The issue at the core of partner bidding is the lack of control that brands have to enforce rules and regulations regarding how resellers use their brand terms. This blog post will look at what harmful partner bidding most often looks like and begin to explain the options a brand has to protect against it. Future posts will go into more depth about industry specific types of problematic partner bidding and the steps that a brand can take to minimize the impact.

When it comes to brands that that both sell their own products and work through retail partners, issues surrounding brand bidding can be complex and confusing. While we have written about these issues before, both in our Report on Hotels, OTAs, and Paid Search and in a blog post we published in January, the fact of the matter is that there is no single answer or absolute best practice. On the one hand, resellers bidding on a brand’s terms allow that company’s products to dominate the search results and increase the chance of a sale. On the other hand, partner bidding may cut into profits and potentially harm your customers’ experience with your brand. Direct sales may be lost, customers could have negative experiences on your resellers’ sites, and resellers may even make false promises in their advertising.

As you may have seen, Google announced last Thursday that in late September they will be doing away with the option to disable close variant keyword matching on exact and phrase match keywords. In brief, marketers could previously target their ads to exact strings that people search for—or to particular phrases that people include in their searches. Now, the only option is to also target what Google calls “misspellings, singulars/plurals, acronyms, abbreviations, accents and stemmings,” when using exact and phrase match. TechCrunch offered a good overview of the change shortly after it was announced. Generally, the announcement has garnered some negative reactions among marketers as illustrated in this Marketing Land post, which highlights various responses to the new policy.

Ginny Marvin recently posted a fascinating article over on Search Engine Land. Her piece focuses on the issues that arise when users search for customer support on Google and Bing. In particular, it deals with searches where people are looking for customer support from specific brands.

Everyone enjoys being recognized for the work they do, and here at BrandVerity we’re no different! We’re thrilled to be one of ABestWeb’s “Best Of’s” for 2013, taking home the prize for “Best Affiliate Tool.” Some excellent technology services were nominated, so we were honored to be chosen.

We were recently featured in a piece on the CPC Strategy blog! The post focuses on the third-party trademark abuse that we find in paid search, explaining some of the negative impacts this has on retail brands (and others).

We’re very excited to add Product Listing Ad monitoring as a complimentary new tool for our clients! All of our paid search monitoring clients now have access to this new set of reports that we've developed specifically for monitoring Product Listing Ads (PLAs). We hope that this tool will provide you with much-needed visibility into PLAs, helping you make more informed decisions about your campaigns.

I recently had the misfortune of missing out on AM Days London. I was originally preparing to speak on a panel entitled "Crossing the Pond: Growing Affiliate Programs in Europe vs. U.S.", but ran into a comedy of errors at the airport (weather, mechanical issues, customer service breakdowns) that ultimately prevented me from going.

Earlier this week, Mozilla launched the latest version of Firefox. The news got plenty of people (including me) excited about the updated look, feel and features of version 29.

You may have heard about the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability in the news. This particular vulnerability affected (and may still affect) approximately 70% of the websites on the Internet, BrandVerity included.