The 2021 holiday shopping season is projected to drive an incremental 9% in US retail sales year over year to reach $1.12 trillion—the strongest growth rate since 1999. This surge in holiday spend will spread across both brick and mortar and ecommerce driven by consumers' increase in discretionary income amidst ongoing supply chain issues. Marketers can easily take advantage of this revenue opportunity by maximizing the value of their in-person and digital presence through the partner channel—optimization that requires brand safety to be effective.
When it comes to leveraging BrandVerity to safeguard holiday strategies from nefarious affiliate activity, consider these best practices:
- Ensure that you are monitoring the most relevant keywords. Audit your monitored keywords to be sure that they represent the most up-to-date trends of how consumers search for your brand online. Make sure to also include common misspellings or variations of your brand name that might be targeted by bad actors to avoid detection.
- Identify holiday-specific promotional language to monitor. With an influx of promotional messaging in the channel, it’s important to understand which affiliate partners are permitted to promote in their ad copy language. For example, outdated or expired offers or incorrect coupon promises should be input into BrandVerity’s search filter criteria for an added layer of safety.
- Document your best practice. If other members of your team will be accountable for remediating fraud identified by BrandVerity, ensure that everyone is clear on steps for enforcing violations. For example, if the platform detects a bad actor during the holidays, does the fraudster get an initial warning or are they immediately removed from the program? Does the remediation process differ for bidding and direct link hijacking?
- Implement regular check-ins. While it’s important to log into BrandVerity regularly to remediate detected violations, we recommend increasing logins during the holiday season when traffic spikes. While BrandVerity sends daily summary emails of violations found, it’s important to also review the full scope of data reported in-app during this busy season.
- Gain an understanding of average activity. If you are familiar with what is “normal” for your brand, it helps you recognize abnormal paid search affiliate activity more quickly, which expedites time-to-fraud resolution.
Interested in implementing BrandVerity’s affiliate paid search monitoring for the holiday season and beyond? Check out our free solution to get started.
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