paid search affiliates

Why Affiliate Commission Cuts Are a Bad Way to Fight Violations

No week passes by without a news that an advertiser is either contemplating, or has already implemented a commission/payout drop as a way to penalize violating affiliates. Bad idea! There are at least three considerations that are worth spelling out in this regard: I. Non-Preventive Mechanism Lowering the violator’s commission rate […]

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Google AdWords Upgraded URLs and DTM Affiliate Links

If you are a paid search affiliate who earns money via DTM linking*, you have noticed the following alert in your Google AdWords account lately: *For those not familiar with the lingo, in affiliate marketing “DTM linking” stands for direct-to-merchant linking of an affiliate’s paid search ad whereby the affiliate’s

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Lori Weiman of The Search Monitor on Affiliate Paid Search Compliance

Last week The Search Monitor, creators of the Affiliate Monitor tool, announced: The Search Monitor analyzed the compliance level of all affiliates found advertising across The Search Monitor community to create a snapshot of affiliate behavior. The analysis found that 71% of affiliates using paid search are following the program

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Is Affiliate Marketing Undergoing a Kind of "Darwinism"?

Not too long ago an interesting piece appeared in MediaPost’s weekly Performance Insider. It was authored by Peter Klein and entitled Online Darwinism And The Evolution of Performance Marketing. Klein suggested that “as the performance marketing industry matures, and as brands seek more sophisticated and legitimate agencies and affiliates to

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Can Affiliate Programs Exist Alongside Paid Search Marketing?

<!”If a merchant is running their own paid search campaigns, and also has an affiliate program, how can they ensure that the latter doesn’t cannibalize but compliment the other?” — this is the question that nearly every merchant wonders a few months into running their affiliate program. Some end up

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Bing Allows Anything for Display URL?

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

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PPC Display URLs and Affiliate Direct Linking Interconnected

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

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5 Tools to Police Affiliates Violating Trademark Restrictions

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

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