Direct linking occurs when the affiliate uses the merchant’s website as the display URL, with an affiliate link as the destination URL. The effect of this tactic is that the affiliate does not need to operate a website because it is directing traffic straight from the search page to the merchant’s website.

This tactic, while economical, efficient, and easy for the affiliate, creates problems for merchants.

Common issues include:

1.   Channel Conflict

Channel conflict arises when the merchant and the affiliate are advertising on the same keyword set. In this instance, Google, Yahoo, and Bing only show one advertiser at a time with the same display URL.

Because the affiliate and the advertiser are using the same display URL, the two are in essence competing to be served on the SERP. The end result is a bidding war between the affiliate and the merchant on whose behalf the affiliate is advertising in the first place.

2.   Messaging Conflict

Messaging conflict occurs when the affiliate has developed its own ad content that doesn’t match your messaging.

Examples include off-brand messaging, outdated offers, or offers that you do not want promoted against certain keyword combinations. As in issue #1, here, only one ad can be served at a time. If the ad served is the affiliate’s ad, then your brand message isn’t being seen.

3.    Revenue Wars

Revenue wars refer to the struggle between your SEM team and affiliate teams to each gain credit for conversions, actions, and/or sales from paid search keywords.

If revenue is not properly attributed to the SEM team, for instance, then ROI calculations will suffer, causing issues with your bidding methodology and most likely the logic and algorithms in use by your campaign management vendor.

Because we have the affiliate ad on the one hand, and the SEM team’s ads on the other hand vying for impression share, it is likely that revenue attribution will be skewed when direct linking is deployed.

The Search Monitor and other compliance vendors have been working with SEM Brand managers and affiliate teams over the past several years to identify instances of direct linking in order to rectify the problems noted above by eliminating the direct linking tactic from the affiliate’s arsenal.

It is noteworthy that some affiliates are allowed to direct link, in which case, these affiliates are white listed and empowered to run with this tactic, however, in the vast majority of instances, direct linkers are violating the terms and conditions of the affiliate agreement.

It seems to be a reasonable hypothesis that the deployment of compliance vendors would generate lower instances of direct linking over time.

However, the trends are actually the opposite. We looked at a 10 month time frame spanning from June 2010 thru March 2011 across nearly 20,000 keyword variations, across many different vertical markets. What we found is that the instances of direct linking is actually growing, and not shrinking at all.

In fact, the rate of direct linking affiliates has more than doubled since June 2010. Keep in mind when reviewing the chart below, that not all of the keywords checked contained affiliate marketers and the trends below are averages across all terms reviewed.

Three reasons why the rate is on the rise rather than decreasing is a function of several factors:

1.  As with all types of fraud, there are times when fraud levels off, re-surges, declines, levels off, and resurges again. Downward trends can happen if other better tactics are discovered to be more beneficial for the fraudsters. When those tactics dry up, old tactics are recycled again.

2.  There are simply more affiliates than there are merchants who have adopted compliance tools and therefore, only the most diligent merchants have cleaned up their programs. We are still in the early stages of this type of compliance checking and therefore, most users are early adopters.

3.  The summer months generate less traffic then the winter months, and therefore, direct linkers perhaps take a sabbatical during those times. However, if this were the sole cause of the trend, we would see a big spike during the holiday season, and a leveling off toward March.  This is not the case, and instead we see a steady growth pattern, with a surge in March.

We are also seeing the same types of resurgence with spam trends.

According to Symantec’s State of Spam and Phishing monthly report for March 2011: “As forecasted in the last month’s report, average daily spam volume did increase for the first time since August 2010. The average daily spam volume increased 8.7 percent in February month-over-month. Overall, spam made up 80.65 percent of all messages in February, compared with 79.55 percent in January.”

Unfortunately, those affiliates and other types of fraud purveyors are always looking for ways to get around detection. Merchants engage with great diligence for periods of time, and then there are time spans when attention is directed away from compliance, thus, opening up the opportunity for an increase in undesirable tactics.

It is a cycle that is continuous. Just as direct linking is on the rise today, it is entirely foreseeable that it will decrease over periods of time in the future as well.

Conversely, branding is not the ‘usual’ way that the search channel is used. This is primarily because branding objectives differ greatly from direct response goals and therefore the same measures do not apply. Usual branding objectives encompass things like creating awareness, generating familiarity, promoting consideration, and driving recommendations.

While clicks and purchases are not relevant to the measure of a branding effort, there are metrics that can be derived from the search channel which do fit nicely with a branding strategy.

For example, we can measure efforts to create brand awareness from stats like reach and frequency, a.k.a. impression share. We can measure familiarity and consideration by cleverly bidding on paid search terms that connote our brand and measuring the effectiveness via click thru rate on our advertisements as compared to other connotative keywords.

