The average hotel brand is losing out on direct web traffic to the tune of about 26,500 visitors each month. This can lead to a real loss in revenue as those bookings go elsewhere.

On July 1, Google officially migrated all accounts to Upgraded URLs. While Google’s descriptions of the new feature have primarily focused on the simplification of tracking templates and decrease in ad downtime, we were intrigued to see if the changes might spill over and affect affiliates’ ability to hijack paid search ads.

We’ve been crunching the numbers. Well, technically Sam has been crunching the numbers…but either way we’re excited to make this announcement!

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced they would be taking over AOL Search and shifting some parts of its advertising work onto both AOL and AppNexus, an online advertising company.

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you’ll know that here at BrandVerity, we’ve been thinking a lot lately about regulations and disclosures--particularly with regard to the FTC and its take on affiliate marketing. Today we’re happy to have a post by our own Mason Smith about a new, somewhat concerning development, in this field: Bitly’s announcement that they are testing a new partnership with VigLink. This news was a hot topic of conversation at AM Days a few weeks ago and we thought it would be of particular interest to our readers. Mason, take it away!

The recent announcement that Bitly is testing a partnership with VigLink presents interesting questions for companies with affiliate programs. For those who haven't heard, Bitly is testing out a partnership with Viglink that transforms their shortened links into Viglink affiliate links. In other words, if someone shortens a link to an ecommerce site using Bitly, that shortened link is now an affiliate link. Any clicks on that Bitly link will be routed and monetized through Viglink’s platform.

On April 16th, Bing and Yahoo announced a change to their longstanding search partnership. Search Engine Land posted an immediate follow-up to the announcement with useful details and analysis, and followed up with an update last week that provided more information.

As you probably know by now, here at BrandVerity, we don’t have a lot of patience for malware and adware, particularly when advertisers bundle it with free versions of popular software. We were thus quite pleased when Google recently announced some changes to how they treat download sites in Paid Search.

But if we’re already lacking in patience for the download sites who target average web users, we have even less for sites that attempt to take advantage of already vulnerable users.

Since we’re still fresh off of a wonderful few days in San Francisco at AM Days, I wanted to take the opportunity to share the slides and recap the presentation I delivered at the event. I thought this could be a useful reference—whether you were able to attend the talk or not. For those of you that couldn’t be there, I’ve provided a synopsis of my points below (along with my slides). You can also feel free to connect with me over LinkedIn or send BrandVerity a note!

A lot of the time, detecting potential bad actors in the affiliate world can be hard: these guys are smart, and it’s in their best interest to hide (and hide well) from brands, affiliate managers, and honest affiliates.

But sometimes they come right to you.

We’ve been hearing recently that someone had been aggressively marketing an adware platform to numerous people in the affiliate industry--including, ironically, a lot of folks who work on the front lines of affiliate compliance and who have little patience for adware.

Last week I was fortunate enough to attend my first ever Affiliate Management Days conference in San Francisco. I was thrilled to be there—everything from the location (I don’t get to visit the bay area enough!) to the expert-level content created a positive atmosphere for networking and learning. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience, I wanted to share some of the key themes and moments that I remember. I hope this recap will prove useful for you—whether you were at the conference or not!