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Affiliate marketing is a popular and reliable way of generating leads for your business. Companies spend more than $8 billion on affiliate marketing in the US alone, and at least $17 billion globally. But the industry is not without its risks. Many business owners lose money due to shady practices like transaction fraud or brand bidding.
What Is Brand Bidding?
In simple terms, brand bidding is targeting your branded keywords by a third party. Unscrupulous affiliates, search arbitrage companies and online marketing agencies often use brand bidding to create fake competition, inflating your campaign budget and making you pay for what is essentially your organic traffic.
Companies that rely on affiliate marketing to promote their products and services generally forbid affiliate website owners to use branded words in paid search. But some affiliates do that and hide their actions using various tactics.
Ad hijacking is a specific type of brand bidding done by affiliate fraudsters. They create ads that duplicate your content and outbid you during a CPC auction.
How To Prevent Affiliate Marketers From Brand Bidding
Your contract should specify the keywords that should be excluded from the affiliate marketing campaign. Having a registered trademark also helps in legal matters. However, you have to catch the affiliate red-handed to prove that they are lowering your sales by defrauding you.
No one can successfully monitor the campaign 24/7, especially if they are partnering with multiple affiliates. The fraud can go on for a long time, with perpetrators using smart tactics like temporary restriction (dayparting), typos, geo-targeting outside your location, dynamic redirecting and cloaking.
Thankfully, modern AI-powered tools like BluePear can monitor your affiliates for your and detect fraud while reducing the risks of false-positives that often come from misrepresenting the behavioral factors.
BluePear protects your lead generation budget and revenue by constantly tracking multiple affiliate campaigns across different devices, regions and search engine optimization strategies.
When the AI detects possible fraud, the system generates a report that includes ad screenshots and publisher IDs which will help you determine whether the affiliate is trying to cheat you.
BluePear creates reliable reports and collects enough proof so you can win compliance disputes, and ensure that your branded keywords are not being targeted. No more unearned commissions to shady affiliates.
Using BluePear is much cheaper and convenient compared to the risks of increased CPC, affiliate commissions and partial revenue loss due to the actions of unscrupulous affiliates. It's easy to use and can be set up by a person with limited experience thanks to its powerful AI. All you need is a list of branded keywords. Other options are self-explanatory and include geo-targeting and monitoring frequency.
What Can Happen If You Don't Protect Yourself From Brand Bidding?
The click through rate will drop. Artificially boosted competition reduces the traffic that comes to your e-store or a landing page. This leads to revenue loss.
The cost-per-click will be through the roof. Every click now costs a lot more, making you overpay for your advertising.
Affiliate ads and other content can mislead your customers. Shady affiliates can make exaggerated or even illegal claims, write poor copy that confuses customers or bungle up your offer in some other way.
Fewer ad impressions. If a dishonest affiliate creates ads that mimic your branded content you will see your ad impressions go down or even disappear. Smarter fraudsters tend to bleed your ad budget over time, instead of making a single huge impact.
Unusually high affiliate conversion rates. If affiliate conversions are incredibly high or peak during the night it might be a sign of fraud. They are stealing your ‘organic' customers.
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