Why should you care about Online Yellow Pages when Google is most likely your primary source of traffic and ROI? The simple answer is because local search is on the rise, and with it so are opportunities for other advertisers to exploit your corporate name or brand, possibly to your detriment.

Lets take a look at some of the potential glaring brand issues that can exist on yellow page search results:

• Your own resellers and/or affiliates can promote conflicting offers.
• Too many ads for yourself repeating on a page. This leads to consumer confusion about available offers and where to call or which web pages to visit to seek information.
• Competitive ads displaying when your brand is searched.
• Irrelevant ads displaying when your brand or industry vertical is searched.
• National results can display above local results.

Consider these stats published earlier this year:

• Local search comprises nearly 12% of all searches on the top 5 search engines.
• Local search has outpaced the growth of overall web search, growing by 58% in 2008, compared with 21% growth for overall web search.
• Local yellow page sites saw double digit growth in searches last year, with more than a 23% increase.
• 75% of searches are for non–branded terms.
• 45% made a purchase from a yellow pages search.

Now consider a generic category web search on an online yellow pages web site such as yellowpages.com for the generic term “cable TV.” If you are not accustomed to these searches, you would expect to see a similar result to what you might find in a print version of the yellow pages—a single listing of all cable TV vendors, plus advertisements purchased by the vendor. However, the results for “cable TV” contain multiple page elements, which can be somewhat confusing:

• There are nearly 6 listings for each of the major providers—each with a different offer.
• There are nearly 25 ads that appear first, before the consumer ever reaches the actual yellow page phone directory listings.
• There are tiled ads down the right side of the page promoting the reduction of belly flab.

Next, we conducted a search on the generic term ‘Mortgages’ for a local market. These results were similar to the above, plus:

• There were several national advertisers who did not appear to have a local presence.
• Only 1 nationally recognizable bank was advertising on this term—which made me think that the others are not using this channel at all.

Here is what you ought to do to ensure that you get the best exposure on local yellow pages search for your brand:

• Run a search of your top generic terms on the popular yellow page search pages and make note of the results including yellowbook.com, yellowpages.com, and superpages.com .
• Be sure to advertise on your top terms.
• Control your resellers and/or affiliates so that their advertising efforts, ad copy, and offers, are consistent with your own.

Please note that the above issues occur with web based searches. Mobile searches using apps designed for the mobile phone deliver cleaner results and are more in line with what you would expect from print versions of yellow pages.

Achieving and sustaining top ranking visibility for your brand on important organic terms is increasingly getting tougher. This is because natural text listings no longer rule on the search result page. There are many other elements that appear sometimes ahead of or intertwined with the natural results, including local listings with a map, shopping listings, latest news, top blogs, images, videos and even book reviews can appear. Google calls these mixed result types Universal search; others call it blended search. These other elements can push what were once top performing organic listings into second or third page positions.

Consider these keyword examples:

“Desktop computers”. The natural listings are intertwined with three shopping listings. If you want your brand to show in the number one spot, you have to compete with the shopping listings that will appear above you.

“Pizza delivery”. Three natural listings on top, followed by seven map listings. If you are a pizza shop showing 4^th in natural results, you are below the fold.

“Refrigerator deals”. You’ll see a forum with a description and four forum listings intertwined in the SERPs before you even get to the organic listings.

“Ghost”. If you’re looking for a product named with a word with multiple meanings, such as “ghost,” you may find several videos and image listings beating you out.

Just as SEO has finally become a commonplace tactic in the online search marketing mix, we now find that the evolution of the layout of the SERP requires a new approach. As brand marketers, we need to re-think our strategy for how to achieve top visibility for our brand on our major terms on the free SERPs.

I think of this as a new opportunity to be found in a growing class of page elements. Here are four new things that you need to do to accomplish top visibility for your brand using the page elements to your advantage:

Determine your true rank. To determine your true page rank, look at the page layout of the actual page for each of your important keywords—the terms where you need your brand to be identified at the top. Natural ranking reporting tools will not provide you with this information. You will need to study the actual SERP by either running searches by hand or by deploying an organic monitoring tool that offers true page ranking. Identify the order in which your page(s) appear in the overall page ranks. Your page order will be impacted by the other elements that exist on the page. For example, if you are #1 in the natural listings, but there is a map ahead of you with seven listings on it, than you are in position #8 on the page—not #1.