Branding on the search channel is important because the opportunity for exposure is big and continues to get bigger. During a recent joint webinar with The Search Monitor on Budgeting Intelligence, Eli Goodman of Comscore put forth the following key information on search use:

• Search intensity has grown by 11% since January of 2010 – search intensity refers to the number of searches per search.
• Searchers are usually looking for something to do, somewhere to go, or for places to find information.

The Top 5 Ways To Use Search For Branding

1. Target interest-based keywords

Branding can be about connecting with your target base through relevant interests. There is a gaping hole of opportunity within paid search to target keywords that connote interests tied deeply to your brand. For example:  if you run a search for cooking related keywords like ‘fried chicken’, ‘crab cakes’, or ‘chicken soup’, you will find virtually no advertisers.

However, these are great opportunities for home focused brands like William Sonoma, Calphalon, and others to get in front of their target market, not for the purpose of driving a sale but simply as an opportunity for branding.

You can try the same exercise with recreational keywords like ‘wilderness kayaking’ or  ‘sky diving’ or ‘biking events’. Again, you will notice that there are either no advertisers or only a small subset of advertisers that offer the specific expedition style sport.

These types of interest based keywords could present a great opportunity for Camelback or Specialized to run branding based ads.

2.  Target traits-based keywords

Branding can be about emphasizing unique traits of your brand. You can target keywords that emphasize your key selling points coupled with your ad copy to hammer home serious brand messages. This is great strategy for manufacturers and is totally underutilized.

For example:  if you search for keywords that denote quality, there is a dearth of advertisers like ‘high quality brake pads’, ‘unbreakable sink parts’, ‘stain free carpet’ or ‘knowledgeable insurance broker’.

3.  Optimize video

If you have strong video advertisements that depict your brand messaging, you need to optimize your videos for organic search results. You should promote your videos through YouTube sponsored search. You should promote these videos on social media using the pay-per-click platform offered through Facebook.

4. Brand Meta Tags for organic SEO listings

Organic listing descriptions are often pulled from your meta tags. I find that brands are hyper focused on getting a top rank, that the description is often overlooked. The listing description is a fantastic place to put out branded messaging. You control the meta tag descriptions. Your tagline and other targeted messages can gain more reach through placement within your organic listing descriptions.

Pizza Hut does a nice job of this with strong branding messages within its organic listing copy: “Pizza Hut – home of America’s favorite pizza, delivering delicious hot pizza and WingStreet buffalo wings straight to your door. Order your Pizza Hut pizzas”:

5.  Be there when your brand is queried

You should have a strong presence when your brand is specifically being searched.

This includes:  slogans, brand names, product names, typos, and adding ‘.com’ extensions to your keywords. This should also include brand phrases – keywords that contain your brand.   While I am stating the obvious, solid search data also supports this, as Comscore noted during our presentation together that out of the top 15 paid search terms (based on click volume), 11 are brand names.

Consistent Messaging From Search To Site

When considering these options, also bear in mind that the landing pages where you are driving branding traffic should show continuity of messaging. If you are promoting your ‘stain free carpets’, then the landing page should explain more about how your unique process enables you to provide carpets that shun stains.

Remember that the goal of your branding campaign isn’t to drive a sale today but to create awareness about a specific trait, style, or need that your brand meets – in turn driving long term customer loyalty and hopefully word of mouth recommendations to friends and family.

In that scenario, the typical landing page would contain the advertiser’s logo and look ‘official’ as if it were authorized or even owned by the brand holder through the use of colors and brand like design.

The website might prominently display a form for you to enter your email address in order to receive a prize such as a gift card or will ask you for more information about yourself, thus creating a ‘lead’ to be sold by an affiliate marketer.

Affiliates Misrepresent Your Brand Identity In Email

This tactic has an additional ploy – email. Yes, I am talking about SPAM, but a special kind of SPAM where the brand owner is unknowingly being exploited in unsolicited emails for the benefit of affiliate marketers with a tricky design, intended to skirt around the CAN SPAM act.

We have seen all sorts of brands exploited in this manner including phone providers, phone manufacturers, nationally known restaurant chains, computer brands, and major airlines. I am purposefully not mentioning any of these brands by name due to potential liabilities for them under the CAN SPAM act.

To refresh your memory, the CAN SPAM act sets out rules to govern email messages that promote or advertise commercial products or services.

The basic tenets of the act are:  not to be false or misleading in the header or subject, to allow recipients to opt-out, and to inform recipients of who you are, where you are located, and how to opt out.

