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.

…at least to a degree (and this is good to see).

Back in May of this year when Google Suggest got links to the main/official websites added to the lists of suggested search phrases, I am pretty positive they did not have affiliate marketing in mind. The feature was certainly mainly geared towards to the end users, but it appears to help merchants prevent affiliates (as well as competitors) from poaching their trademarks through Google AdWords.

For example, if before May 2009 we searched Google for “Cabelas”, we’d get the following suggested key(words)/(phrases) shown to us:

Now the suggestions look as follows:

From the above image, it is obvious that Google Suggest puts the original website on the very top position, and all paid search ads (which are bidding on the keyword in the search field) on the bottom of the list. Ideally, for the purposes of preventing trademark poaching on this level, paid ads should have been excluded altogether. But since, as stated at the outset, trademark poaching was unlikely the primary concern of Google, it’s good to see that PPC ads are at least pushed down to the very bottom.

On May 14, Google announced an adjustment to their “trademark policy in the U.S.” which has been changed “to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text.” The reasoning behind loosening up on trademarks was reported in light of aiming “to improve ad quality and user experience.” Just as generic newspaper ads, which do not communicate specifically what brand product they are advertising/selling, carry little value for the reader, so Google believes it is with paid search ads which cannot list the exact brands they are associated with. More on Google AdWords official blog.

As Matt McDougall (aka @sinotechian) has pointed out “this brings Google’s policies in line with those of Yahoo, which allows trademarks to be used in text ads with similar restrictions” [source].

Meghan Keane (@keanesian on Twitter) believes that this change “is likely to spark more lawsuits against Google” as not only companies are now able to directly mention the brands that they sell “but also, they can refer to their competitors, and bid on key words so that their ads show up first on searches for their competition’s products” [more here]. McDougall, in his turn, wrote that whether Google’s advertisers and partners are going to love or hate this decision, “Google should benefit from the sale of more relevant – and more expensive advertising.”

But what implications does this change have for the affiliate marketing channel?

Before the change, brand name owners had to specify to Google which affiliates may reference their trademarks in their ad text, while others couldn’t. Now, on the other hand, any affiliate “who sells a brand on its website can use that brand name in the text of their Google ads.” The “cumbersome white-listing process” has now been deleted from the procedural sequence of getting an authorization to use a trademark in the ad text [source].

Is this a good change for affiliates? It definitely is. Obviously the change is going to have a positive effect on affiliate CTR’s, and revenues.

What about merchants that run affiliate programs? Should they prohibit using their trademarks in the ad texts, or should they have an open policy for affiliates (because their competitors are likely to take advantage of this change as well)? These questions leave us with some food for thought.