monitoring data and it can easily show in one dashboard.

No, but we do encourage our clients to look at a relationship with The Search Monitor as a longer-term one where both parties are learning from each other.

We focus on constant education and optimization for every client. Every month our team of Account Managers will review your account and provide training on current and new features, and make suggestions for getting the most out of the platform. During these reviews we happily share anonymous learnings from other similar clients. Our goal is to make sure you have the support you need to meet your marketing goals.

We do not want to simply provide a technology and move on, but we want to be your business partner

Annual Contract Discount: We provide a large discount for clients who begin with an annual contract. Contact us if you would like to hear about other benefits of an annual contract.

The Search Monitor can help you determine the best number of keywords to start with. We have thousands of clients using our platform across 22 different verticals and can provide advice on the most appropriate number to begin with.

What if I go over? Not a problem. We have small surcharges that are automatically applied if you go over. Your Account Manager will contact you and make recommendations for how to avoid those charges in the future. We’re here to help!

Nope. We are happy to customize a solution for you that meets just the needs you have. Our system was designed to be very customizable.

Automatic alerts are your friend! There are many situations where you want to be automatically notified of compliance issues or advertising insights. Here are a few common ones used by The Search Monitor’s clients, along with the data they could be programmed to report:

Brand Bidding & TM in Ad Copy

You can be automatically alerted to competitors or partners bidding on your keywords or using your trademarks in their ad copy.

URL Hijacking

You can get automatic reports whenever an affiliate is displaying your branded URL in PPC but running their clicks through their Affiliate ID.

Affiliate Violations

You will receive an email at your specified time with full detail on the affiliate violation, including:

• Violation type
• Violation date
• Screengrab with timestamp. Screengrab is a hosted URL so you can easily forward
• Affiliate’s profile, including: their ID, network, number of violations, and other merchants they advertise for

Market Share

You can get alerted to major market share changes for SEM and Organic, for any advertiser or keyword.

Example: Learn that your competitor’s SEM market share increased by more than 50% in the last 7 days

CPC

You can see average cost-per-clicks for any advertiser or averaged across a keyword group or industry.

Example: Learn that your competitor’s cost-per-click dropped below your target CPC on an important set of keywords

Clicks

Get automatic alerts on the volume of SEM clicks received by a competitor or affiliate.

Example: Learn that five of your seven key competitors received more clicks than you did last month

Offers

Get automatic alerts on the types of ad copy offers used by competitors or affiliates, including which ones were most popular.

Example: Learn that  your competitors started running Free Shipping Ads on a certain keyword set

Ad Rank

Get alerted on important changes to the ad rank of any advertiser.

Example: Learn that your competitor averaged a higher ad rank than you did in the last 14 days.

What to see the full list of automatic ad monitoring alerts?

Request a demo today!

Without customization, you’re left with spreadsheets of ad monitoring data that doesn’t apply to your business or advertising goals.

The Search Monitor’s platform stands out from other ad monitoring providers by allowing incredible customization of your monitoring data. For the reports, charts, and automatic emails, you can customize items such as:

• Keywords
• Advertisers
• Metrics
• Geographies (ZIP, city, state, region, country)
• Engines
• Languages
• Date range

For compliance data in particular, you can customize metrics such as:

• Trademark Details, such as the ad copy, advertisers, times seen, and duration
• Affiliate Details, such as their ID, networks, and other merchants

For both sets of data, you can also customize the export format. It can be exported raw, in chart form, in tables, via an optional API, via email, and even as a URL with screengrabs that are easily forwarded. See list of syncing options.

Want to see customized ad monitoring data first-hand?

Request a demo today!

Visit the individual report pages to see a few images. Reports are:

Competitive Monitoring Reports

• Paid Ads
• Organic Listings
• Shopping Engines & PLAs

Compliance Monitoring Reports

• Affiliate & Partners
• Trademarks
• Offers

Don’t see what you need?  Schedule a demo or contact us and tell us what report you’d like to see and for which vertical or keywords. We’ll do our best to provide.

The following charts are available through the Chart Manager section of the Dashboard

• Single Line Metric: Paid
• Single Line Metric: Organic
• Scatter by Competitor
• Stacked Bar Knockout: Affiliate
• Stacked Bar Knockout: Rank
• Stacked Bar: SOV
• Stacked Bar: Shopping SOV

Our system makes it easy to move large amounts of data between your system and ours.