The misdirected brand tactic for email uses the following clever ruse:

• A prominent brand is mentioned in the email with a call to action e.g. confirm your phone order for a [cell phone brand].
• The ‘from’ field contains an alias disguised to look like a subject such as ‘Travel Confirmation’.  You will need to view the email details to see the email address of the sender (which is an extra step if you use a free web mail account).  When you do that, the ‘from’ field will appear to come from an individual, probably a fake name, at a website that doesn’t display a web page and is registered as a private domain so that you can’t obtain the registration information.
• The message subject makes it look like you have already ordered something e.g. ‘please confirm reservation ABC123’
• The message body consists of 2 lines of text – no images.  Your email is the greeting line, followed by a message in the body such as ‘Please claim your promotional tickets on [a popular airline]:  Confirmation Code ABC123’. Like the sample shown below.

• The opt-out portion of the email appears below the fold, after scrolling through a yard of white space. You will then find 2 places to click to opt-out. The first will appear in text with a bogus address. The second will only appear if you enable images, and will contain a second different address embedded in a blurry image.
• If you click through on the link in the email, just like in the misdirected display URL trick, you are misdirected to a web page that appears to be an official site sanctioned by the brand with a logo and brand colors, but is actually designed by an affiliate marketer to obtain your email address or other personal information.
• Finally, opting-out of the email is not effective. The reason is because the affiliate is operating under multiple aliases. Opting out of a single alias does not opt you out of the others.

The ruse is compounded in that on the surface, it appears to be compliant with CAN SPAM, however it is not. In fact, violates several of the tenets of CAN SPAM laws:

1. It is false and misleading. The subject implies that you ordered something when you did not. The link leads to a brand imposter web site. Last, the domain from which it is sent is a private domain, thus violating the underlying spirit of being upfront as opposed to misleading.
2. It doesn’t provide a proper address. It is implied that the address provided should match the sender. However, there is no way to verify a match since the private domain makes it impossible to verify.
3. The Opt-out is Improper. While you can opt-out, the method violates the spirit of the act. Since the affiliate is using multiple aliases, you would need to opt-out from each alias at an incredible pace in order to keep up with the barrage of spam. Further, the opt-out is located after a lengthy stretch of white space, making it tough to find. Finally, opting-out may only be another clever way to confirm your email address and thus opt you in instead.

As Brand owners, you need to be aware of this tactic and monitor email vigorously for it.

The CAN SPAM act specifically makes it your responsibility to monitor email messaging. If your brand is identified in the email, you are just as culpable as the affiliate. The fine for violating the CAN SPAM act is up to $16,000 for each separate email. Monitoring costs a lot less than the penalty and will save the good will of your brand.

After receiving the barrage of emails from brands this holiday season, some who I have done business with before and some I have not, I started to wonder:  Should you develop new year’s resolutions for your brand? What about putting your brand on a diet? Saturated fats are bad for us, perhaps saturated brands are bad for us too.

A brand can’t over-eat, but it can do things like over-email and over-coupon.

Over-Emailing Your Customers

The first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one. Brands are addicted to email. My personal example: I spent 3 hours recently un-subscribing to marketing emails all from my favorite brands, particularly those who sent 1 email a day over the holidays, 1 email a week the rest of the year. Multiply that by all of the brands that you love, plus the ones you don’t, and it gets complicated.

I wanted to write them each a letter so that they wouldn’t be sad when I left. I wanted it to say something like this:

My Dearest Brand,

We have been friends for many years. I buy things from you, you send me those things. Sadly, though, I must end our email relationship. It’s not you, it’s me – well actually it is you. You see, there are a lot of brands in the sea, and they all email me. Your email doesn’t get noticed, and distracts me so that I often miss more important emails from friends, family, and colleagues. I also suspect you are emailing others and saying the exact same things, which makes me feel less loved. I will continue to buy things from you, but we must break off our email relationship. When I need you, I will find you.

All the best, Lori.

Perhaps a better strategy is to send relevant information and to do it at relevant times. Maybe it’s a bad idea to send the same un-personalize email to everyone. Look at what was purchased in the past by your customer, and send that customer relevant and personalized information. Do it with a frequency that makes sense based on what that customer buys from you.

Know your customer’s buying buying patterns and history. Do you know how long it takes for a sweater to go out of style or to lose its fluff in the wash? For example, if the person bought a sweater and you know they will need new sweaters in 12 months, email them then. If you do that, then we can get back together – in an email sort of way.

Over-Couponing = Brand Site Devalued In SERPs

I have dubbed 2010 as the ‘Year of the Coupon’. We have Groupon, Living Social, Restaurant.com, and locally focused businesses like Mobile Scoops. We get them in our email, on our phone, and did you also know – we get them on search from web sites mostly operated  by affiliate marketers. These affiliate coupon websites dominate the search results.

Therefore, when you offer discounts, promo codes, or coupons, the side-effect is that you will find yourself quickly getting knocked down on search results. This unintended consequence on search pages occurs when the coupon websites, who are promoting your coupons, get pushed to the top of the search results, inevitably pushing your branded website down.

