However, there are times where clients of mine have agreed to a select few affiliates to bid against their brand and it is something I have been asked about a number of times since.

If you are unsure of the reasoning behind the closed brand bidding group, the logic is that by allowing a small number of top performing affiliates to gain extra commissions from the merchants brand it allows these affiliates to bid broader on more generic keywords or pay a higher CPC to send increased traffic and sales the merchants way.

Due to the change in trademark policy on keywords in Google, this might in some cases make more sense in terms of supporting brand protection, especially in higher CPC markets with more competition. But separate from this issue, I find the affiliate brand bidding argument extremely weak on the whole. What irritates me more than anything about this concept is often the lack of real thought gone into it like most marketing or business decisions should have.

In using a closed group of brand bidders the merchants aim is ultimately to increase their traffic, conversions or revenue (or whatever else the goal might be) by effectively paying the affiliate additional commissions, which does make sense. That’s fine.

But like any marketing decision for this to be measured accurately in terms of return and performance the merchant needs to know -

• The increase in extra traffic, conversions, revenue (the end goal)
• The amount of extra cost/commission paid to the brand bidders
• Any other extra cost involved (time, tracking, management whatever)

So Why Is This So Often Flawed?

• Ignorance – Very often, none of the above are even properly considered let alone set up to be tracked and measured accurately to be able to determine the performance

• Trust In Tracking & Affiliates – Tracking and measuring increases from the data can be inherently difficult to gauge anyway due to the number of factors involved. But even more so with a closed group the merchant needs to be completely sure that tracking is accurate because quite feasibly an affiliate can set it up however they wish. How can you be sure that every branded advert is being tracked separately? You can’t.

• Brand Ownership – Merchants are allowing affiliates to be the face of their brand. They will need to dedicate some time to monitor and police the ads and make sure they are representing their brand accurately. Also, if there are many adverts against the said brand, this can equally confuse searchers.

• Lack of Control – For large scale brands there are huge variances in brand related traffic that cannot always be predicted or controlled – meaning on occasions affiliates could all of a sudden receive a huge amount of commissions direct from the brand without providing extra in return.

• Higher CPC – If the merchant is also running a branded PPC advert, what extra cost are will they now be paying due to the increased competition from their own affiliates?

So Why Do We Still See The Closed Group Brand Bidding Model?

There are numerous reasons from bad advice from affiliate managers to pressure to hit targets. However in some cases I have found that marketeers actually embrace the lack of transparency that affiliate brand bidding provides. That may sound strange, but there is a sweeping under the carpet mentality sometimes.

It means they can reach their targets without seeming to pay a higher cost to do it. It’s easier to hide marketing expense in what can be viewed as just improved affiliate sales by allowing affiliates to syphon from their own brand than actually just paying out a higher CPA/commission. There can be a blissful ignorance in gaining more sales using this method (at least more perceived sales) and far from enough thought or consideration which is scary.

Conclusion

A much more transparent method is to simply agree to pay a higher CPA or commission to the select top performing affiliates because this is effectively what the affiliate brand bidding concept is attempting to do. In a roundabout kind of way. However, this is much easier to budget, track and measure and offers the same basic premise of more money for more of whatever the said business goal is. Working closely with the affiliate and providing extra offers or discounts is also a great option.

Marketeers will still have the same overriding issue of measuring performance of what extra they are receiving against the extra outlay of cost – but it comes with much greater transparency and control. My advice would be, if you want to push affiliates and really get the most out of them and your campaign, don’t hide your true cost in a closed brand bidding group.

Do you have any arguments for a brand bidding group? I would be interested in hearing any. :)

There are a number of tricks I have seen used to bend completely flaunt many affiliate programs terms & policies. One of the most common PPC policies is to disallow affiliates from bidding against merchant brand terms, as the merchant will generally get that sale 99% of the time anyway not having to pay a premium to an affiliate for it. From the other side, obviously it makes sense for an affiliate to bid against brand as it cuts away the hard work of finding a niche as & they know it will convert. It’s a low hanging fruit.

