Notice anything fishy in your PPC metrics lately? Is your impression share on branded terms lower than normal? Are the conversion rates for one of your affiliates almost identical to your branded paid search campaigns? You may be the target of an affiliate ad hijacker.

While most affiliates don’t engage in ad hijacking, when someone does, the impact can be very damaging to a brand’s paid search programs. Affiliates are supposed to be driving incremental revenue and helping you reach your goals, not stealing clicks and making your paid search programs more expensive!

In this blog, we’ll answer the five most common questions about affiliate ad hijacking and give you the information you need to identify and stop ad hijacking.

About Sonos

Founded in 2002, Sonos® creates the leading smart speaker system. Once a tech startup populated with nerdy engineers and brilliant designers who love music, Sonos has grown into a global music brand dedicated to transforming the experience of listening out loud to music in the home. Its family of wireless smart speakers and home audio products make it easy for everyone to listen to the music they love in every room of their home.

What trends will impact the way advertisers run affiliate programs in 2018?

On August 7th, 2017, Bing Ads updated its Relevancy and Quality Policy, adding a new System Quality Policy to “enhance a positive user experience by delivering improved ad and network quality.”

The policy provides Bing Ads the ability to limit or remove keywords and/or ads from its platform that have not shown any performance over a significant period of time. In addition, advertisers subject to the policy may see additional restrictions within ‘sensitive categories,’ including: weapons, pharmaceuticals, gambling, adult, and trademark.

We were excited by Bing Ads’ announcement, particularly the additional protection it provides brand owners against irrelevant trademark use by third-party search advertisers. So, we decided to take a look to see what, if any, impact the policy change had on trademark bidding using the BrandVerity Paid Search Monitoring tool. We’ll talk about the results of that study later in the post.

We used the BrandVerity Paid Search Monitoring tool to look for trademark bidding on some of the most anticipated gifts of this holiday season including Apple Airpods, Amazon Echo, Hatchimals, and Super Mario Odyssey. We monitored branded keywords associated with these well-known products over the extended Thanksgiving weekend and through Cyber Monday. 

What we found wasn’t pretty. We’ll go into specific examples later on, but here are some of the general findings:

We don’t need to tell you that the holiday season is the busiest time of year for retailers. Right now you are in the thick of it! Adobe is already forecasting that U.S. online sales will surpass $100 billion this holiday season–a 13.8% increase over last year!

Whether you are a trademark bidding expert or a newbie, there is a lot to know about trademark bidding. But if you do an online search for trademark bidding, you won’t find much.

This webinar took place on November 7th  and has been recorded. The recording is available here.

Have you noticed anything fishy in your paid search campaigns lately? Unexplainable metrics? Unusual spikes in cost-per-click (CPC)? Or strange dips in click-through rates (CTRs)? You start going back through your PPC reporting to try to figure out what happened. Did you or someone on your team do something by mistake that could have caused a major change in the health of your account? You can’t put your finger on the problem. Frustration and confusion follow.

If you work in paid search, you may have heard about the importance of paid search monitoring. If not, read the first post in this two-part series, where we explain the many reasons why paid search monitoring is a no-brainer for PPC professionals.