Amit, the post isn’t putting “the blame squarely on the affiliates”. My conclusion says: “Review your affiliate program agreement today, and make sure you are clear on your stance regarding trademark bidding” — if you allow – say it; if you don’t – state which terms affiliates must stay away from.

However, there’s a flipside to this whole issue. It is a fact that there are affiliates out there that do nothing but look for merchants with open (or non-existing) paid search bidding policies, but bid on trademarks alone.

Is it always bad to have an affiliate bidding on your name? No. I did say that “there can be exceptions”. Is it always bad to have an affiliate bidding on your URL (targeting those visitors that instead of typing in your ABCWebsite.com URL into their address bar, type it into a search engine’s search box)? Absolutely.

Yes, every merchant must have a program agreement where all dos and don’ts (especially the “don’ts”!) are clearly spelled out. Do they? Many don’t. Is that the main problem? One my conclude so. But in my opinion it is frequently simply being used as an an excuse to bid on trademarks. Should Lowes start an affiliate program tomorrow, and not clearly spell out that affiliates cannot bid on “Lowes” and “Lowes.com”, it would be very hard for anyone to even start making a coherent argument about the value added by affiliate PPC bidding on these terms.

If that was the case, then CJ won’t be asking merchants to consider alloing TM bidding by affiliates.

The following text is copied from a ABW forum post Good points from CJ this morning on working with PPC affiliates about the aforesaid CJ webinar.

2. If you are going to allow trademark bidding, do so in a way that allows competitive blocking. This means the merchant gets the top spot and your affiliates get to kick out competitors bidding on your TM. With this strategy in place you know that your chances of converting a sale will be better than just allowing your competition to steal your customer away.

3. Allowing trademark Coupon Searches helps customers find what they need when they know what they want. This doesn’t mean you have to post your coupons everywhere, this just means that someone is delivering what your customer wants when they type in “[your company name] coupon code”.

4. Google is only able to show one results per URL per search for particular keywords. This means that by allowing direct linking to your display URL will result in either you or your affiliate’s ad showing up for a search. If you communicate your terms at the beginning, then this could actually be a good thing:

Merchants have to be clear in their T&C about whether they allow TM bidding, if they allow direct linking. Not having a clear T&C and then blaming affiliates to be parasites isn’t fair either.