In the vast landscape of online marketing, affiliates play a crucial role in driving traffic and sales to businesses. However, there’s still an ongoing concern regarding nefarious affiliates’ brand-bidding activity on the SERP. Namely, that some affiliates exploit Google's tools as an excuse for dubious tactics.
Paid search is a powerful tool for businesses to reach relevant audiences online. When used effectively, it can help businesses increase brand awareness, drive traffic to their website, and generate leads and sales. However, there is a dark side to paid search: bad actors can use your brand name to create fraudulent ads that can damage your brand's reputation and impact your bottom line.
An Introduction to Affiliate Compliance
Affiliate marketing programs have the potential to add great value for a company, but a few competent scammers can quickly and vastly reduce their profitability. The technical sophistication of abusive affiliates often far outweighs the merchant’s reciprocal knowledge, allowing marketing fraud to run rampant.
This guide aims to provide extensive information about fraudulent affiliate tactics so that merchants can better understand how affiliate abuse operates, the impact of it on a company, and methods for detection and prevention. We hope that this guide can serve as a step towards an overall reduction in affiliate abuse by granting merchants a deeper understanding of the ways that unethical affiliates manipulate the system.
At BrandVerity, we provide merchants and affiliate managers with tools to detect online brand and trademark abuse. Two services, PoachMark and the Affiliate Watchlist, grant clients effective management tools for their affiliate programs by detecting affiliate abuse of paid search policies and creating a continually updated list of affiliate abusers. If you have any questions or are interested in partnering with BrandVerity, please contact us.
An affiliate marketing program is a marketing strategy in which a brand partners with a third-party called publishers, or affiliates, to promote its products or services in exchange for a commission on sales.
In a recent webinar hosted by BrandVerity, David Iglesias, a seasoned professional from the sales team, delved into the strategies for safeguarding your brand on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This blog post will summarize the key online brand protection strategy tips from David's webinar, focusing on the prevalent tactics, examples of infringements, and recommendations for brand protection in the paid search landscape.
When allocating spend to paid search campaigns, marketers expect to expand their reach and acquire new customers to justify a return on spend for the channel. However, a disadvantage of paid search is that the channel’s payment model is based on clicks—a structure that creates a low barrier for entry to digital fraudsters and contributes to $1.4B dollars lost to affiliate marketing fraud annually.
With access to a near-infinite number of platforms and partners, and an ever evolving technology and regulatory landscape, a brand's need for a holistic compliance approach is paramount, something that ASDA is fully aware of.
For marketing and legal teams in regulated industries, monitoring for compliance online is difficult and time-consuming. Manually monitoring thousands or even millions of pages across multiple affiliates, partners, and/or third-party sites is nearly impossible and leads to critical content being missed. Introducing BrandVerity’s automated Web Compliance solution, which empowers marketing and legal teams to ensure airtight brand protection and compliance of online content and offers. Our solution provides companies with a comprehensive and efficient way to identify content compliance risks and take action immediately.
As I write this, I’m working from home, as is the rest of the BrandVerity team. For some of us, that means juggling how to home school our kids during the workday. For others, it translates into having their dogs in their laps during video calls. All in all, though, we are a lucky group to be able to have jobs that enable us to work from home. Our gratitude goes out to those who are not able to do the same, yet are helping our communities function as normally as they can, from healthcare and hospital workers to those at our grocery stores and pharmacies.