• Bulk Import & Export: Use this option to easily upload and export a file of some, or all, of your data
• Excel Web Query: This option simplifies getting data from the system to excel. Creates connection with excel that is a time saver for anyone creating a weekly or monthly report with pivots, charts, or formulas
• API Option: This option allows automatic creation of campaigns and retrieval of UI reports. Creates a connection between our system and client’s database making the process of getting data fully automated

Want to learn more about exporting your ad monitoring data?

Request a demo today!

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

• We monitor all tweets on Twitter containing an affiliate link (a.k.a. an affiliate URL redirect). We do not monitor every tweet posted.
• Metrics Captured:
  • Created Date
  • Twitter ID
  • Unique Tweet ID
  • Tweet Copy
  • Retweet or not
  • Merchant Domain Promoted
  • Entire redirect path from affiliate to merchant domain
  • Ad Network
  • Affiliate Id

Tools to use with twitter affiliate monitoring

• Download report to Excel
• Send compliance emails with evidence of the issue
• Schedule the report to run automatically
• Search for an affiliate – by keywords, Affiliate ID, or Twitter ID

Best practices for using Twitter’s affiliate activity data

• Find your affiliates who are using twitter to promote your website
• Explore the use of twitter by affiliates and compare your affiliates’ use to your competitor’s affiliates’ use.
• Monitor tweet copy for compliance to any copy policies in place for your affiliates
• Search through tweets for offers used by your (and other) affiliates

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?

There are several reasons why an advertiser would want to disguise their ad to make it seem like your ad:

• Affiliate Hijacker.  An affiliate who is URL Hijacking is doing this to avoid having to create a landing page.  Traffic from the hijacked ad is directed through an affiliate link and then ultimately to your landing page.  On the plus side, you wind up receiving the business.  However the cost is tremendous.  First, as noted above, your own ads are knocked-off of the search results page.  This then causes channel conflict with your SEM team and your automated campaign software.  Second, you are not able to control the messaging.  Third, the competition is now between you, the marketplace, AND your affiliate.  More competition for placement equals higher CPC’s.  Finally, affiliate hijackers typically hijack on brand or brand plus terms where the meatiest traffic lies thus taking clicks away from you.  We can find these hijackers by looking for incorrect tracking urls and identifying affiliate links within the redirect path.
• Traffic Hijacker/Phishing: A traffic hijacker usually wants your traffic so that it can fool a consumer into giving away personal information like an email address.  The pattern from ad to landing page will be an advertisement that looks like yours, then to a landing page that is owned by the hijacker and not owned by you.   The landing page may be disguised to fool the consumer by using your colors, logo placement, and wording.  We have seen this behavior with phony gift card give-aways for example.  We detect these hijackers by noticing a mismatch between your website URL and the landing page URL of the advertisement.

• Quality Score Hijacker.  The search engines grade your ad quality using a formula that they call Quality Score.  The better your quality score, the less you have to pay in CPC’s.  In order to boost quality score for new campaigns, sometimes competitors will hijack your display URL in order to gain quality score points.  This happens to bigger more well known brands who are likely to have a great quality score.  The hijacker will disguise its SEM ad as you, use your display URL, and direct traffic to your landing page.  The hijacker will do this for a period of time in order to boost the quality score within its adwords account.  We can usually find these hijackers because the tracking URL used will be different than your own.

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.

Your strategy must also include rank restrictions and possibly CPC restrictions so that the super affiliate is not able to out-rank you.  This strategy will enable you to own more paid search listings, and to drive CPCs downward instead of upward.  You can read more about this on Search Engine Land.

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’.

SmartCrawler keywords are free additional keywords that are added to Ultimate and higher compliance monitoring plan. (See compliance pricing plans.)  Generally, you can expect 10-20 additional free keywords per trademark variation in your compliance monitoring account.

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.

It’s an essential part of any affiliate marketing program to monitor frequently and enforce quickly. Our monitoring tools not only catch violations when they happen, they automatically notify you and provide easy tools to notify your affiliates, the networks, or the search engines. We provide screengrabs of the violation and full background detail on the affiliate, including their IDs, the networks they work with, and other merchants they advertise for.

