Affiliate Paid Search Monitoring in AvantLink.com
One of the major business issues we find ourselves battling every day at AvantLink.com, is the problem generally referred to in the affiliate marketing industry as “Trademark Bidding” or “Trademark Poaching“. This practice involves affiliates placing Pay Per Click (PPC) ads on the major search engines using merchant trade names and/or domains names as the ad keyword trigger.
For example, if an affiliate buys ads on Google for the keywords ‘AvantLink’ or ‘AvantLink.com’, we would end up paying affiliate commissions for customers we would get anyways. The customer was entering our name directly into the search engine and as with most businesses, our website will be the first in the natural search results. Believe it or not, a large number of people enter business names or domain names into search engines rather then typing the URL directly into the browser address bar, even when they know it.
From our perspective, this form of advertising provides little to no value to the merchant. Many merchants don’t understand that if they don’t specifically prohibit this activity in their affiliate program terms and conditions, some affiliates will take that as a green light to trademark bid until they are told otherwise. This is the reason that AvantLink.com decided to prohibit this activity by default in our network level terms and conditions. We’re the only affiliate network that has this default policy.
We have been enforcing this policy right from the beginning, providing AvantLink.com merchant advertisers with a much higher level of brand protection while keeping their affiliate marketing costs down significantly. Many of our competitors are happy to turn a blind eye to this activity because it drives a lot of sales through their networks. And since many merchants are unaware of how these sales are are being driven to them, they are left with the false impression that the large volume of sales must be coming from performing affiliates who are harnessing their own traffic streams.
While it used to be fairly easy for us to monitor this activity manually when we were a smaller network, it has become increasingly difficult now that we’re approaching 200 merchants in our network. That’s why I’m very pleased to announce that we’re currently testing our own fully integrated paid search monitoring tool. This tool was inspired by code initially written by Mark Silliman, available at iTrademarkBidding.com. Our CTO, David Clark, took the general ideas in Mark’s code and has been developing our own keyword monitoring tool over the last few weeks.
The results of our monitoring will be available as a standard report and will provide the following information: merchant name, search term (ad keyword trigger), search engine, affiliate network (including other major affiliate networks the merchant has affiliate programs in), affiliate tracking parameters (If we find an instance of an AvantLink affiliate trade name bidding, we show you the actual affiliate with a link to that affiliates detail information), ad landing page (affiliate website URL or affiliate network click URL), first observed occurrence date and last observed occurrence date.
Currently, we are only monitoring the merchant business name and domain name during our internal testing phase. When this tool is released to AvantLink.com merchants, they will be able to add a custom list of additional keywords that they want monitored by our service. Since we present the paid search monitoring results to merchants in our standard reporting system, merchants can subscribe to these reports as they would any of our other reports and have them delivered via email, RSS, etc. And of course, this tool will be available for free as another value-add service for merchant advertisers in the AvantLink.com affiliate network.
Be sure to keep an eye on our network blog, AvantShare.com, for the public release of this tool.
Scott Kalbach
