Comments on: Trademark & Merchant Name PPC Bidding

By: Scott Kalbach » Affiliate Paid Search Monitoring in AvantLink.com

Scott Kalbach » Affiliate Paid Search Monitoring in AvantLink.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:54:40 +0000

[…] 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 […]

By: Paul Schroader

Paul Schroader — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:41:11 +0000

This is an issue that has had a major impact on both publishers and merchants for nearly a decade. I remember my first exposure to this was in 2000 when some of our top affiliates were bidding on the term “flipdog”. At the time, FlipDog didn’t have a well-established brand and it was looked on as acceptable under the circumstances. There have been case studies cited where affiliates have actually helped companies build their brand, but this is usually an exception and not the rule.

I’ve also heard of tests run where programs have run with affiliates bidding on trademarks for a set amount of time, then run for the same amount of time with absolutely no affiliates on their marks and seen a 35% decrease when affiliates aren’t part of the mix.

So, depending on how open your trademark is to competition from more expensive channels, grey marketers or outright competitors, there can be benefit derived from a strategic partnership with credible search affiliates.

That being said, an affiliate network should definitely have a default policy of not allowing merchant name, domain name or trademark bidding. Merchants should know who they’re working with in this type of situation and should be able to dictate the terms of the relationship. The decision of allowing this sort of controlled trademark bidding should be made by merchants and not networks.

By: Jason Forthofer

Jason Forthofer — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:17:58 +0000

We currently do allow domain name bidding simply because our competitors (who are not affiliates) are also bidding on our domain name and I’d rather have our affiliates taking up more serps real estate than our competitors. (cough cough Beau-coup and others).

By: Gary M

Gary M — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:45:21 +0000

Mark, absolutely. Thanks for the comment. Not only does rampant trademark bidding hurt the reputation of the industry, it also “poaches” traffic from legitimate and value-based Affiliate sites ranking high for merchant related searches for good reason. And it’s not network specific. For example if one of our merchants is also in another network, and their Affiliates are trademark bidding on that other network, then it can and does directly impact our Affiliates, as well as AvantLink.

Our policy offers a simple solution to an issue that is giving a lot of web retailers a sour taste for Affiliate marketing. We default the policy in favor of the majority, but in the end it’s entirely up the merchant on whether or not they want to offer unrestricted PPC marketing. Gary M

By: Mark Silliman

Mark Silliman — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:47:43 +0000

Well I’d argue that quality affiliates are greatly affected by this as well. This type of activity makes our entire industry look “dirty” making it unappealing for new clients (directly affecting the bottom lines of quality affiliates). Also I feel that we have to defend that we are a legitimate information sources because the presumption is (by merchants) that most affiliates are junk or the one billionth coupon site … and sadly that’s fairly true.

The idea that this is impossible to track is far from the truth. Though I’d argue that Avantlink is making a sincere effort the real problem is that most affiliate channels made their fortune (in the past 5 years) off of coupon sites which are the core brand spammers.

So with that said it’s very inconvenient for most affiliate channels to correctly detect this type of spam. Though it’s the hard road to take I think the affiliate channel which clears up these problems will dominate the industry in the next few years.

With all this being said I do think that Avantlink’s got a great shot at taking on this challenge.

My advice to merchant is does the affiliate actually have content and could that content drive as much traffic as your receiving (lots of black hat affiliates have a “fake” blog but all the traffic is via black hat techniques)? If it doesn’t make sense, take a closer look.

Mark Silliman
Spadout.com