Remember my PPC Display URLs and Affiliate Direct Linking Are Interconnected post two months ago? In it — being guided by Google AdWords policy — I argued:

Permitting “direct linking” (or Direct-To-Merchant (DTM) paid search bidding), however, implies that affiliates are allowed to link their paid search ads (through their affiliate links, of course) right to your website.

Yesterday, however, we spotted the following affiliate ad on Bing:

This was an affiliate agreement violator and brand hijacker (as Halloween Mart prohibits paid search bidding on its trademarks, URL, and variations thereof), but, as it is obvious above, they are — or, at least, they may think they are — not as bad of a violator as some others. The “keyword” they are using is the merchant’s full URL. They are also using it (twice) in the ad copy. But when it comes to the display URL, they went away from the actual merchant’s URL, and added the word “store” (in)to it… Apparently, Bing doesn’t require the display URL (the website address that the searcher sees on a PPC ad) to match the domain of the destination URL (the page on which they land upon clicking the paid search ad).

Minutes after my tweet about the above situation, a well-known super affiliate and affiliate marketing advocate Scott Jangro tweeted:

Google started requiring for the display URL to match the landing page URL in early 2008 [more here]. Apparently, Bing still doesn’t.

Affiliate program managers must be aware of this tactic, and treat my Display URL and DTM Linking post in light of the above exception (at least, until this gets addressed by Bing).

Yesterday I have once again touched on the subject of affiliate compliance with rules, and how merchants are or aren’t policing it. As I wrote in my FeedFront article:

…to begin with, you want make sure you have an affiliate program agreement in place. Not to be confused with the affiliate network agreement, it is basically the contract between you and your affiliates. I won’t pause much on this here, but if you need a sample, I have one for you at www.amnavigator.com/TOS.html.

Now, just having that affiliate program agreement in place doesn’t safeguard you. It gives you grounds to enforce the rules.

If you don’t have the rules, there’s nothing to enforce… But even in the rules (or program “policies”) merchants are frequently confusing. Here’s an example I’ve caught just the other day:

The AdWords policy is:

The display URL in your ad must match the domain users will land on when they click on your ad. [emphasis mine]

Permitting “direct linking” (or Direct-To-Merchant (DTM) paid search bidding), however, implies that affiliates are allowed to link their paid search ads (through their affiliate links, of course) right to your website. If the use of merchant’s “display URL on any PPC engine is prohibited” (as in the above example) then there’s no way they can direct-link their PPC ad to you; and you want to mark that DTM field “No” (not “Yes”).

When, however, merchants (or affiliate program managers) word their agreements, policies, or rules, in ways which may point to their lack of knowledge about a particular field, rogue affiliates easily spot that. And then don’t be surprised about “violations”.

An affiliate has emailed me the following situation and question:

I’m fairly new at PPC, but I’ve already had some luck with it. A few days ago I started promoting [merchant name here]‘s program  on CJ. Sent over 150 clicks to them spending over $30 on it already, but haven’t had any sales yet. Their EPC range on CJ is $18-$24. Should I start worrying?

In a nutshell, the answer depends on a number of factors, but if you’re new at paid search, and already aren’t 100% sure that what you’re doing is right, start analyzing and tweaking things right away.

I’ve pulled up this particular merchant’s info, and here’s what I see:

It seems that you’re concerned because your current CPC (cost per click) is right around $0.20, and you see that the maximum you could expect from this program is $24.68 for every 100 clicks, but, more than likely, this number will be 30% lower, as over a longer period of time (3 months vs 7 days) this merchant’s program has been registering an EPC (earnings per 100 clicks, in this case) of $17.87. As mentioned above, your current situation may have good reasons for concern, but only if you aren’t 100% certain about the traffic you’re sending to them (how targeted is it? are you actively using negative keywords to sift off the folks you do not want?). Yes, (a) you’re already spending  quite a bit on each click (but that’s fine as long as the ROI is there), and (b) overall program’s EPC is like an average body temperature around the hospital, hence, not good grounds for basing your CPC decision on [more here]. Having said all of this, if your budget allows for it, and you’re certain that you’re sending highly targeted traffic to this merchant (i.e. the traffic that is meant to convert into a sale, and not merely to find out information on their product), it may be too early to jump to conclusions. The reason for this being that this particular merchant’s AOV (average order value), or average price tag seems to be in the vicinity of $400 (which, by the way, with their 14% commission rate, should convert into a good average payout), and higher ticket items generally take longer for the customer to decide.

I’ve analyzed return days distribution (or how many days it takes for the customer to complete the purchase) in two of the higher AOV affiliate programs that we manage, and here’s what I see:

I don’t know over what time period you’ve been sending those 150 clicks, and this particular program’s return days distribution may look even more different, but the above should give you at least some idea. It is also absolutely acceptable to request this information from the manager of this particular affiliate program. It’ll help you a lot in your analysis. So, I would definitely do it as a part of your analysis and tweaking.