Design a strategy based on the elements that are topping you. Once you identify the page elements that are essentially topping you on a result page, you are ready to develop new strategies. For example:

• If there is a map above you, then you will need to combine a local strategy along with your natural SEO to regain your top position on the page.
• If there are shopping listings ahead of you or surrounding your listings, you may find that you are not in the mix. To gain strength here you will need to determine how the shopping listings achieve top rank on specific phrases, and tailor a comparison shopping engine strategy. Sometimes this can be as simple as a willingness to pay more, or may be more complicated and relevancy or popularity driven.
• If there are video or image listings beating you out, you need to add an image/ video SEO strategy to your game plan. This should include uploading your own brand-oriented videos to YouTube.
• If there are blogs on the page and you are not a major mention, you need to gear up your social media strategy.

Constantly monitor the effectiveness of your strategy. Non-text universal search results sometimes can impact rank faster than traditional SEO. For example, in the case of time-sensitive elements like news or blogs, up-to-date fresh information may beat you out. For this reason, you need to monitor true rankings more often than you do for “regular” SEO. I suggest that you monitor your rankings daily, but if this is too overwhelming, try once a week.

Don’t forget geotargeting. You should engage in this exercise for each of the major markets where you generate leads or sales because the page layout can change depending on the searcher’s market.

With the holiday season upon us, now is the time to engage in this new strategy for your most important keywords—the terms where your brand had better appear on page one of search results.

I often write about what you can do to protect your brands when it comes to the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing. But did you know that the second most popular search engine today is YouTube? (according to Hitwise, ranking ahead of Yahoo search). You can buy self-service advertising on YouTube through its “promoted videos” advertising system, which is great and easy to use. Beware, however: if you are trying to protect your brand, “promoted videos” can seem like the wild west revisited.

Ads run on YouTube in much the same way as they do on the text based search engines. On the left side of the screen is “organic” content and on the right is “paid.” You’ll find two types of paid ads on YouTube: “promoted videos” which are ads to generate traffic to videos, and text ads from Google’s content network which generate clicks to web pages.

If you pick any major brand and plug it into the search query box on YouTube, you’ll likely see the “promoted videos” advertisements. You will also notice that the majority of brand owners are simply not yet using this channel—instead non-brand advertisers appear. Here are a few examples:

• WalMart: only non-brand advertisers appear for the terms “walmart” or “wal-mart”
• Best Buy: only non-brand advertisers appear
• Target: Target owns its ad space and only official Target ads appear. Nice job Target!
• Amazon: only non-brand advertisers appear
• McDonald’s: only non-brand advertisers appear.

I could continue, but I think it’s pretty clear that we have a new frontier ahead of us. As with traditional search, you need to deploy a strong brand strategy to promote your messaging above all other advertisers. And just as with Google’s paid search, it’s very easy to advertise using some other brand owner’s name.

Here are a few things that you ought to be doing to solidify your messaging around your own brands on YouTube.

Create rich meta data. This applies to the “organic” side of the YouTube search results. Make sure that the keywords and text that you use to describe your YouTube videos match the keywords on which you want to be ranked within YouTube search results so that consumers can find you.

Become a YouTube advertiser. Just because you’ve loaded videos into YouTube does not mean you will be found or noticed by searchers. You ought to advertise in the same way that you do paid search with the general search engines—to protect your brand. Identify the brand phrases that are most important to you and buy ads that will be triggered by those keywords. You can do this by buying ads on YouTube’s promoted videos product mentioned above. You can add an additional layer of coverage by buying ads on the Google content network and picking “YouTube” as your site selection.

Monitor YouTube search results. Just as you would with paid and organic search on the major search engines, monitor the search results pages of YouTube to see who is listed for your brands and phrases. Take it one step further and watch the videos to see what type of content appears on your brand terms. You may find old commercials, or spoofs of your brand or company.

Monitoring tools for YouTube

Google Alerts. Just as when new content is added to Google’s web index, Google Alerts will send you alerts about new video content on YouTube. However, the alerts are only about new and popular videos, and aren’t limited to YouTube. This information will not be sufficient to tell you who is advertising or appearing in the organic listings on your brand phrases on YouTube. So this is not my favorite method.

Search manually. You can run searches on YouTube.com yourself and hit page refresh a few times to see who shows up on the right and left side of the pages.

Video monitoring tools.. While they’re not here yet, I predict tools will evolve to support video monitoring on YouTube and other popular sites in the not too distant future that will be the next wave in brand protection and monitoring.