Another popular affiliate network policy is to ban affiliates from sending traffic direct to a merchants site because the merchant or ad agency are already running a paid search campaign, the merchant does not trust affiliates to uphold their ‘brand image’ within adverts or perhaps for a variety of other reasons.

So, how do affiliates bypass these rules, working within the ad platforms own system while keeping under the radar of the merchant, the affiliate network and perhaps an ad agency keeping an eye on the SERPS? The price of getting caught might be a loss of commissions, getting kicked off the affiliate program or even the network all together.

Let’s look at some of the methods used -

1) Bidding At Certain Times – Brand bidding at certain times of the day or week when they know there is less chance of someone in-house, agency or affiliate network seeing the offending adverts. Evenings & weekends are the obvious choices or a couple of minutes here and there will often go unnoticed. Advertisers don’t even have to be at their computer to do this with Google kindly providing ad scheduling.

2) Geo-targeting – Geo-targeting of smaller individual locations or those where the merchant, their agency or affiliate network are not based. Advertisers can custom geo-target away from those areas, again thanks to Googles ever increasing Adwords tools inventory.

3) IP Exclusion – As Google explains “refine your targeting by preventing specific Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from seeing your ads”. Find out the IP of those you don’t want to see your ad and ban them so they can’t see your advert. Now that is naughty.

4) Advert Tricks – This is pretty sneaky & I have seen this more than you might think. This only happens if the merchant is running their own adverts against their own branded terms. The affiliate simply copies the merchants advert EXACTLY and bids higher to gain a higher ad rank that will replace the merchants own advert. At a glance the merchant will believe their advert is still running, although obviously it’s that of the affiliates. If the merchant digs a little deeper and views the destination url the affiliate might get spotted, but this method is generally used intermittently. If the merchant/ad agency notices they are no longer receiving clicks for there core keywords it will raise suspicion – so this is often used with 1, 2 & 5.

5) Masking Affiliate Urls – I have heard of software from some of the affiliate networks that claim to detect brand bidders by scraping the search engines and monitoring ad urls. (Although this is of course, depending on whether this detection system is not blocked by either 2 or 3 above in the first place). How do naughty affiliates attempt to protect themselves so their affiliate url is not spotted in adverts immediately? Well, by masking the url & affiliate ID within a url redirect. The likes of Tinyurl make this very easy for anyone. In fact, the affiliate might be using multiple redirects to make it a little harder again to be identified without proper investigation that might confuse the average merchant or online marketer.

6) Sending Traffic To A Different Domain – This is not rocket science. This can even be accomplished without setting up redirects, just a little understanding and knowledge of how the automatic and manual ad approvals work at the search engines. Advertisers can take advantage of the time between automatic approval and a manual review, but it’s actually even simpler for affiliates to trick the system after the manual review period.

As an example, lets say an affiliate wants the advert display url to be affiliatename.com, but they want to send traffic direct to a different domain, merchantssite.com. By playing nice at first, affiliates can simply set up their advert with the same display url and destination url to affiliatename.com. The affiliate can allow their advert to go through manual approval. It takes roughly 48hrs (in the week) for the advert to pass through manual approval in Adwords (ads can even be paused during this period) before the affiliate can whip in a keyword level url for the real destination they want to send traffic to. Keyword level urls take precedence over ad level urls and they do not go through manual approval like adverts do.

Another method that is frequently used to get past the one display url per SERP policy from the search engines is to simply send traffic to affiliatename.com and after the manual approval throw in a server side redirect over to the site of choice. That way the advert has not been amended and will not get manually reviewed again.

7) Using Broad Match To Bypass Trademarks – Here in the UK, businesses can protect their trademark brand names in both adverts and keywords on Google by submitting an application. While this method can be very effective for some brands, it can also sometimes be bypassed by the use of broad match. Take the well known car company ‘Land Rover’ as an example. For sometime they protected their band online on Google and hence the keyword ‘Land Rover’ was a trademarked term and would not display ads when used as a keyword. An easy way to get around this was simply having the keyword ‘Rover Land’ on broad match and sure enough it would trigger the advert against a search for ‘Land Rover’. It can be as simple as that. So while trademarking can work great for some businesses, it can easily be bypassed for others.