Just run a search with this combination of keywords: ‘any brand + coupon’   or ‘any brand + promo code’. You will see a list of coupon and deal web pages at the top of the natural results and find yourself perhaps low on page 1 or completely absent. Here are a few examples to try:  ‘Sony Promo Code’ , ‘Dell Coupon’, ‘Hanna Andersson Shipping Code’

Result: The entire 1^st page of the organic results consist of coupon websites.

From a search engine perspective, this is the proper result – relevant content based on what the consumer is seeking which is a coupon. But from a brand perspective, is this how you want to be represented? Perhaps a better strategy is to develop a web page of your own that showcases your promo codes and coupons so that you are on top and controlling the message.

To give you a taste – here are the top 6 results on the search for ‘Sony Promo Code’:

Is this the way you’d like to present your brand’s body image in search? If the answer is no, it may be time to think about putting your brand on a diet.

Here are the top 5 reasons why our affiliates are forced into this position.

1. No Method To Exchange Information

As you market to prospective buyers, you learn which ad media, copy and strategies work better and which do not fare as well. Your affiliates are learning the same thing through their own trial and error efforts.

Unfortunately, most affiliate programs have no method to exchange and share these key learnings. One reason is that there is a social barrier to sharing. Affiliates do not want to share with you because they fear that the brand will only use them to test out channels and then cut them off. You do not want to share with your affiliates because you do not want channel competition from your affiliates.

Another reason is that there is no standardized way to share information. However, there can be great benefits to sharing like cost savings so that neither of you are testing channels that the other has already proven to be inefficient. It brings up questions like:

• What do you share?
• In what format is information shared?
• Which affiliates should benefit from shared information?
• How can you share in a uniform way that doesn’t burden your staff?

Probably the least controversial information to share are those things that didn’t work. You could start by releasing your web analytics data on media and ad copy with low ROI, so that affiliates know what to avoid. The same will hold true from the affiliate end—they ought to do the same type of sharing. You can make your information sharing conditional on reciprocation, and you can also limit which affiliates can take advantage of the information exchange (for example, top earners, affiliates with a working history with you where they have exhibited good behavior, and so on).

2. Lack Of Web Analytics Data

There is always more to a sale then the sale itself. The entire web analytics funnel plays into how you measure the success of various ad media including drop-off rates, bounce rates, page views, site hang-time and goal pages. Affiliates typically have no visibility into the web analytics funnel. Their viewpoint is limited to purchases only.

In the interest of sharing, if you can attribute traffic to a specific affiliate using your web analytics program, it makes sense that you would share the data with that affiliate. Meaning each affiliate would get the opportunity to review the web analytics funnel for traffic that the affiliate has driven to your website. Equally helpful is for the affiliate to benchmark itself against other traffic you receive by shared data on site averages, and the affiliate’s increase or decrease in relation to the average.

3. Missing Purchase History

You hold all of the cards regarding purchase history. You know things like which buyers are repeat buyers, what the future value of a customer might be based on purchasing behavior and the lifetime value of customers driven to you via various channels. Your affiliates have none of this information. It isn’t reasonable or ethical to share customer-specific purchase history, but it is reasonable to share channel specific history.

If you know that certain keyword types (for example, product part numbers) generate customers with a high lifetime value, that is the kind of information you want to share with your affiliates. Sharing this kind of information is self-serving; it helps you direct your affiliates to run campaigns in places where you will get the most revenue. Sharing in this instance will help you to encourage your affiliates to focus their efforts on the ad media that you deem to be most valuable.

4. Unknown Or Fuzzy Demographics

Affiliates probably do not know your sweet spot with regard to demographics and targeting. In the absence of insights from you, top affiliates use common sense and experience to figure this out. Smaller affiliates probably have no way to determine your target demographics and may drop out of your program due to costly failures before they get the chance to drive a return for you. If you don’t already do this, you should consider publishing information and offer training to direct your affiliates to the demographics of consumers that are the most valuable for your business.

5. Lack Of Attribution Data

Attribution refers to tracking the marketing activities that generate a sale. Last-click attribution, for example, is where the only marketing effort tied to a sale is the one that generated the click immediately preceding the purchase event. There is also first-touch attribution and multi-touch attribution. Multi-touch attribution is where all of the marketing touch points are tied to the sale so that insights can be gleaned about things like how many visits take place before a purchase occurs, the time span between visits or visitor progression such as with keyword search history leading to the sale.

The problem again arises for affiliates because their only insight is usually regarding the last-click. There is no insight as to the multitude of marketing touch points that ultimately lead the consumer to make the purchase.

Further, as I mentioned in Is The “Last Click Wins” Model Best For Your Affiliates?, there is no credit given to affiliates who drove traffic that pre-dates the last click. You could strengthen your affiliates via tracking attribution by giving some financial credit for participation in the sale, or you could share attribution insights so that affiliates can market smarter and better on your behalf.

