One of the advantages of running paid search monitoring on a large scale is that you occasionally uncover valuable data by accident. Kick up enough dust, and sometimes it settles in an interesting, unexpected way.

After our initial findings last Friday, we uncovered some more interesting behavior in the Yahoo toolbar.

For companies looking to engineer some extra (perhaps non-organic) traffic, toolbars are a pretty clever strategy. They take much less investment than full-fledged web browsers, but afford options such as setting the user’s default search engine. Those options can help companies work their way into users’ browsing activity.

After observing the Super Bowl trademark be subjected to potential misuse and misrepresentation by advertisers, we decided to look into the paid search surrounding another monumental event: the Oscars.

Brands and agencies do it, as do bars and restaurants, but do your affiliates take full advantage of the price anchoring effect when creating a contextual environment that upsells products on their websites?

For decades, the big game has been television advertising’s darling. It draws in record or near-record ratings each year. That makes it a stage in high demand—brands are even willing to spend $4 million for 30 seconds on screen.

Credit: Robert Scoble

Yesterday, Google concluded a 6-year legal contest with the Australian government’s consumer protection agency, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The Australian High Court ruled in favor of Google, who had argued that it was not responsible for the messages in the ads placed by advertisers on its results pages.

For more than a decade, coupon codes have served online marketers rather well. They’re an excellent arrow in the quiver, capable of accomplishing a variety of goals—gaining new customers, re-engaging loyal ones, clearing inventory and much more.

What an eye-opening few days! So many great people and so many interesting stories from all sides of Affiliate Marketing. When you get the chance to step back for a moment, you can really start to appreciate how sophisticated our industry is.

We just identified a new wrinkle in the mobile cramming scam we discovered last June. For a quick refresher, this is a technique Black Hat affiliates use to pose as legitimate coupon sites and trick users into entering their mobile numbers – thus entering them into a “subscription” service that ends up billing them monthly.