These are just some examples of blackhat PPC in the affiliate marketing space. All of the above tricks can be spotted if you know what you are doing. The ad preview tool goes a long way to help, but is by no means full proof.

So if you’re a merchant, how sure are you that your PPC affiliates are playing nice?

So along with the new Google hot trends report and analysing the top peformers within the affiliate programs, what other tools are available? I have put together a list of tools below that can help inspire & provide ideas to identify trends, potential niches or opportunities that could provide decent traffic and monetisation opportunities for a dedicated blog or site.

Search Engines -

• Google Trends
  
• Google Hot Trends – US only. Replaces the old Google Zeitgeist.
• Yahoo Buzz – The days top 20 overall searches.
• MSN Hotlist – The days top 20 overall searches.
• AOL Hot Searches – Latest top searches with categories.
• Ask Top Searches – Top overall searches and movers.
• Lycos Top 50 – Just that.
• Dogpile – Not great.
• Search.com – Top 1000 searches.
• Metacrawler – Most popular search queries with categories.

Blog Sites -

• Technorati Most Popular – Top searches, blogs and videos.
• Ice Rocket Blog Trends – Top movies & news too.

Shopping Sites / Products -

• Ebay – List of top searches on Ebay.
• Kelkoo – Kelkoos most popular, not great.
• ShopZilla – As above, not great.
• Amazon Bestsellers – Bestsellers by category.
• Amazon Movers N Shakers – Whats hot or not anymore.
• Amazon Hot Future Releases – What should be hot.

News Sites -

• NY Times – Most popular search phrases.
• BBC – Top searches & fastest movers.
• BBC Celebdaq – Highlights hot celebs.
• Wall Street Journal – Most viewed / E-mailed.

Others -

• Alexa Top Sites
• Alexa Movers N Shakers
• Jupiter Research Most Popular – Inc most popular searches.
• Touch Local Popular Searches

Can you add to the list?

Hat tip to the Search Anyway blog, it was about time I spoke a little more about affiliate marketing.

“For example, if site A advertises domain.com in Google’s AdWords. And also, site B advertises domain.co.uk in Google’s AdWords. They both are bidding on the same keywords. In this case, only one of the two ads should be displayed according to Google’s affiliate policy.”

AdwordsAdvisor2 explains -

“Under our affiliate policy, the .com and the .co.uk will be considered the same domain, so they should not both show ads at the same time. On a search where more than one ad with the same domain is available in the auction, we will show whichever one would have the highest position. There is no bidding competition between the same domain ads, so it should not effect what your actual CPC is on that search.”

Sounds great in theory right? But realistically its pretty much bullcrap. Lets take a quick look under a search for MacDonald Hotels -

MacDonaldhotels.co.uk
MacDonaldhotels.com
MacDonald-hotels.co.uk
MacDonald-hotels.com

Only one of the above domains might be stopped from serving in an advert editorial review, that is the MacDonald-hotels.com url. The advert will run to start with as shown in the above pic, but it forwards directly onto MacDonald-hotels.co.uk (where as the others do not). This is against Googles guidelines and would probably be picked up on when reviewed.

But the rest?. You are having a laugh.

It’s Shoemoney at his ‘no holding back’ best, answering some off the wall questions not just about seo and affiliate marketing, but also some interesting experiences with his own pay per click (ppc) advertising campaigns.

Check it out.

If you are not already familiar with Shoemoney, he’s one of the most interesting sem’s around at the moment. The show will feature guest PepperjamSearch who run huge ppc campaigns over in the states.

PPC arbitrage is best explained as affiliates who run pay per click campaigns to send traffic to a website or a seperate landing page with content ads or sometimes via an affilaite program. The target is basically to make commission on the content ads or sales that convert as per a normal affiliate campaign. The success or profit of these campaigns is the difference between the amount that is spent on ppc to that which is generated from the commission.

Basically what most shopping sites like ShopZilla and Shopping.com do anyway…

Dont miss it on Webmaster radio.