Fighting brand bidding: what advertisers need to know

Advertisers: get informed about brand bidding in affiliate marketing – learn how to spot it, how to stop it and how to protect your branded keywords.

Brand bidding in affiliate marketing refers to the malicious practice where publishers bid on an advertiser’s branded keywords for their own search engine advertising campaigns. Why should this concern advertisers? There are a number of important reasons why:  

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1. Cannibalisation of organic traffic

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If a user types in a store’s brand name, they are already motivated to buy from that brand directly. Affiliates who use brand bidding on these keywords can eat up a portion of this organic traffic. This results in the loss of valuable clicks and leads for the brand, the CR goes down, as well as the overall effectiveness of an advertiser’s own campaigns.

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2. Increased ad costs

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Publishers competing to bid on brand names forces the cost to keep the top ad positions to increase. This leads to sky-rocketing ad investments for the advertiser to keep their top position. Higher CPCs, increased competition and lower organic traffic can totally offset the revenue generated from affiliate sales, reducing a business’s overall profitability.

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3. Risks to brand reputation 

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When brand-bidding publishers begin to use an advertiser’s branded keywords, the advertiser loses control over how their brand is represented online. This causes certain challenges with ensuring that the brand is being portrayed accurately and aligned with the advertiser’s strategies.

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What can advertisers do to fight brand bidding? 

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First and foremost, once an advertiser launches an affiliate program, it is extremely important to introduce anti-brand bidding rules into the program’s terms and conditions. 

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Advertisers need to add strict guidelines for partners who engage in brand bidding. Unfortunately, this might not be enough, since the most fundamental problem with brand bidding is the difficulty in detecting every single case of this type of fraud. 

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Here’s an example: your company operates worldwide. Your in-house affiliate manager would have to use a VPN to manually check each and every country you operate in, searching your own branded keywords to try to catch out any fraudulent publisher campaigns. And, what if there were two and more languages spoken in the same country? Bearing in mind the fact that the largest amount of fraud is committed at night and from different device types, this adds up to a nightmare trying to combat brand bidding manually.  

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Thankfully, automated solutions like Brand Auditor are here to help.

A tool for brand auditing: an automated solution for combatting brand bidding

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Admitad’s automated anti-brand bidding tool, is available to all advertisers on our network. The tool offers 24/7 monitoring of up to 10 branded keywords across multiple GEOs, in multiple languages and across several device types. 

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Whenever and wherever brand bidding is detected, the system automatically  alerts the advertiser and takes screenshots of the ad and the landing page where the ad leads. This enables brand-bidding affiliates to be caught, the threats from their actions immediately blocked, and any payments for fake leads and fraudulent sales to be declined. The advertiser’s marketing budgets remain safe – reserved only for trusted publishers.

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Any affiliate program launched in Admitad can be added to the tool monitoring list for free – ensuring our advertisers’ traffic is safe and fair. 

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Key features of the tool:

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Unparalleled reach: in-depth, detailed threat-identification searches across all device types, search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), geographies and languages.

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Real-time reporting: instant alerts for all potential threats and granular, transparent reporting with high-fidelity, same-day data.

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Automatic evidence collection and reaction: screenshots and tracking links are collected and formatted into ready-to-submit complaint templates. All information is passed over to our traffic quality control team, the advertiser’s account manager as well as to the publisher who has violated the rules, with the message that a fraudulent action has been detected and further measures are to be taken by the advertiser. 

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The tool protects you from: 

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Use the tool to protect your brand image and advertising budget

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Brand bidding in affiliate marketing can be a sensitive topic, as it raises concerns for both brands and affiliates. Advertisers should be concerned about affiliates cannibalising their own paid search efforts, potentially driving up advertising costs. Publishers, on the other hand, need to be cautious not to infringe on branded trademarks or engage in unethical practices that may damage a brand’s reputation.

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It’s important for affiliates to understand a brand’s policies regarding brand bidding and follow any guidelines or restrictions set by the advertiser. Additionally, publishers should strive to create value-added content and build trust with their audience to ensure a positive and mutually-beneficial relationship with the brands they promote. 

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To find out more about the tool for brand auditing, and to add your affiliate program to its monitoring list, please consult your account manager or write to support@admitad.com.