I theorize that in the absence of this data exchange, affiliates evolve from “dumb” to something more only after their own trial and error has shown them the best marketing methods. This means that only the affiliates with the fortitude for risk will stick around to reap the rewards. Smaller affiliates or those with less attention span may be likely to drop out of your program early or even complain about their lack of success, making it harder for you to recruit other affiliates.

If you can, you should consider sharing information with your affiliates to make them smarter upfront and work harder for you long-term.

Behavioral retargeting (redacted from Wikipedia), also known as behavioral remarketing or simply, retargeting, is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion (in other words, the action desired by a site owner, typically making a purchase).

Retargeting helps companies advertise to website visitors who leave without a conversion—about 98% of all web traffic. This is done by displaying ads to the prospect as they surf the internet via various ad networks. Retargeting is only serving banner ads to people who have shown at least some amount of engagement with your brand. This makes retargeting a smarter spend than most other display ad campaigns as it focuses on your brand’s engaged user-base. Studies suggest that a company needs to have seven different contacts with a customer (on average) before they make a purchase. Retargeting allows companies to continue the marketing conversation with a customer after they leave a website. This form of behavioral targeting is a growing trend in the online marketing arena.

For the affiliate channel to take advantage of BR on behalf of your brand, several components must be in place. First, there must be rules around post impression cookies that are clearly defined. Second, you need to allow participation by your affiliate network for tracking and payouts. Finally, you need to have the ability to de-duplicate cookies from all of your marketing channels.

The current wisdom is that behavioral retargeting and post-impression cookies, if introduced to your affiliate program, should be governed as follows:

Only trusted affiliates should be allowed to use PI cookies. The reason is that a PI cookie is delivered without any action from the consumer – merely serving a banner ad on a page the consumer visited will cause a PI cookie to be placed. This opens up the possibility that an affiliate will force a cookie on the user through “hidden” ads or below the fold ads.

Prohibit forced clicks / forced actions. Prohibit forced clicks in your affiliate agreement, and also ensure that your affiliate network enforces this restriction. Forced clicks occur when a cookie is dropped without user initiated action. PI cookies should only exist where the consumer has been exposed to a brand impression—e.g. a banner advertisement. PI cookies should never be allowed in the absence of an above the fold ad which contains an obvious and clear display of your brand in the form of an advertisement.

Establish cookie war winners. Click cookies should supercede PI cookies, and you can keep the “last cookie wins” model in place. PI cookies are nice when there is no click, but the affiliate has driven impressions. Otherwise, click cookies still are the most favored winner. Think of the impression cookie as a way to take advantage of all the gaps that normal click-based transaction correlations might miss, not to create duplication of payouts or to over-write click transactions.

Establish commission rules. Perhaps brand holders should pay less for sales generated through behavioral retargeting than for sales driven from clicks. Perhaps the PI cookie gets a shorter lifespan than a click cookie.

Define rules to govern media buying. Define what types of content sites are relevant. Restrict advertising to publishers with relevant content and that don’t conflict with your existing media buys. Just like in paid search, coordinate your efforts to avoid channel conflict.

Establish placement guidelines. Placement should be above the fold with controls on display time, and frequency caps.

Why would merchants want to do this? The main driver is to expand reach beyond “click” driven channels. The merchant still only pays if a sale happens. Publishers can become affiliates and gain the opportunity to monetize unsold impression based inventory.

Behavioral retargeting along with PI cookies is not a new idea for the affiliate channel. With today’s tracking tools and targeting vendors, it can be better policed and controlled than in the past. The debate will continue I imagine and we should all keep an eye on it to see what types of successes (and failures) may emerge.

According to comScore’s MobiLens data from August 2010:

• 234 million Americans age 13+ use mobile phones
• 34% use mobile web browsers (some math: roughly 79 million people)
• 22% access social media through their phone (more math: 51 million people)

The top mobile social media sites in the USA:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• YouTube
• Twitter

So let’s speculate about what’s going on so you know exactly how you or your competitors could manipulate ads on social media and mobile to take advantage of brand advertising.

Facebook. Facebook sells ads on a CPC basis. When you purchase ads, you pick who you want to target by selecting their “likes.” Using this option, you are able to list the Facebook groups that you want to target. These groups could be your competitors’ groups. You could even tailor your ad to call out the competitor by name (“Hey [competitor] fans!”) to draw attention to your ad.

There is tremendous opportunity to target in a very specific way. There is also an opportunity for brand posers to take advantage of your hard work in building your channel, so be aware of the ads that may be targeting your users when these users are visiting your Facebook group.