Track volume. Track the volume of impressions and click traffic you receive on your brand phrases—this will help you if you have a lot of possible brand variations (e.g. types) to weigh which brand variations merit the effort. Google and YouTube provide reporting and you can also use third party tools to track video ads—and that’s a topic unto itself that I’ll save for another article.

Unfortunately, affiliates do not always abide by the rules and requirements of your program.  For example, you may specifically prohibit keyword sponsorship of your best terms or your brand terms. You may look to keep your affiliates from co-promoting you alongside of your competitor(s) on the same landing page, you may have restrictions on paid search regarding rank, or you may have restrictions on ad copy (e.g. affiliates cannot use the phrase “official site” or make superfluous claims about your product).   These terms may be explicitly defined in your affiliate agreement, but regardless of your contract, your affiliates want to make money and that is inspiration enough to break or bend your rules when it suits their needs.

The good news is that the affiliate industry is trending toward recognizing that these issues exist and need to be resolved.  I attended Affiliate Summit East earlier this week in New York.   I was pleased to see two sessions specifically dealing with issues of compliance and regulation of affiliate marketing activities.

Hot topics in marketing compliance and enforcement. This session dealt with the complexities and liabilities of false advertising, affiliate advertising practices and enforcement of the laws and regulations in the USA.  Speakers included a representative from the Federal Trade Commission, a law firm and several industry insiders.

Bullet-proofing your affiliate agreement. This session was conducted by an attorney who explained  the varieties of business rules that are important to lock down in your affiliate agreement in order to protect yourself from liability, enable the merchant to control commission payments when the affiliate is out of compliance and to control affiliate messaging and marketing efforts to stay within the boundaries of the law.

There is also an emerging trend in the industry among the top affiliate networks who either offer or are openly talking about offering network quality services to their largest brand customers.  Some are considering options for their smaller and medium sized customers as well.  Overall, the trend seems to be pointing to a desire to provide merchants with more control over the quality of their affiliate programs.

The good thing is that you are in control when it comes to defining the rules and requirements of your own program.  Without rules in place, you put your ad dollars in jeopardy.  Examples of issues that will confront you in the event of your affiliate quality is out of control:

Increase in CPC If you are battling your affiliates on your key terms, you run the risk of driving up your CPC as you essentially compete against yourself.

Decrease in ROI. When a consumer clicks on your affiliate’s ad they receive a cookie that will give the affiliate credit for any sale that occurs within the cookie expiration time frame (usually 7 or 30 days).  If the consumer also clicks on your PPC ads, and winds up buying something, your affiliate will get credit for the sale—not your marketing department or agency.  When this occurs, affiliate sales can under-value your keywords so that the revenue is lowered, causing an unwarranted appearance of decline in ROI for specific keywords or media properties.

Decline of your good will. In this instance, messaging is key.  Being shown on the same page with competitors, or allowing affiliates to promote old offers, or to make false or grandiose claims will diminish the good will of your brand.

A carefully crafted affiliate legal agreement is important to your success in avoiding channel conflict, to ensure your CPC costs are contained and that your ROI is not falsely deflated.

As you may know, Google recently loosened its policy in the USA related to the use of trademarks in ad copy text, which went into effect on June 15, 2009. The big question is: has this change resulted in an increase in trademark use? The answer is yes.

The Search Monitor tracks and monitors trademark sponsorship and use in ad copy across all of the major search engines for brand holders. We recently conducted a study to determine the impact of these recent trademark policy changes. The results indicate that there has been an increase in trademark use across all of the major search engines.

The study discussed below is a look across several verticals at the change in the number of advertisers who sponsored or used trademarks in ad copy text before the Google June 15^th policy change, and after the June 15^th policy change.

The early results below show an increase in each category, across all search engines. Here is a preview of the current findings by vertical:

A small number of brands were reviewed for the above analysis consisting of brand holders which we suspected are not currently using a trademark monitoring tool and therefore may not be proactively monitoring and pruning abuses.

The above study is just the beginning of ongoing analysis needed to measure the impact on trademark use by unauthorized advertisers, including changes in the number of competitors engaged in the practice, the impact on impressions and/or click share, the impact of affiliate marketers engaged in the practice, and the impact on cost per click.

Does the new policy allow advertisers to engage in unauthorized use?

The short answer is no.

First, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Advertising each have slightly different policies which you can find in their help documentation, and are further explained online by various white papers, bloggers, and columnists. You may be able to sponsor terms freely on one search provider, and not be allowed on another, so check their policies.