Links For More Information

• What We Monitor for Affiliate Managers
• The Affiliate & Partner Monitoring Report
• The Trademark Monitor Report 
• The Offer Monitoring Report

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

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.

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

• Find advertisers that are displaying your trademarks in their ad copy, but only in certain markets. You’ll need this proof to submit to the engines for removal!
• Find affiliates who break your rules in select locations, such as where your office is not located (since they think you only check there)
• Identify resellers that are unauthorized to advertise in certain cities
• Learn how competitors change their offers and landing pages by geography
• Identify new countries to enter for paid search

Industries That Benefit From Geo-targeting

Industries that benefit the most from geo-targeting include localized retailers, telecom, travel, automotive, and finance.

For example, travel clients may want to learn about advertised room rates, OTA activity, or brand infringements per market serviced. Clients who work in cooperative search marketing scenarios with resellers and distributors can benefit from ensuring rank compliance and keyword/ad copy synchronization.

The Search Monitor uses thousands of IP addresses across the globe to simulate a user in a specific location. We can target any country, city, or region, and the language of the ad.

Want to learn more? Ask us for examples of how geo-targeting can help your vertical. Or, request a demo with your list of geographies.

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We have the data that demystifies the PLA!

PLAs are the talk of the town for retail search marketers and aren’t going away anytime soon. They are incredibly effective conversion tools but are often misunderstood. While marketers control the content of PLA ads through a data feed, the problem is a lack of visibility into which product is showing for a keyword query.

What We Monitor: We capture and report on all shopping listings that appear in worldwide search results. This includes Product Listing Ads (PLAs) on Google and shopping listings on Yahoo and Bing. We monitor them similarly to paid search ads, with multiple query checks per day. PLA monitoring is included in our SEM package offering and also within  .

Why It’s Tricky: PLAs require more intensive monitoring than other shopping listings. They change with each new search query (like paid search ads) which is different than shopping engine listings that change at a pace similar to organic listings.

PLA Stats We Capture

• Percent of keywords containing PLAs:  Some keywords do not have PLAs, while others do.  The percent of keywords that contain PLAs can vary per vertical.
• Number of ad units per keyword:  PLAs can show up as small as 2-unit boxes or as large as 6 or 8-unit boxes.
• Cross-media reporting: SEM, SEO, and PLA ad share, and the intersection of how often you appear on each ad unit.
• Seller Statistics: Rank, Share of Voice, frequency (i.e. % of the time a seller shows up in product listing ads), seller ratings and reviews, & list of all products promoted by the seller
• Product Statistics:  Price promoted by each seller, average price for a product, price range (low to high), & ad copy

Best Practices With PLA Stats

• Determine if your vertical is a heavy user of PLAs and you need to be there (agencies can use to recommend PLAs to clients)
• Determine if PLAs are pushing down your text ads, causing lower CTRs
• Determine if the products you want to display are actually displaying
• Determine if your product’s price is displaying within the range of prices in the PLA unit (too high is a big no-no for CTR)
• Determine if your product’s images look as good as the other images in the PLA

Other PLA Resources

• The Search Monitor’s blog posts on PLAs

CLICK FOR EXAMPLE

  gives you detailed click and spend data by vertical!

It provides historical paid search, organic search, and PLA statistics organized into vertical categories like Lodging, Apparel, Hobbies, Finance, etc.  Clients receive insight into unlimited competitors across 1,200+ verticals across millions of keywords for Google and Bing.

Lighthouse™ is sold by the vertical at a starting price of $300/month per vertical.  Platform licenses are available to all 1,239 vertical categories.

Data Consists Of 

• Paid Search Statistics.  Ad Spend, SOV, Clicks, CPC, CTR, Avg. Rank, reach, impression share, ad copy, and offers.
• Organic Search Statistics.  Ranking, page share, & listing copy across universal search results including organic, local, hotel finder, news, videos, images, shopping, and more.
• Product Listing Ads Statistics.  SOV, page share, product price, # of merchants, product descriptions, seller ratings & reviews, and PLA page placement

Learn More About Lighthouse

• BLOG: “Top 5 industry insights you can learn using Lighthouse”
• VIDEO: “How to improve SEM, SEO & PLA performance with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to defend Your PPC spend with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to improve prospecting using Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• Visit our Competitive Ad Intelligence overview page

Lighthouse for Travel

Hotels, Cruises, Resorts, Airlines, OTAs, and Auto Rentals have a unique need for geo-targeted information at the city level.  Lighthouse for Travel specifically provides a unique data set across more than 200 popular US destinations with historical data on Ad Spend, SOV, Rank, Ad Copy, Clicks, & CPC.