YouTube. I wrote about YouTube advertising channels in my article Search, Video & Your Brand: Hello YouTube! over a year ago. At that time, advertisers could purchase self-service CPC-based ads called “promoted videos.” Since then, YouTube has added several other ad units including “brand channels” that enable advertisers to build a channel area filled with videos only related to them. Channels appear to get top billing in the organic results on YouTube. However, we are still seeing many instances where promoted videos of non-brand related items or other brands appear on searches. Nor do we see big brands taking advantage of ad opportunities on more generic searches for products that represent them. For example, we ran a search on the term “snowboards” but not a single ski or snowboarding product manufacturer appeared in the sponsored listings or the organic results. There is opportunity here that seems to be wide open for the taking.

Twitter. You can advertise on Twitter or be a recipient of advertisements on Twitter without realizing it. There are companies that pay for tweets to promote their products and brands, usually on a CPA or CPC model. The messaging in these tweets is not well controlled. It’s actually quite easy to disparage a brand in tweets in order to promote another—making some easy cash in the process. If you run a quick search on the keyword “twitter ads” you will find several enterprising companies who are capitalizing on the concept of paying for tweets.

Google mobile. This is our new favorite for brand compliance activities. Folks that want to exploit your brand or your affiliate program have gone largely undetected on mobile. We recently released a compliance monitoring report for Google mobile, and found compelling evidence that brand exploitation has found a new home on mobile. We have just begun to study these results but early indications suggest a rise in affiliates detected on Google mobile as well as competition that many times doesn’t exist on regular search results.

Keeping track of the ads running across all of the various channels can be challenging. Here are a few easy things that you should do.

Mobile. Search for your top terms on your own mobile phone. Decide if you need to be there. Is your competition there? Are your affiliates brand bidding there? Be sure to target your search campaigns for mobile users.

Facebook. It’s tricky to see the ads that another user might see because targeting can be so specific to “likes.” The best thing you can do is to make sure your own ads are running so that even if a competitor does manage to show up when a user is looking for you or reading about you, your ad will be present also.

Twitter. There are many monitoring tools, some free or very low cost, that allow you to read tweets that mention your brand. You should subscribe to a tool and follow-up on tweets from folks with enough followers to have some influence.

YouTube. Begin by running searches on your brand name or generic words that generate traffic for you on other search media. Observe which videos appear, and then purchase ads to ensure that your ads appear as well.

We are keeping an eye on the social and mobile ad opportunities. As more channels appear, there are more ways for your brand to be advertised as well as exploited. More for you to manage, but also more channels for you to use to evangelize your message.

Keywords that contain your brand are extremely valuable both because conversion rates are typically higher due to the high relevance between queries using brand terms and search results, and costs-per-click are often less expensive than those for generic keywords. Your search team wants to own your brand terms, and will want to prohibit the affiliate channel from advertising on them. But from the affiliate channel’s perspective, the ability to advertise on brand terms or brand derivatives, like typos, can generate great revenue. The problem is when both teams vie for the same or similar keywords you run the risk of creating a revenue war between both teams.

You’ll likely find yourself facing this problem if you manage your affiliate program and your search program through separate and disparate teams—for example, if you use a search agency to manage your search program and an outsource program manager (OPM) to control your affiliate program. Each team wants to take credit for revenue derived from the search channel to propel the metrics that you should and are going to hold them accountable for achieving—e.g. ROI or CPA. Depending on your tracking system, credit for the sale will either go to the last cookie dropped, the first cookie dropped or to each cookie dropped—in which case you will be attributing the same revenue dollars to multiple channels. Flawed conversion metrics are then used by your search team, your affiliate team and yourself to measure performance of keywords, maximum CPC’s, budget allocation and overall performance benchmarks. Flaws in these stats cause mistakes—what if you fired your SEM agency due to a revenue attribution mistake?

Consumers do not always buy on the first click. This means that it is possible, and likely, that a consumer will run multiple searches and click on multiple ads before finally making a purchase. If during the shopping and researching phase the consumer clicks on your search team’s ad and also clicks on your affiliate team’s ad(s), and the credit for the sale is given to the affiliate team, there will be negative repercussions to your search team’s metrics, analysis and decision making or vice versa.

Both the affiliate and search teams seek to be credited for the ultimate sale. To maintain a healthy working relationship between these two channels, so that everyone ultimately benefits, you could consider the following practices:

Create affiliate rules. Create affiliate marketing rules so that the affiliate program enhances your search program and does not detract from it. For example, prohibit cookie stuffing, prohibit direct linking (unless you do not have a search campaign) and on top terms and even brand terms, make sure affiliates have an even playing field with the search team. Meaning, give your affiliates the opportunity to succeed so that they do not need to resort to underhanded tactics.

Monitor affiliates closely. Keep track of your affiliates to ensure that the rules are adhered to, which will ultimately curtail channel conflict.