Second, the study above shows a big jump in keyword sponsorship of branded terms. This result is interesting because Google did not change its policy with regard to keyword sponsorship. Google has allowed keyword sponsorship for quite some time now. However, the recent policy change which specifically impacted use in ad copy, seems to have encouraged a surge in advertisers sponsoring brands as keywords. Yahoo and Microsoft Advertising did not issue a change, and yet seem to be impacted as well.

Third, just because a search engine allows the practice, does not mean that the law agrees with them. It seems that advertisers think there is an opportunity to use trademarks more freely, which may not be the case from a legal standpoint. The test from a legal standpoint in the USA and abroad is two-fold: (1) is the use considered ‘use in commerce’? To this question, it seems that the concensus legal view is that sponsorship of brand terms or use in ad copy text is a use in commerce; and (2) is the use likely to confuse a reasonable consumer as to the origin of the good or service? To this question, the answer depends on the facts surrounding the use.

For example, if the ad copy or ad leads to a website that looks quite like the brand-holder’s site or has replicated elements such as color, stylization, or logos, then it is more likely to be deemed to be confusing versus a website that has a unique brand and is espousing a competitive comparison.

The key is not to rely on the policy of the search engine but instead to rely on the law of the land in which you engage in business.

The display URL is the part of your ad copy text that tells consumers where they will go if they click on your ad. Therefore, it is a very important tool for branding yourself, as it is how consumers will recognize you in list of sponsored results.

Each of the major search providers typically enforces the following rules with regard to the format of display URLs:

• The top level domain of the display URL must match the top level domain of the ultimate landing page (excluding redirections e.g. for tracking URLs).
• The display url can be a sub-domain e.g. ’something.topleveldomain.com’
• The display url can be an indexed page e.g. ‘topleveldomain.com/something

Brand hijackers

In this article,  the term brand hijackers means any advertiser using another advertiser’s trademarks without permission. For example, an advertiser who is not an obvious reseller or company affiliated with the brand holder.

The display URL is an excellent place for brand hijackers (”BrandJacker”) to exploit your brand, as well as the credibility and trust you have built with consumers. Brandjackers will attempt to disguise the display URL  causing its listing to appear to be you. I have noticed the following tricks deployed by brand hijackers in order to divert traffic to their own web pages using your brand as a lure.

Trick #1:  sub-domains

This method is where the brandjacker uses your brand as part of a sub-domain so that at a glance the display URL appears to be yours or endorsed by you. Sub-domains are allowed by all three search providers. The landing page rule is not broken because the top level domain of the display URL and the landing page DO match. There are several techniques used here:

• Brand appears before the ‘dot’. Display URL example:  chuck.99-styles.com

• Brand appears before the ‘dot’ and top level domain is an offer for something free or for a discount or deal.  Display URL examples:

1. fisher-price.now-at-low-prices.com
2. playstation3.price-discounts.com

• Your complete URL appears before the ‘dot’ in the display URL. URL structure example:yourdomain.com.topleveldomain.com

Trick #2: mis-directed display URLs

This method is where the BrandJacker uses your domain as the display URL, so that the ad looks 100% like your ad, but then sends the traffic somewhere totally different.

We find examples of this type with large retailers like Walmart being exploited. Here is a live example, if you run a search for the keyword ‘ walmart‘ or ‘ wal-mart‘, you may find ads that look something like these:

Wa‍lmart – Official Site Your Source for Top Brands & Much More at Wa‍lmart Now! Walmart.com

ShopWal Mart^TM On-Line Save Today At Wal Mart .com Shop Our Official Online Store Now www.walmart.com

The display URLs in the above ads clearly indicate that the advertiser is ‘Walmart’.  A consumer will click on these ads expecting a Walmart web site. That is not what happens. When a consumer clicks on these ads, the consumer may land on a web site that offers one of the following user experiences:

1. A site which collects consumer email addresses. The landing page looks like it belongs to Walmart – it has Walmart colors, logo, and a mocked-up giftcard that looks like a Walmart card. It promises $1,000 for free. To get started, you need to provide your email address.  There is a disclaimer on the web site in small print that tells you the site is not endorsed by Walmart:

“[site name removed] is an independent rewards program and not associated with any of the above listed merchants or brands. The above listed merchants or brands in no way endorse or sponsor [site name removed] ’s offer and are not liable for any alleged or actual claims related to this offer.”

2. Another site which also collects consumer email addresses. The landing page looks like it belongs to Walmart. However, this site is not walmart.com as promised in the ad copy text. The logo and colors match what you would expect, there is a lady jumping across the page holding shopping bags with the Walmart logo on the bags. To get the giveaway you need to provide your email address.