Lighthouse for Travel also includes Hotel Finder listings that appear in organic search results, with daily rate results coming in Q1 2015.

See a Demo With Data & Reports on Your Industry

Yes. If your competitors are using keywords that you have loaded into your campaign manager, we will identify them.

However, we do not have visibility into your competitor’s Google Ad Words account or Bing Ad Center Account.

Interactive Agencies

Automate repetitive research reports like competitive landscape information, trademark bidding, and affiliate activities. Use real intelligence to support business development efforts geared toward winning new clients.

Paid Search Managers

Use ad copy reports to get the heads-up on competitive promotions. Protect brand bidding by monitoring your trademarks. Watch for competition from your own affiliate program.

Multi-Market Local Advertisers

Automate the monitoring of your position on local search results across multiple markets. Watch competitors’ ad campaigns for unique geo-targeted promotions.

Affiliate Managers & Compliance Teams

Ensure affiliates are following the requirements of your affiliate program on search. Identify the strength of your competitors’ affiliate programs on search. Ensure that claims and offers in ad copy are truthful and up-to-date.

SEO Managers

Get the competitive landscape on universal search results. Use the data to tailor your organic strategy around page layout including organic, shopping, video, and local results.

Advertisers with Reseller Programs

Watch resellers to ensure that rank rules, keyword restrictions, and geographic requirements are followed. Ensure that current promotions are running and old promotions have been removed.

Marketing Teams need a powerful tool that provides the following benefits, in one easy-to-use place:

• PPC monitoring
• SEO monitoring
• Shopping engine and PLA monitoring
• Campaign performance benchmarks for any industry
• List of Hot Competitors for any industry
• Trended market share stats for all Hot Competitors
• Alerts when a competitor performs a specific action.

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

• Find advertisers that are displaying your trademarks in their ad copy, but only in certain markets. You’ll need this proof to submit to the engines for removal!
• Find affiliates who break your rules in select locations, such as where your office is not located (since they think you only check there)
• Identify resellers that are unauthorized to advertise in certain cities
• Learn how competitors change their offers and landing pages by geography
• Identify new countries to enter for paid search

Industries That Benefit From Geo-targeting

Industries that benefit the most from geo-targeting include localized retailers, telecom, travel, automotive, and finance.

For example, travel clients may want to learn about advertised room rates, OTA activity, or brand infringements per market serviced. Clients who work in cooperative search marketing scenarios with resellers and distributors can benefit from ensuring rank compliance and keyword/ad copy synchronization.

The Search Monitor uses thousands of IP addresses across the globe to simulate a user in a specific location. We can target any country, city, or region, and the language of the ad.

Want to learn more? Ask us for examples of how geo-targeting can help your vertical. Or, request a demo with your list of geographies.

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Absolutely. The Dashboard makes it easy to customize which data to include in reports, what format they will take, and how often you will receive them.

Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.

Since we started the company in 2008, our goal was a monitoring tool designed to meet the needs of the leading advertising agencies.

Below are a few features engineered for agencies to help grow both their clients’ businesses, and their own.

• Agencies can manage multiple clients from a single interface where each client’s sub-campaign is kept separate.
• Agencies can easily compare performance across multiple clients and even create customized benchmarks
• Agencies have the option of using our API to move data directly into any internal system
• Some of our agency clients use our white-label option so that their clients only see the agency’s branding. We can even white-label our Help Center.
• We can help you find more clients! Our monitoring tool can be used to identify potential new clients for an agency. Watch our video ‘Smart Prospecting for Agencies‘ to see how.

CLICK FOR EXAMPLE

  gives you detailed click and spend data by vertical!

It provides historical paid search, organic search, and PLA statistics organized into vertical categories like Lodging, Apparel, Hobbies, Finance, etc.  Clients receive insight into unlimited competitors across 1,200+ verticals across millions of keywords for Google and Bing.