Ensure proper sales attribution. Give credit for sales to both teams so that it is not all or nothing. Consider tracking sales so that you can watch the entire shopping path of a consumer over time. This will give you a greater understanding of the different contributions of your search and affiliate teams.

Unify management. If you can do it, you ought to consider common management for both channels, so that one agency or one group is responsible for both the paid and affiliate channels. It is also wise to consider bringing the SEO team into the process as well. A single source vendor who can handle all three components and operate the program in harmony will yield better results in the long run. In this scenario, management is credited for both the search and affiliate successes, and therefore has every reason to ensure that the playing field is balanced.

Be transparent in tracking or external monitoring. If you are going to manage search and affiliate teams separately, you ought to consider some transparency in tracking and/or external monitoring so that your SEM agency has a way to see which keywords have a strong affiliate presence. This will give the SEM agency a clearer picture when evaluating performance and in decision making. Otherwise, your agency will have a blind spot which puts the agency at a disadvantage.

Ultimately, channel wars between your search and affiliate teams can stunt your ability to maximize the search channel. You may be over or under spending, good search terms may appear less viable or you may wind up firing your agency or your affiliate team for metrics that they cannot control. As you think about this problem, keep in mind that great brand managers can use a group of super-affiliates to protect your brand. Affiliate programs can offer strong results in assisting with brand protection and expanding your keyword reach. However, if not carefully managed, revenue attribution from the affiliate program will “steal” dollars from your search team’s bottom line.

Direct linking a.k.a. URL hijacking. If you and your affiliates are both advertising in the same places—the same keywords on Google, Yahoo or Bing—you need to prohibit direct linking to your website. Links in ads from affiliates should point to their landing pages, not yours. This is because direct linked ads from affiliates will compete with your ads for placement and ad serving frequency. The exception to this is if you and your affiliates are advertising in different places. In these cases, you may want to allow direct linking to give your site exposure provided that you define specifically when this is allowed and spell out any ad copy restrictions that follow.

Competitive brand bidding. You should prohibit competitive brand bidding (affiliates bidding on your competitors’ trademarked terms) in these circumstances:

• If you allow your affiliates to direct link
• If your products are confusingly similar to your competitor’s products, either in look and feel and/or brand name
• If your affiliate promotes only your goods & services and not the competitor’s on their landing page.

Media & keyword restrictions. You should prohibit your affiliates from directly competing with you on specific media properties and keywords. Exceptions: if you are deploying a strategy with super-affiliates to box in a market or if you cannot get enough reach on your own. The list of restricted terms should include your brand names, typos of brand names and variations that include ‘.com’ or typos of that. You may also want to include your top performing keywords and/or brand phrases—phrases that contain your brand along with a generic word.

Negative keywords. If you are restricting specific keyword terms from paid search advertising, you should also require that those same terms be negatively matched to prevent the search engine(s) from accidentally auto-matching your affiliate’s ad to a restricted keyword.

Rank restrictions. If you do allow your affiliates to advertise on your brand name or top performing keywords on paid search, you may want to enforce rank restrictions on those specific terms so that your ads appear higher up in result listings than the affiliates’ ads.

Domain registration. You should prohibit your affiliates from registering domains that contain your brand and typos of your brand.

Link cloaking. Link cloaking can be used for good or for evasion purposes. If you have the technical know-how, you may consider providing your affiliates with a link cloaking tool so that you can easily decode the affiliate network and ID from cloaked links while still enabling your affiliates to cloak. The restriction needed in your affiliate agreement is to prohibit link cloaking if done through an unauthorized method or if done for the purpose of evading you.

Compliance with search engine rules. You should require that your affiliates follow the editorial guidelines of each search engine. For example, the landing page must match the display URL, and no redirects or jump pages that immediately redirect to your website.

Prohibit evasion. You should prohibit your affiliates from using evasion tactics to hide the affiliate link when the visits are from either you or from search engine editorial bots checking on paid ads.

Violation of laws, rules and regulations. If your industry has specific regulations (as is the case with certain verticals), you need to require the affiliate to remain in compliance with those regulations. If you allow email marketing, then you must require compliance with the “can spam” act. Your affiliates who operate editorial publications must also comply with new rules from the FTC when they are endorsing or recommending your products which require disclosure that the website is a compensated affiliate.

Ad copy and landing page copy. You need to prohibit things like:

• Use of your brand in ad copy text or in the display URL if you are prohibiting brand use False advertising or any claim that shows you or your competitors in a false or misleading light
• Promoting old invalid offers that have expired
• Using certain words such as “official” or “free”
• Copying your landing pages if you want your affiliates to have their own unique landing pages—in some cases, you may want to supply the ad copy/landing page language.

Press releases. You may want to include a restriction prohibiting press releases.

Fraudulent commissions. You will also want to prohibit fraudulent activities like cookie stuffing, link interception and falsifying orders. These may seem obvious, but you’re safest if you spell these things out in an agreement rather than just assuming your affiliate has enough common sense to avoid them.