Although the search engines have rules that require the display URL to match the top level domain of the landing page, clearly in the above examples the rule is being skirted. To avoid the rule, the brandjacker may initially point the ad to the matching top level domain site, using a redirect tracking link as the destination URL. Next, as expected the search engine’s editorial bot will crawl the ad to confirm that it complies with its top level domain policy. The brandjacker waits until after the editorial bot has crawled the ad. Once confirmed that the ad has been crawled, the brandjacker switches where the redirect URL points so that now the redirect URL lands traffic on the brandjacker’s web site instead.

What can you do?

If your brand is being used in the display URL without permission, you can complain to the search provider. Most of the trademark policies do not cover the display URL. Your strongest arguments will be editorial rules that guide what can and can’t be used in the display URL. For more ideas on what you can do, The Search Monitor has published a white paper available for download: a Step by Step Guide to Combat Trademark Abuse on Paid Search, which provides a list of ideas to help you to stop these types of tactics.

If you are a Google Adwords customer you may have read that the Adwords’ trademark enforcement policies are going through a big change which will impact the control that you have over use of your brands on paid search.  The new policies will impact you starting on June 4^th and June 15^th, 2009.

Earlier this week, Brad Geddes discussed the changes and how they would impact ecommerce sites and affiliates. Today, I want to focus on brand owners, offering cautions and recommendations to make sure you fully protect your brands when the changes take effect.

When it comes to trademarks, there are four types of uses that brand owners need to watch out for on paid search:

1. Keyword sponsors. This is when an unauthorized advertiser sponsors your brand as a keyword so that the advertiser’s ads appear when a user conducts a search for your name or products.
2. Ad copy use. This is when an unauthorized advertiser uses your brand within ad copy text.
3. Display URL use. This is when an unauthorized advertiser uses your brand as part of its display URL.Examples: Sub-domain e.g. brand.dealscompany.com Double sub-domain e.g. yoururl.com.dealscompany.com A top level domain that includes your brand e.g. branddealscompany.com or brand-dealscompany.com An indexed page e.g. dealscompany.com/yourbrand
4. Display URL hijack: This is when an unauthorized advertiser uses your brand as the display URL, and either sends traffic to you as in the case of an affiliate or diverts traffic somewhere else as in the case of a brand hijacker. While all search providers claim to not allow the latter scenario, there are many examples of deals, promotions, and/or email list companies engaging in this tactic to mimic a site that looks like that of a brand or trademark owner. I will not name them here to protect the innocent brand holders, but feel free to email me for examples.

Brand users frequently include:  Competitors, affiliates, resellers, promotions and giveaway  sites, email list companies, parked domains, spyware, comparison shopping engines, and other media outlets from whom you have purchased ads.

New policy for keyword sponsors

Beginning on June 4, 2009, Google will add more countries to the list where it will not investigate the use of trademarks as keywords. A full list of impacted countries can be found here, which includes the USA and the UK.

This means that keywords that were restricted before will no longer be restricted after June 4^th.

Essentially, anyone who wants to sponsor your brand name, can and probably will.

New policy for ad copy

Beginning June 15, 2009, Google is relaxing its policy on use of trademarks in ad copy text.  In the past, Google has restricted the use of brand names in ad text and was willing to take action to prevent it which allowed you to authorize specific resellers to use your brand while restricting the remainder of the market.  Now Google will allow previously disapproved ads to run on Google.com and the content network in the USA, without the need for approval by the trademark owner.  Google will use its own editorial judgment to determine if it will allow the ad to run.

This means that ads containing your brand will start to run more frequently and pervasively after June 15^th.

Essentially, anyone, except for direct and obvious competitors, will be able to use your brand in their ads.

New policy for display URLs

Brands are often used in display URLs as a great way by legitimate resellers to direct traffic to specific product pages, but also, unfortunately as a clever ruse used by unauthorized advertisers to siphon traffic.

Unfortunately, Google, along with the rest do not investigate the use of brands in display URLs.  The policy:

“Although display URLs are subject to our editorial guidelines, we don’t investigate display URLs in response to trademark complaints because the presence of trademarked term within a URL may not necessarily constitute trademark use, such as in the case of post-domain paths or subdomains.”

Essentially, the display URL is fair game and can be used as an alternative to ad text use with the same or better influence on the consumer’s impetus to click on the ad.

What should you do?

First, you need to make sure that your ads and your brand are present when a user is searching so that posers do not siphon your clicks.