If you’re a paid search expert reading this, and have something to add, expand on, or correct, please do chime in, and post your comments, ideas and suggestions below.

Trademark violations happen in multiple forms, but the more frequent ones are: bidding on trademarks in paid search campaigns and registering domain names with merchant’s trademarks in them. Both of these methods yield fairly easy money to violating affiliates, and neither of these will ever stop.

Also, just because you may have prohibited trademark use (in one form or another) in your affiliate program’s Terms of Service, doesn’t mean it’s not gonna happen in your program. It happens in every program out there, and if you do prohibit trademark bidding (or trademark use in domain names), you want to have good tools to police affiliate compliance with these rules.

Today I’d like to bring you 5 such tools:

1. iTrademarkBidding — This is a free, open source solution for monitoring trademark bidding. They “use proxies in most US states to monitor trademark bidding” on three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing. “The information is recorded every hour allowing you to know who was bidding on your keywords.”

2. Brandverity PoachMark – Developed by Andy Skalet and David Naffziger, graduates of University of Colorado at Boulder and MIT respectively, PoachMark has been built exclusively with one aim in mind — to meet the paid search compliance need. This excellent piece of software counters the techniques used by more sophisticated black hat affiliates (such as referrer laundering, geotargeting, dayparting and id obfuscation). BrandVerity also manages and maintains two important databases of rogue affiliates: PoachMark Pool and The Affiliate Watchlist.

3. SearchMonitor — The Search Monitor focuses “real-time competitive intelligence to monitor brand and trademark use, affiliate marketers for compliance, and competition on paid search, mobile search, organic search, local, social media, and shopping engines worldwide in every language.”  The Affiliate Monitor can be effectively used to police affiliate marketers for compliance with affiliate program Terms and Conditions, and not only with restrictions pertaining to keyword bidding. This tool also allows you to police direct linking ad copy rules, and keyword rank. With reporting you have choice of viewing it online or receiving email reports. 

4. AdGooroo Trademark Insight –  In the fashion very similar to that of the above-quoted tools, Trademark Insight provides 24/7 automated brand monitoring by identifying advertisers who are bidding on or using your brand terms in their ad copy. Each license enables merchants to monitor up to 200 variations of a single trademark on 8 search engines in 46 countries. You also have options to view copy and average position of competing ads and identify the ad servers and individual affiliates in infringement.

5. CitizenHawk — In case you are prohibiting affiliate utilization of your registered trademarks in their domain names, there are also tools to police cybersquatting. This particular one is a really good tool. Their unique technology “identifies instances of cybersquatting that infringe on a company’s trademark, sends notices of fraudulent activity to domain owners, interrupts the flow of money being paid to cybersquatters and automates legal action to get fraudulent sites stopped for good.”

The above isn’t a ranking of any sorts (just a list of the more robust tools available out there). If I have missed a tool that belongs here, please do let me know about it by using the “Comments” are below.

Nine months ago, when I blogged my 5-step advice for paid search affiliates, I wrote:

Use negative keywords (or keywords for which you do not want your ad to show in paid search results, as they are unlikely to convert into the desirable action)

Using negative keywords not only helps you improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) and quality score of your paid search campaigns, but also prevents ad impressions for irrelevant keyword combinations, and saves you the money wasted on undesirable clicks.

Well, it appears that today the process of compiling lists of negative keywords has become one step easier. 50 minutes ago WordStream announced the launch of “the world’s first” Negative Keyword Tool. The best part is that its completely free. Here’s the video on it:

Affiliate program managers and affiliates alike will love this. Thank you, WordStream!

Yesterday Google introduced a new split testing tool for paid search marketers that use AdWords to try — the AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) tool [see original announcement here].

Google’s below video explains how the only way of handling split tests in PPC marketing before was to conduct a “before and after analysis” where you would compare performance of one campaign to another.

The problem with this method was that even if your conversions increased you really wouldn’t know if that was because of the bid change or due to some other factor like a sudden increase in the demand for [the product/service you're selling].

With ACE you can test one campaign against another simultaneously, “without having to apply the bid change to all auctions for which your ad could appear”. You leave the original campaign up, and also set up an “experimental bid” campaign, split testing between the two, and seeing which one makes more business sense to carry on. Besides this basic scenario, there are other ways you can use the ACE, and if you’re serious about your paid search marketing with Google, it’s time to start experimenting.

The tool is now in its beta phase, and to request your access to it you need fill out this form.

A friend, and fellow affiliate marketer tweeted:

If you are looking for tool to monitor affiliate (and competitor) bidding on your trademark, AdGooroo does seem to have a free option offering a “24/7 monitoring of 6 search engines in 20 countries” with a “deep analysis of over 155 ad servers and affiliate networks” [more here].