These rules need to be applied to the affiliates with whom you have a direct relationship, and any sub-affiliates of your direct affiliates. Be sure that these rules are applicable to the affiliate and all websites and businesses owned and operated by the affiliate. It is not uncommon for an affiliate to sign up for your program using one web site address, then sign up for your competitor’s program using another and then brand bid on both of you.

Finally, it is important to communicate your rules effectively to your affiliates. Remember that your affiliate agreement is written in legalese and some of your affiliates will not read it. To ensure that your restrictions are communicated thoroughly, you may want to also publish an FAQ section, hold training sessions or provide an online video, and/or explain the restrictions via your affiliate newsletter.

To understand why this is such a big problem, let’s first explore the definitions of broad and phrase match. Broad and phrase match are used by both Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter. Broad match is the typical default setting for sponsored search. If the sponsored search term is seen anywhere in a search query, the ad will be triggered, regardless of what other terms are also contained in the query. This also applies to plural and singular versions and sometimes variations or related terms that are similar to the intended query. By contrast, phrase match is slightly narrower than broad match in that the exact phrase specified by the advertiser must appear in a query; however, other words can appear in the query as long as the exact phrase is present.

If you find an advertiser sponsoring a phrase that contains your keyword along with non-brand terms, before you take serious action (e.g. legal or send threatening letters), it is in your best interest to determine the likelihood that brand bidding was intentional or if it was caused by a match type setting. Unfortunately, a searcher cannot control the match type trigger for paid ads. The searcher can use the advanced search functionality to request relevant organic listings by match type but the logic used for paid ad serving is not affected by the searcher’s preferences. Therefore, you must look for other circumstantial evidence to validate whether or not brand bidding has occurred.

Here are some things to look for to determine if your competitors are purposely bidding on your brand.

Monitor your brand by itself. Look to see if there are any instances where the advertiser’s ads appear on your brand name by itself, including typos, and variations with and without the .”com” extension (e.g. “Netflix” vs. “Netflix.com”). If you find instances of this your confidence level should go up regarding phrases that contain your brand plus non-branded terms. If the advertiser is bidding your brand by itself, it is logical to gain confidence in the advertiser’s intention to bid on your brand included as part of a phrase.

Look at redirects and landing page URLs. Often the determination of what landing page to show the consumer is determined by tags in the redirects and on the ultimate landing page. You will need to review all URLs that lead to the landing page including the display URL, the destination URL, all redirects and the final landing page URL. If your web site URL or your brand name by itself appears in the URL, then your confidence level should be very high that the advertiser is bidding on your brand terms.

Look at the keyword parameter. Advertisers often embed either the keyword or the category of the keyword (e.g. ad group) into a tracking parameter in the URL string to track the source of the traffic. Keyword tracking parameters can either be dynamic—inserted by the search engine using a variable—or fixed—inserted by the advertiser at the time of ad creation. If the parameter is a variable, then you would expect to see the keyword phrase exactly as it was entered into the search tagged onto the URL. If the parameter is fixed, then you could see either the searched keyword phrase or a shortened version of it.

The question to ask is, “does the entire searched phrase appear in the keyword parameter?” If it does not, and the only item in the keyword parameter is your brand, then the advertiser intended to brand bid. If the entire phrase does appear, then you will want to look for other circumstantial evidence as suggested above. In addition, if the advertiser is using Yahoo web analytics, you can look directly for two parameters in the redirect path from the URL: OVRAW, which will show the searched phrase, and OVKEY, which is the sponsored keyword to determine the intention.

Look for bold text in the ad. Text appears in bold in the ad when that same text is included in both the search phrase and the ad. The AdWords help information says this: “If your ad shows when a user searches on a keyword in your ad group, the keyword will appear in bold in your ad text.” Therefore, you could look for the non-brand part of the search term. If there is ad text that matches the non-brand portion of the search phrase and it is not in bold, then the advertiser was broad matching on your brand.

Look for your brand in ad copy. If the answer is yes, you should feel very confident that the advertiser intended to appear on your brand name. Look in the display URL as well as the title and description of the ad.

Monitor the phrase without your brand. Lop your brand off of the phrase and see if the advertiser shows up with the same ad copy on the non-branded version. If the answer is no, then you can be sure the brand was the intended target. If the answer is yes, then you will need to do more to make a determination as it is possible the advertiser brand bids and also bids generically.

The point is that there are a lot of methods that can be used to gain confidence as to the intention of an advertiser. I suggest that you go through the above checklist to be sure that you are expending compliance resources properly. If an advertiser did intend to brand bid then this will lead to a different set of actions on your part versus if the advertiser did not intend to but wound up advertising anyway due to their choice of match type settings.