Second, you need to report any display URL abuse to Google.  While Google does not police the display URL, if you find brand hijacking causing traffic to be diverted to a site that isn’t yours, Google will take action as this practice violates their editorial guidelines.

Third, be wary of sending out cease and desist letters.  These rarely result in a behavioral change.  The risk is that the recipient can file for declaratory judgment against you in their state causing you to litigate in the recipient’s state instead of your own. Read more here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratory_judgment.  If you plan to litigate, gather your evidence and make sure you have a lawyer.

Fourth, to stop comparison shopping engines or other media outlets from using your brand to generate clicks, negotiate deal terms with each one when you purchase your ads from them that restrict their use.

Your brand is important to you.  Consumers looking for you or a product like yours will often search using your brand in their keyword phrases.   Your competitors know this and will likely try to advertise on your brands, slogans, and catchy phrases.

 How can you tell if you are winning out on your brand terms? 

Most advertisers will watch their rank: if they are in position 1, then happiness occurs.  If not, well you know what happens next—you bid higher. 

But is rank really the best bellweather of your success on your brand terms?  There are other metrics and ways to look at the information. 

Here are a few suggestions to lend clarity on whether you are winning, losing or neutral on your own brand terms:

Ad serving frequency. You need to know how often your ads are being served versus your competition. If your ads are only being served 50% of the time on your own brand terms, then you have a visibility problem. You can find out how often your ads are being served using the Google AdWords “impression share” statistic. You should also compare yourself to the competition to find out how often your competitor’s ads are served. If your competitor’s ads served more often than your own, you will need to make budget changes.

Number of positions you occupy. How many positions do you occupy on your brand terms? If your answer is one, and if your brand terms are very competitive, then you are not as successful as you could be. You need to lock-up as much real-estate as possible. You also need to know how much real-estate your competitors are locking up on your own brand terms. A useful strategy is to enable your affiliates to sponsor your brands in lesser SERP positions than you.

Offers and promotions. Are you running a generic ad on your brand terms while your competitors are making deals with consumers? Check your ad copy and check your competitors’ ad copy. Make sure that you are not being out-promoted on your own brand terms. Especially in today’s economy, consumers are looking for better pricing and better offers. To stay competitive, watch what your competitors are saying. If they are offering a low price, and yours is better quality, you certainly don’t need to match their price point offer—instead combat it in your copy by mentioning a key benefit of your product or offering that they can’t compete against. The big take-away here is don’t just run a generic ad on your brand terms—consumers are not necessarily only looking for you when they do a search on your name.

Organic tactics. If you are top in organic listings for your brand, and top in paid listings for your brand terms, you’re doing a good job. Next measure the click volume you get on each—organic and paid. Obviously, you want folks to click on your organic version because its free. Make sure your organic listing text is more compelling than your paid listing text. For example, make a better offer in your organic listing text than paid – this will inspire clicks on your organic listing.

Keyword selection. Be sure that you have covered all variations of your important keywords. We often see affiliate marketers taking advantage of brand terms simply because they have picked some unexpected variations. For example, consumers do search on your URL—yes they do. Consumers often treat the search box the same as the address bar. Some often-overlooked keywords are variations of your domain name: “www.url.com,” “url.com,” “ww.url.com,” “w.url.com,” “.url.com,” and “url.co.”

Identify who is competing with you.. What types of sites are competing against you on your own brand? You ought to categorize who you are competing against into buckets such as affiliates, parked domains, comparison shopping engines and other competitors—and rate them as strong, weak or mediocre competitors based on their market share of your vertical or industry.

Measure success over time. Snapshots in time do not provide enough information to draw meaningful conclusions. Looking at a single day or a single moment isn’t useful. You need to watch your brand terms and graph the trends over periods of time. You ought to be graphing:

• The number of competitive advertisers on your brand terms
• The number of affiliate marketers on your brand terms
• The rank changes of you and your competitors on your brand terms
• Ad serving changes of you and your competitors on your brand terms

 While rank is important and a great measure of your ability to claim your rightful spot (as expected in the minds of consumers), rank is not enough.   There are many other ways you can be beat on your own brand terms—and if you’re not watching, you probably are being outmaneuvered.

Most affiliate managers and brand owners agree that they are not fond of the practice where affiliate marketers direct link from a search campaign to the advertiser’s web site.   While frowned upon, the practice may be simply a nuisance because you just don’t like it or could become a more serious problem that is costing money either directly or indirectly due to skewed decisions.  The only way to know for sure is to measure the impact with real quantifiable numbers.

