The Search Monitor's blog posts about affiliate monitoring

Credit Card Marketers: Do you know what the CARD Act is ?

Apr 4, 2014

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.

The Search Monitor Launches Enhanced Content Monitoring Tools to Better Monitor Affiliates and Comply With FTC Guidelines

Jan 13, 2014

The Search Monitor, the leader in providing competitive ad intelligence to search and affiliate marketers, today announced a significant enhancement of its tools to monitor affiliate publishers and website landing pages. The new tools will help advertisers protect themselves against a recent increase in high-profile lawsuits against companies for deceptive advertising practices.

The Federal Trade Commission and its new Director of the Consumer Protection Bureau, Jessica Rich, have made several recent announcements about the need to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive advertising practices. The most recent statementcame on January 7^th when the FTC announced a new resolution to protect consumers from deceptive weight loss claims, many of which appear online.

“In the last few years, we’ve seen more than 10 cases brought against websites by the FTC for deceptive advertising,” explained The Search Monitor’s CEO, Lori Weiman. “And since it’s often the affiliate—and not the advertiser—that’s committing the abuses, it’s a business necessity to constantly monitor affiliate activity for compliance.”

Failure to monitor affiliate compliance can carry a heavy price tag. In 2012, the FTC fined one company $1 million and, according to the settlement, required them to “monitor affiliate marketers in their network to ensure that their statements are truthful and in compliance with federal advertising law.”

The Search Monitor’s clients first had access to affiliate monitoring tools in 2007 and have used them to identify thousands of abuses. Abuses range from obvious ones, such as hijacking an advertiser’s URL in their ads, to harder-to-find ones that affiliates try to hide, such as deceptive coupon codes or shortened URLs for Twitter.

“There are many highly regulated industries where advertisers need to know how their affiliates are representing them,” added Weiman. “The financial industry, especially with credit cards and mortgages, and the health industry, especially with prescription drugs and weight loss, are two high-profile examples. In these industries, an affiliate that does not comply with strictly enforced rules around promotional language can quickly land an advertiser in hot water with the FTC.”

The enhancements to The Search Monitor’s content monitoring tools include an increase in the number of sites monitored, a higher frequency of monitoring, faster alerting of violations, and better tools to summarize violations. The Search Monitor provides access to the marketing tactics, threat levels, marketing channels used, and merchant affiliations of more than 20,000 affiliates across 50 different affiliate networks.

To learn more, visit https://www.thesearchmonitor.com.

About The Search Monitor

The Search Monitor monitors paid search, organic search, social media, mobile search, and shopping engines worldwide for brand and affiliate compliance, and competitive intelligence. Interactive agencies, search marketers, and affiliate marketers use The Search Monitor to gather and analyze competitive information more effectively. Visit https://www.thesearchmonitor.com to learn more.

The Search Monitor Automates Compliance Emails

Nov 7, 2013

The Search Monitor, the leader in providing competitive ad intelligence data to search and affiliate marketers, announces the release of a new feature that makes composing and sending affiliate and brand compliance emails faster—auto- email-fill.

Auto-email fill auto-populates email addresses into compliance emails to make it simple and fast to send warning notices to affiliates who violate program rules or competitors who infringe on trademarks on paid search ads. This new feature is tied into The Search Monitor’s database of over 20,000 affiliates, across more than 50 affiliate networks, with profiles that expose marketing tactics, threat levels, marketing channels used, and merchant affiliations. Customers are able to augment affiliate profiles with contact information and comments. Stored contact information is then used to auto-populate email addresses into compliance emails.

The auto-email fill feature compliments The Search Monitor’s existing compliance features including identifying brand infringement activities on search engines and detection of affiliate compliance with paid search, social media, and coupon code rules.

“Many times clients need to send out repeat notices to the same affiliate or competitor,” said Lori Weiman, CEO of The Search Monitor. “Auto-email fill makes it easier to grab email addresses on the fly to make compliance enforcement faster and less cumbersome on our client’s workload,” adds Weiman.

