An affiliate marketing program is a marketing strategy in which a brand partners with a third-party called publishers, or affiliates, to promote its products or services in exchange for a commission on sales.

In a recent webinar hosted by BrandVerity, David Iglesias, a seasoned professional from the sales team, delved into the strategies for safeguarding your brand on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This blog post will summarize the key online brand protection strategy tips from David's webinar, focusing on the prevalent tactics, examples of infringements, and recommendations for brand protection in the paid search landscape.

When allocating spend to paid search campaigns, marketers expect to expand their reach and acquire new customers to justify a return on spend for the channel. However, a disadvantage of paid search is that the channel’s payment model is based on clicks—a structure that creates a low barrier for entry to digital fraudsters and contributes to $1.4B dollars lost to affiliate marketing fraud annually.

Since the onset of economic uncertainties brought on by the global pandemic, marketers have been asked to optimize their program spend and reduce unnecessary expenditure. What classifies as unnecessary is the subject of heated debate. One thing everyone agrees on, however, is that you shouldn’t pay commissions to affiliates who don’t abide by your affiliate program rules and who aren’t driving incremental revenue.

With access to a near-infinite number of platforms and partners, and an ever evolving technology and regulatory landscape, a brand's need for a holistic compliance approach is paramount, something that ASDA is fully aware of. 

For marketing and legal teams in regulated industries, monitoring for compliance online is difficult and time-consuming. Manually monitoring thousands or even millions of pages across multiple affiliates, partners, and/or third-party sites is nearly impossible and leads to critical content being missed. Introducing BrandVerity’s automated Web Compliance solution, which empowers marketing and legal teams to ensure airtight brand protection and compliance of online content and offers. Our solution provides companies with a comprehensive and efficient way to identify content compliance risks and take action immediately.

As I write this, I’m working from home, as is the rest of the BrandVerity team. For some of us, that means juggling how to home school our kids during the workday. For others, it translates into having their dogs in their laps during video calls. All in all, though, we are a lucky group to be able to have jobs that enable us to work from home. Our gratitude goes out to those who are not able to do the same, yet are helping our communities function as normally as they can, from healthcare and hospital workers to those at our grocery stores and pharmacies.

You think a competitor is abusing your trademark in the copy of their ad. You’re a little rusty on Google Ads Trademark policy. You seem to recall something about how Google doesn’t allow trademarks in the ad text, but they can use them in the display URL. You go to the Google Ads support page that describes what is and what is not allowed, and by the end of reading it, you are more confused than you were before! Don’t worry! You are not alone. Many smart people have read and re-read Google’s policies on trademark and come away with more questions than answers.

When I speak with prospective customers about the benefits of our paid search monitoring solution, one thing I commonly hear is: “We don’t need automated software; we are already monitoring and remediating issues manually.” Another common refrain is: “Our agency handles all of that.”