Lighthouse™ is sold by the vertical at a starting price of $300/month per vertical.  Platform licenses are available to all 1,239 vertical categories.

Data Consists Of 

• Paid Search Statistics.  Ad Spend, SOV, Clicks, CPC, CTR, Avg. Rank, reach, impression share, ad copy, and offers.
• Organic Search Statistics.  Ranking, page share, & listing copy across universal search results including organic, local, hotel finder, news, videos, images, shopping, and more.
• Product Listing Ads Statistics.  SOV, page share, product price, # of merchants, product descriptions, seller ratings & reviews, and PLA page placement

Learn More About Lighthouse

• BLOG: “Top 5 industry insights you can learn using Lighthouse”
• VIDEO: “How to improve SEM, SEO & PLA performance with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to defend Your PPC spend with Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• VIDEO: “How to improve prospecting using Lighthouse by The Search Monitor”
• Visit our Competitive Ad Intelligence overview page

Lighthouse for Travel

Hotels, Cruises, Resorts, Airlines, OTAs, and Auto Rentals have a unique need for geo-targeted information at the city level.  Lighthouse for Travel specifically provides a unique data set across more than 200 popular US destinations with historical data on Ad Spend, SOV, Rank, Ad Copy, Clicks, & CPC.

Lighthouse for Travel also includes Hotel Finder listings that appear in organic search results, with daily rate results coming in Q1 2015.

See a Demo With Data & Reports on Your Industry

The Search Monitor specializes in providing competitive intelligence for agencies. Below are a few of the reports our agency clients find most helpful.

• Paid Ad Monitoring (Learn More)
  • Rank Report
  • Market Share Report
  • Ad Copy Report
  • Keyword Report
  • Special Offers Report
• Organic Listing Monitoring (Learn More)
  • Listing Report
  • Rank Report
• Shopping Monitoring (Learn More)
  • Seller Report
  • Item Detail Report
  • PLA Report
• Display & Mobile Ad Monitoring (Learn More)

All reports can be scheduled to be sent to you or anyone else. Many of our agency clients have PPC competitive analysis automatically emailed monthly for their clients. Others receive weekly Market Share reports for their clients’ Hot Competitors. We can show you how to set up these automatic reports.

Yes. Our main competitive product (Lighthouse) makes it easy to identify new ‘good-fit’ clients for an agency.

Let’s say you are the Business Development lead for your agency and need to identify 50 prospects that are a good fit for your business.

• You want companies that are in the verticals where you have expertise—or would like to move into–and are the right size for your agency
• You want companies who are under-performing their benchmarks in their vertical or companies whose performance is not as good as your agency’s results
• You also want to know which vendors your prospects use for tracking, bidding, and campaign management

This information will give you a targeted list of ‘best-fit’ prospects and the information needed to craft the perfect pitch about why they should select your agency.

With Lighthouse, this list can be ready in an instant. And since Lighthouse data comes from The Search Monitor’s partnership with comScore, you can rest assured that you’re getting the most precise data available.

Watch our video ‘Smart Prospecting With Lighthouse‘ to learn more.

Yes. You can easily spread out your purchased keyword group across multiple clients in one account.

Yes. If your competitors are using keywords that you have loaded into your campaign manager, we will identify them.

However, we do not have visibility into your competitor’s Google Ad Words account or Bing Ad Center Account.

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

• Find advertisers that are displaying your trademarks in their ad copy, but only in certain markets. You’ll need this proof to submit to the engines for removal!
• Find affiliates who break your rules in select locations, such as where your office is not located (since they think you only check there)
• Identify resellers that are unauthorized to advertise in certain cities
• Learn how competitors change their offers and landing pages by geography
• Identify new countries to enter for paid search

Industries That Benefit From Geo-targeting

Industries that benefit the most from geo-targeting include localized retailers, telecom, travel, automotive, and finance.

For example, travel clients may want to learn about advertised room rates, OTA activity, or brand infringements per market serviced. Clients who work in cooperative search marketing scenarios with resellers and distributors can benefit from ensuring rank compliance and keyword/ad copy synchronization.

The Search Monitor uses thousands of IP addresses across the globe to simulate a user in a specific location. We can target any country, city, or region, and the language of the ad.

Want to learn more? Ask us for examples of how geo-targeting can help your vertical. Or, request a demo with your list of geographies.

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