The Search Monitor Adds Twitter Monitoring, Selected by LinkShare as its Preferred Vendor

Oct 6, 2011

The Search Monitor, a leading provider of real-time market intelligence tools, added Twitter monitoring to its affiliate compliance platform. The Search Monitor now captures and analyzes tweets that contain links from over 50 different affiliate networks.

LinkShare, one of the largest affiliate networks in the world, selected The Search Monitor as its preferred vendor for Twitter monitoring. Read the Press Release.

New Affiliate, Organic, and Reports Features

Jun 23, 2011

Affiliate Monitor – New Features

Affiliate Profiles. Every affiliate, yours and your competitors’, now has a profile. Each profile includes:

Aliases: URLs used as display URLs, landing page URLs, & URLs in the redirect string PLUS other associated affiliate ID’s,
Merchants: All associated merchants found in your account,
Contacts & Comments: User generated contacts & comments with optional anonymous sharing,
Threat Level: threat level based on URL hijacking and/or trademark bidding behavior across our entire community of clients.
Replacement: Affiliate Profiles have replaced the Affiliate List Details report.

Commission Junction API Integration. CJ customers who have an API Key can now integrate it into your account.

Use: We will use this information to update Affiliate Profiles with the domains registered to each CJ affiliate.
Financial information cannot be viewed or gathered. This data is private and is not shared across clients.

Rank Policy Enhancements. Get alerts when specific affiliate adverters are ranked above or below you.

Set-up: To set up a rank policy for above/below comparisons to yourself, use a new field in custom reports called ‘Competitor Position’.

Shopping Engine Affiliate Programs. We’ve added the following CSE programs so you can easily view sub-affiliate relationships:

Bizrate, Beso, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Nextag, Dealtime, and Shopzilla.

Diagnostics for Your Own Affiliates. You may have seen a field called ‘My Affiliate?’ in the restricted keywords report. This field isolates the list of affiliate advertisers to only those who are sending traffic to your website. You can now gain access to this field in Custom Reporting as well.

New Release: Yahoo! Affiliate Monitoring is Live

Dec 14, 2009

The Search Monitor now offers affiliate monitoring on Yahoo! paid search results to its clients. We do this to aid advertisers with affiliate compliance, including the detection of direct linking affiliates and brand hijackers on paid search results. We will continue to provide trademark and competitor monitoring services for our advertisers. This is important to us because The Search Monitor is the first and only vendor that has been approved by Yahoo! to offer affiliate monitoring – a significant element in assisting brands to monitor the paid search marketing channel. Advertisers and their agencies spend many hours manually checking ads looking for affiliates by hand in order to ensure compliance with their affiliate programs. By offering affiliate monitoring on Yahoo! paid search results, The Search Monitor can better support advertiser efforts to patrol their brands and affiliates more efficiently.

New Release: Bing Affiliate Monitoring is Live!

Aug 21, 2009

As you know, we have always provided trademark and competitor monitoring on Bing. Now, the Search Monitor also supports Affiliate Monitoring on Bing!

This is a big deal because The Search Monitor is the first and only vendor that has been approved by Bing to offer affiliate monitoring – an important element in assisting brands to gain control over the paid search marketing channel. It means that we can track direct linking URL hijackers, other types of affiliate compliance violations, and your competitors’ affiliates on Bing.

New Affiliate Report – Discover the Size and Strength of Competitors’ Affiliate Programs

Jan 22, 2009

The Search Monitor launched an exciting addition to the Affiliate Monitor reports today (available to ‘Pro’ level clients). You will find new reports called ‘Affiliate List’, released in beta, which includes:

Affiliate List Summary: This report will show you a list of each competitor who is receiving clicks from affiliate marketers on sponsored search. You can compare the relative strength of each competitor’s affiliate programs by looking at the ‘Affiliate Visibility’ field.

October 2008 Release Notes

Oct 2, 2008

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:

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