What is direct linking?

Direct linking occurs when an affiliate uses your web site address as its display URL in search ads.  The structure of the search ad consists of the following:

• Display URN is your domain
• The destination URL is an affiliate redirect link
• The final landing page is part of your domain

Many times the affiliate will also re-use your ad copy in their ads—which makes the ad appear to be you. 

How does direct linking impact your bottom line?

Consumers do not see a negative effect from this practice because the consumer ultimately lands on your site—where they ultimately wanted to go in the first place.

However, you will see a negative impact on your bottom line.  Here is why:  Google and Yahoo only allow one advertiser at a time to show the same display URL.  That means when your affiliate’s ad is being served, then your ad is not—and vice versa.     Your losses from this activity likely consist of:

Increased CPC. You and your affiliate are essentially competing to be served within the SERPs. For you to beat your affiliate, you need a better quality score and/or a higher CPC. Since the affiliate is using your ad copy text and pointing traffic to your landing page, your quality scores should be the same. Therefore, you are left competing only on cost per click. You will go back and forth driving up the cost per each keyword against your affiliates.

Fewer clicks. When your affiliate’s ads are being served, and yours are not, you are losing clicks to the affiliate. This means that when you run your ROI or CPA models against your keyword list, you will find a lower volume of clicks on keywords where you are competing against your affiliate.

Lower impression volume. When your affiliates’ ads are being served, and yours are not, your affiliate is generating impressions which you will not receive.

Cookie confusion. It is common for consumers to search the same keyword multiple times, and revisit ads when researching and shopping. If the consumer first clicks on the affiliate’s version of your ad and receives a cookie, then later shops and clicks on your version of the ad and buys, your affiliate will receive cookie credit for the sale. In that scenario, you wind up paying twice for the same buyer—you pay for the click, and you pay for the commission to the affiliate.

Data interpretation confusion. The affiliate’s ads appearing when yours are not can cause a great deal of havoc for you when analyzing keywords for important decisions such as pruning or bidding. You may find that effected keywords have higher CPC’s, lower volumes and undesirable ROI for you.

 So is affiliate competition a mere nuisance or a real problem?

First let me explain what I mean:

• Nuisance: I mean an undesirable byproduct of your otherwise effective affiliate program – for which you are afraid to rock the boat for fear of losing your affiliate revenues.
• Problem: I mean a measurable impact that damages your bottom line in terms of lost clicks, increased cost, or interference with keyword analysis.

The only way to know if you have a nuisance or a problem is to measure and quantify the situation.  To do that, I suggest two ideas on how you could get your arms around this problem.

Solution A:  Measure the percent of time your ads are served vs. your affiliate’s ads

To do this, you will need to crawl the search results pages along with destination URLs several times daily, from the vantage point of different geo-locations.   You will need to record who the advertiser was that appeared in the results – you or was it your affiliate.   I suggest watching this activity over the course of at least one week.  After you have gathered the data, you will make a table in Excel with fields like this:  Date | Keyword | Advertiser is Me (y/n) | Advertiser is Affiliate (y/n).   Next create a pivot table, and chart the results in a stacked bar chart.  This will show you the percentage of the time your ads are served versus your affiliates’ ads being served by keyword. 

You can take the ad serving percentages and extrapolate these on-top of your keyword data to run scenarios as to what your ROI might have been had your ads been displayed and not those of your affiliates.

Solution B:  Impression share analysis

Another way to determine if you are being impacted is to monitor for impression share anomalies within your own campaign.  Google Adwords provides impression share information by campaign.  You can run a daily “campaign performance” report in your Adwords account, and download it into Excel.  Then create a line chart of the impression share field by date.  Determine your mean or average impression share, and then look for dips in the line chart where it dips below your average.  You will need to also review your account history and other market changes.  If everything else appears normal, then you probably have a problem with an affiliate marketer who is ‘stealing’ your impressions by direct linking.

Solution C: Measure sales

If you can get your hands on your sales data for each affiliate and marry it to the traffic source—in this case keywords and search engines—then you can quantify the impact on sales due to cookie confusion.  You will need to be able to access the following information:  (1) traffic sources by affiliate with the ability to identify the search engine and keyword; (2) traffic path by affiliate to determine if in-bound traffic is coming to you direct from redirect links or if it is arriving from an affiliate owned and operated web site; and (3) your own campaign data to compare the affiliate’s keyword source against your own campaign list.  Next, you will calculate the clicks and sales generated by direct linking affiliates.  Then, you will compare those clicks and sales to the clicks and sales you received from the same sources.  Finally, you will need to run simulations to determine had you received those clicks and sales, what would your ROI have been taking into account the cost for the click and the value of each sale.

