Imagine this: You've invested time and resources into your affiliate program, only to discover that some partners are unknowingly draining your advertising budget by violating program rules.
The consequences may not be immediately noticeable, but over time, such affiliate rules violations can significantly impact the key performance indicators of your PPC advertising. This is a common challenge faced by brands that rely on affiliate marketing.
How Affiliates Drain Your Ad Budget
Affiliate relationships are a valuable asset for brands, but they also come with certain risks.
One major risk comes from affiliates bidding on your branded keywords. Not only does this compete with your paid search efforts, but it also increases the click-through rate, resulting in a smaller average traffic volume.
What's more, brands pay affiliates for leads already familiar with the brand, wasting advertising spend that could have attracted those customers directly.
Such affiliate program violations may seem minor at first, but their further impact can be harmful to your advertising campaign effectiveness and advertising budget.
So what kinds of suspicious behavior or violations should you watch out for?
Suspicious Activities in Paid Search Advertising
Let's look at some common examples of suspicious behavior and affiliate policy violations that brands may encounter in search engine results:
Brand bidding: Affiliates may bid on your brand keywords, which increases competition and drives up auction costs.
Trademark abuse: Some competitors or affiliates may use your trademark in an improper context through their advertising campaigns without your permission.
Cloaking and URL masking: Dishonest affiliates may use cloaking techniques to hide violations like brand bidding. By showing different landing pages to search engines and users, they reduce the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and waste your advertising budget.
Ad hijacking: Dishonest affiliates may hijack your ads by redirecting users to their own landing pages instead of your website. This can lead to lost conversions and damaged credibility.
You may ask, how can you effectively detect and stop such affiliate violations?
The Limitations of Affiliate Tracking Methods
Affiliate tracking and detecting violations have always been a challenge for brands.
Methods of monitoring that involve manual checks are often time-consuming and prone to human error. Even if violations are identified, there is no guarantee that they won't happen again in the future.
Partners are becoming more skilled at hiding their affiliate rules violation, using tactics such as scheduling ad impressions late at night or using dynamic redirects to avoid being detected.
As a result, your brand can be trapped in an endless cycle of spotting and reporting violations, while dishonest affiliates simply tailor their tactics in the so-called blind spots.
With traditional methods falling short, how can brands overcome these tracking limitations?
Protecting Your Ad Budget with Automated Monitoring
To efficiently work with affiliate marketing and avoid traffic cannibalization, you need to incorporate automated brand tracking solutions. It will also allow you to effectively protect effectiveness of your brand ads in search and also your advertising budget. These solutions offer a number of key advantages over traditional monitoring methods:
24/7 scanning of search results across multiple locations and devices: Automated monitoring software can continuously monitor brand search results, ensuring comprehensive coverage and minimizing the chance of overlooked affiliate policy violations.
Identify cloaked sites and verified affiliate links: Using powerful algorithms, automated monitoring can detect cloaking sites and identify authentic affiliate links, giving you accurate insights into affiliate tracking.
Instant alerts with indisputable evidence: The service alerts you instantly with hard evidence of affiliate program violations. This allows you to take immediate action to address the issue.
Valuable insights into your brand tracking: Automated monitoring gives you meaningful insights into how your brand appears in search results, allowing you to make informed decisions and optimize your advertising campaigns.
By using automated brand tracking solutions like Bluepear, you can minimize the impact of affiliates on your brand, protect your advertising campaigns efficiency, as well as save your ad budget and ensure compliance.
Bluepear’s key benefits include:
• 24/7 monitoring across devices, locations, and platforms • Checking thousands of SERPs daily for branded ads • Saving time and money by eliminating manual ad monitoring • Detecting complex fraud and cloaked websites • Gathering violation evidence (screenshots, URLs, etc.) • Customizable reporting for easy access • Real-time violation notifications for prompt action
Final Thoughts
So if you want to protect your advertising budget from the hidden threat of partner infringements, introducing automated brand tracking software is critical.
Regular monitoring of your brand's search results will allow you to detect and prevent affiliate rules violation and preserve your advertising campaigns effectiveness and the integrity of your brand.
Don't let dishonest affiliates take advantage of your hard-earned advertising budget.
Start your free trial of automated brand tracking software today and ensure the success of your advertising campaigns by protecting your brand's reputation.
