Outside of the typical affiliate scenarios, there are plenty of other cases where marketing partnerships can run into brand bidding issues. Whether it's hotels and OTAs, product manufacturers and retailers, or brands and franchisees, there's really no perfect answer. Some brands may welcome it as a means of dominating the search results—others might consider a form of brand poaching. Regardless, I figured I'd call attention to a new example of partner bidding that I noticed over the weekend.
Earlier this year, the FTC released an update to its .Com Disclosure Guidelines. The document expanded the applicability of the original guidelines to new marketing channels such as blogs and social media, and has some interesting implications for the affiliate marketing industry. We interviewed Eric Goldman about these implications. And more recently, industry veteran Tricia Meyer wrote a piece in ReveNews where she identified affiliate managers as the party that's primarily responsible for affiliate disclosure.
Online merchants were promoting deals in full force earlier this week, leading to a record high for Cyber Monday sales. That uptick should provide many eCommerce companies with a significant holiday boost. But at the same time, the increase in demand carried some questionable (and potentially costly) affiliate behavior with it.
The holiday shopping season can be a great boost for merchants, but it's not without its compliance challenges. Because of the tremendous uptick in demand, affiliates have more incentive to employ non-compliant tactics. Furthermore, since affiliates know that merchants' marketing teams will be swamped, they might be expecting to get away with such violations.
Blackhat affiliates frequently come up with new tactics for driving traffic. While the specific details of these tactics may vary, they're all based on similar concepts: brand imitation, misrepresentation, or other attempts to confuse customers. During the course of our brand monitoring, we catch a wide variety of affiliate abuse—from ad hijacking to the republishing of exclusive coupon codes.
Whenever we come across particularly suspicious-looking ads in the course of our monitoring, we flag them for investigation. These ads often turn out to be affiliates cloaking their links, laundering their referers, or running a questionable script on their page.
How is PPC arbitrage similar to Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon? It may sound like the setup to a bad joke, but here's the point I'm hinting at: PPC arbitrage can produce multiple layers of removal from the user's intended destination. Arbitrage can essentially take a user from intermediary to intermediary, potentially without ever resolving on a landing page with any useful content.
Affiliates who violate their programs' PPC policies are always trying new ways to hide. One of the most common tactics employed by ad hijacking affiliates(who display the brand's domain in their ad, pass the user through their affiliate link, and then send the user directly over to the brand's site) is to redirect through disposable URLs or front sites. This enables them to hide their HTTP referrer, preventing the true source of the traffic from showing up in the affiliate manager's reporting tool.
As we've learned from a number of investigations in the past, popular branded searches can often become the target of search arbitrage or other brand bidding schemes. Advertisers choose to poach these terms because they're searched frequently, relatively cheap to bid on, and associated with a trusted brand (thereby easing users' skepticism and luring them in).
When it comes to brand bidding and trademark abuse, the breaking stories often center around new schemes and tactics. But today we have some more positive news. 5earch.com no longer seems to be actively engaging in search arbitrage. And furthermore, the site doesn't seem to be active at all anymore.