While the most accurate method from a final decision making standpoint is direct measurement, it is probably the hardest to accomplish because the data may be difficult to tie together in the proper fashion – which I imagine requires participation from your engineering, analytics, and bid management vendor teams.   I suggest that if you can get your hands on the data for Solution A – measuring ad serving percentages – you will have enough knowledge to make decisions without involving your entire engineering, analytics, and bid management vendor teams.

Would you like to have a heads-up any time your competitors are about ready to launch a new product? In many cases you can get good advance warning with clever use of search. There are specific competitive intelligence tactics that make this relatively straightforward. But first, take a step back and think about the things that you do when you are readying for a brand new product or new ad campaign.  I think it goes something like this:

Step 1: Get in a meeting room and brainstorm names, slogans, and ideas.

Step 2: Register the new brilliant name and new catchy slogan with the United States Government, www.uspto.gov, to protect your future trademark rights.

Step 3: Get a domain name:

• If you’re launching a new product line, there is a good chance you will go perusing about for a special url.
• If you’re launching a new ad campaign, maybe instead you will create a sub-domain or microsite to drive traffic to a special landing page.

Step 4: Post new jobs. You have to hire some people right?

Step 5: Issue a press release. When you are ready for launch, you’ll get that PR machine going.

Step 6: Advertise. Finally, the product or campaign is upon you, and you will launch a marketing blitz across the web and of course we expect that you will do this using both SEM, SEO, and social networking tactics.

Armed with the above awareness, you can easily find out ALL of the new product offerings, ad campaigns, and catchy slogans that your competitors are about to lob into your vertical, with the click of your mouse and a little bit of “too much time” on your hands (or you can find someone to automate this for you).

Let the spying begin:  USPTO.GOV

You never thought as a marketer you would ever have to visit The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and perform a search.  Well my friend, you will if you want to get a crystal ball vantage point on your competitors.

Bet you didn’t know that each new trademark application represents a brand name, logo, or tagline for a new business, product launch or ad campaign.  The timing of registration proceeds actual launch by many months, and possibly even a year.

The way to do this is to enter the site and go directly to the trademarks section.  Your next move will be to create a search on your competitor’s business name.   Once you do this, every single filing for trademarks will appear.  You will learn:

• If a competitor is changing a logo
• If a competitor has registered a new brand name
• If a competitor has registered a new slogan

But that is not all.  Every trademark application requires a description of the product or service that the mark represents.  That means that in addition to knowing something new is happening, you will also know WHAT that something is!

By the way, you can, and should, do the same type of search on new patent filings also.  Try Google’s patent search because its easy:  www.google.com/patents.

Next step: Investigate domain registrations

This one is easy—you are probably familiar with what to do here.  You need a database of every single domain registration known to mankind.  Then you need some way to search through it to detect any of the following occurrences:

• New registrations by the company you are tracking; and/or
• Domain transfers into the hands of the company that you are tracking

If you don’t have access to this wealth of information or an easy way to sort through it, there are several vendors who can help you with that. I will have a separate article on vendors coming out next month.

In some instances, competitor x will opt for a sub-domain instead of a new registration.  In the case of a sub-domain e.g. brandnewproduct.yoursite.com, detecting DNS record changes are not so public.  However, there are a few ways you can find them:

• Guess. Create logical derivations of the domain based on what you learned from the USPTO and stick them in your browser. See what comes up.
• Alexa. Try typing in the main domain into Alexa, sub-domains might appear.

Why do you care about this?  You care because when competitor X starts to build out page content, you’ll be able to read it before anyone else does—well at least 1 or 2 days before they go live, unless they are trying to get some SEO advantages, and then you may get as much as a 30 day head start.

Finally: Peruse job boards, advertising and press releases

Well in advance of launch, job postings will go online.  So watch job boards and your competitor’s career section of their web site.

Also, somewhat in advance of launch, you will see a few other activities: (1) Social media.  If your competitor plans on using social media, they will make efforts around this, and (2) SEO activities.  Detecting these will only give you a small window of opportunity because most of these efforts will become public just before launch.

Then of course at launch, the press release goes out, which you can follow using your normal alerting service which will tell you all about the interesting press and the new product, ad, or slogan you will be competing against.  I hope you are not relying on the press release to alert you to new products and campaigns, because guess what – it’s too late!