You can open a free account with them if you want to monitor 1 trademark (which can be increased to 10 trademarks if you refer three friends — edit: as of January 2010, this offer is no longer valid, and they only offer free accounts for 1 trademark). Here’s what their website says about the monitoring for infringements by affiliates:

Sounds like a must have for merchants who need a tool to monitor trademark violations, as well as for affiliate program managers who operate programs which prohibit trademark bidding. I will play with it, and let you know how it works for me. Thanks for that tweet and email, Rehan!

While parasitism in affiliate marketing frequently being synonymized only with downloadable applications that intrude with the end user’s shopping experience with a purpose of facilitating cookie setting/swap on the customer’s machine, the term should really include everyone who is extracting wealth from merchants/advertisers without assisting them in any way to produce it. Trademark poaching is one of these cases.

Trademark poachers, or trademark violators, are affiliates that either exclusively or along with other keywords bid in their paid search campaigns on merchants’ trademarks, URL(s). as well as variations and misspellings of these. The sole purpose of such activity is to divert the trademark traffic to go through affiliate links/ads first. This sets an affiliate cookie on the end user’s machine, and should the latter place a sale/lead through within the cookie life duration, the trademark bidding affiliate will earn the commission on that sale/lead.

While there can be exceptions (e.g.: merchants with unknown brands, or those whose names consist of generic terms like “calendars”, for example), it is normally in the merchant’s best interest to restrict trademark bidding, and police it. While in case with “calendars”, Calendars.com should not restrict affiliates from bidding on key-phrases involving the world “calendars”, they should by all means prohibit bidding on their URL as a keyword (as they are doing now).

Many merchants are not doing this, and as a result, paying for something that naturally belongs to them in the first place.

Earlier this year Revenue magazine wrote:

Trademark poaching is attractive because of the low barrier to entry. For just the price of a PPC ad, publishers can quickly generate handsome commissions without the usual affiliate administration overhead, and reducing the steps from click to purchase increases the likelihood of a purchase.

One PPC affiliate, who asked not to be named, says there is a “pack of about 30″ PPC affiliates that closely monitor the list of new merchants at every network and “crank up campaigns on them all” in order to profit from this behavior.

This is true. It takes seconds to put together a paid search campaign, and multiple rogue affiliates are continuously taking advantage of merchant naivete (in keeping an open PPC policy) centering these campaigns on merchants’ trademarked terms and URLs only.

Review your affiliate program agreement today, and make sure you are clear on your stance regarding trademark bidding.

Earlier this morning, Roxana Patrichi of Avangate published a list of 150+ negative keywords for software selling AdWords campaigns. This reminded me of one of the questions that I was asked in a recent interview to Affilorama. I was asked what advice I would give to newbie affiliates that are getting involved in paid search. I believe that there are at least 5 things PPC affiliates must know at the outset:

1. Educate yourself thoroughly (a good place to start would be a book by Marshall and Todd called “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords”)
2. Remember to constantly test (watch your CTR and work on improving it on an ongoing basis)
3. Don’t rush (you can burn a lot of money overnight, take small steps until you really know what you’re doing)
4. Develop inventories of long-tail keywords (looking at things through the end user’s eyes and using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
5. Use negative keywords (or keywords for which you do not want your ad to show in paid search results, as they are unlikely to convert into the desirable action)

Below I am including a list of 90 negative keywords to help all kinds paid search affiliates. Let me stress that this is a basic list to start with. Affiliates want to develop such lists for each PPC campaign they run. Thorough negative keyword lists include hundreds of keywords.

While not all merchants may be willing to share their keyword inventories with affiliates, I believe that sharing the list of the negative keywords is a must. After all, if they burn themselves (and loose cash, with low or no conversion), it is the merchant, who they will eventually stop promoting, that will loose too. So if you are a merchant or an affiliate program manager reading this, compile your own list of negative keywords (the above one will help you get started quickly) and offer it to your affiliates.

It is always a pleasure to see affiliate networks adding new tools and functions for merchants to use. A month ago I blogged about a new technology by buy.at to help prevent the stealing of exclusive affiliate coupons [more here]. Today I’d like to draw merchants’ and affiliate networks’ attention to AvanLink.

For as long as I remember AvantLink, they have been advising merchants against affiliates’ paid search bidding on trademarks and domain name(s) which naturally belong to the merchant. They have been monitoring such affiliate behavior, and even prohibiting it in the network’s TOS. The affiliate network’s CEO and Founder, Scott Kalbach, writes:

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 [underlining mine].

In addition to the above policy, AvantLink has recently announced the launch of an additional tool for its merchants to use. In addition to the “default configuration” which “helps merchants, as well as AvantLink staff, maintain compliance with” the above-mentioned affiliate network’s TOS, the tool also allows AvantLink-based merchants to “monitor whatever additional keywords/phrases they want” [more here].

Kudos to AvanLink, and let’s hope more affiliate networks will borrow this idea.