Brand protection has become an essential topic for online stores. However, most businesses wait a little too long before taking any real action to have a proper solution in place.
We're going to walk you through a 5-point brand protection checklist that will give you some practical, easy-to-follow advice to protect your business from the various risks that are out there online.
If you're ready to protect your brand, then let's get started with the checklist.
1. Paid Search Defense: Protecting Your Most Valuable Advertising Channel
For a lot of ecommerce businesses out there, paid search is still their main revenue-driving channel.
Customers who search for your brand name are often your most qualified, high-intent audience. However, the challenging part is that paid search is also a prime target for ad hijacking, non-compliant affiliates and competitors bidding on your trademarked keywords - and that drives your ad costs up dramatically.
So What's Ad Hijacking? Ad hijackers are third-party advertisers, often including rogue affiliates or direct competitors, who bid on your branded search keywords.
These rogue advertisers run ads that look suspiciously similar to yours, but the link either sends customers through their affiliate link (to "steal" a sale that should have gone to you anyway) or worse yet, sends them to a competitor's website or a fraudulent landing page.
The High Price of Non-Compliant Affiliates and Competitors When non-compliant affiliates bid on your brand terms against your affiliate program's guidelines, they mess up your attribution data, inflate your costs, and confuse your brand's loyal customers.
And when competitors bid on your terms, they drive up your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and siphon off your warmest leads.
Here is Why This Matters & what to Do About It. Paid search is likely your highest ROI marketing channel. However, you can't possibly keep an eye on all these violations manually, as hijackers can hide their ads based on location, device, and time of day.
That's where an automated solution comes in. A tool like BrandVerity will monitor your paid search campaigns 24/7, providing the evidence you need to detect violations, enforce your affiliate agreements and protect your main revenue stream.
2. Marketplace Defense: Fighting Counterfeits & Unauthorised Sellers
Now, when you think of online shopping, marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are still the first places that come to mind. However, they're also key placements for counterfeiters and unauthorised sellers who can erode your product's pricing and damage your brand's reputation.
Spotting Counterfeit Products Counterfeits damage your brand's reputation when customers receive a low-quality product, leading to negative reviews and a loss of trust.
The key is vigilance: Regularly check for products that look like yours but are being sold by third-party sellers you don't recognize.
The Impact of Unauthorised Sellers. Unauthorised sellers can create legitimate-looking products, often breaking your minimum advertised price policy. This undercuts your authorised retail partners and creates price erosion, diminishing your brand's value.
What to Do Next: Use programs like Amazon's Brand Registry to report infringements and gain more control over your listings. Crucially, you also need to check how these sellers get traffic. Rogue resellers often run paid search ads on your brand terms, directing customers to their unauthorised Amazon or eBay listings. This is where a paid search monitoring tool comes in - to cut off their traffic at its source (Google).
3. Domain Defense: Monitoring for Cybersquatting & Typosquatting
Your domain name is your digital front door. Cyber threats can target your brand's identity through domain squatting, confusing customers and diverting traffic.
What's Cybersquatting? Cybersquatting is the act of registering a domain name that's identical or confusingly similar to your established brand, with the intent to profit from it. They may try to sell the domain back to you at an inflated price or use it for dodgy purposes.
The Risks of Typosquatting Typosquatting targets common misspellings of your brand's domain name (e.g., "search Google for BrandVerityy with the extra y at the end).
A small typo can lead customers to a fake site designed to steal personal information, install malware, or simply display rival ads.
What to Do: Proactively register multiple domain extensions (.com, .net, .org) and common misspellings of your brand name. Use a domain monitoring service or the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) to file disputes against squatters.
4. Social Defense: Reporting Impersonation Accounts on Social Media
As social media grows, so does the threat of impersonation. Fake accounts can harm your reputation, mislead your customers and run scams under your name. Protecting your social presence is as critical as defending your store.
The Rise of Impersonation on Social Platforms. Impersonation happens when someone sets up a fake account using your brand name, logo, or likeness. They might be selling fake products, trying to phish out your followers with login details, or scamming them with fake "giveaway" contests.
How to Take Action: Get your social media accounts verified on the likes of Instagram, X (Twitter) and Facebook. This gives users a straightforward way to tell who's the real deal. Look for your brand's social media mentions and hashtags for any suspicious activity. Don't wait on this one - use the reporting tools each platform provides to flag up the fake accounts pronto.
5. Content Defense: Tracking Down Stolen Product Images and Copy
Theft of content is rife online. Your original product images, product descriptions and blog posts - these are valuable assets. When they get stolen, it can deal a real blow to your sales, SEO rankings and brand image.
Understanding Content Theft in the eCommerce Space. Content theft occurs when someone copies your original images or product descriptions and uses them on their own site. This can confuse customers for considerable time, and if Google thinks your content is "duplicate", your SEO rankings will take a hit.
How to Take Action: Use tools like Google's reverse image search or Copyscape to track down the culprits and send 'em a nice little takedown notice under DMCA. Keep in mind, though, that fraudulent advertisers will often try to use your official ad copy and images to create their own paid search ads. Having a paid search monitoring solution can spot when your creative assets are being used by others in ads, helping you stop them in their tracks.
Protecting Your Brand Across Multiple Channels
Brand protection isn't a one-off job. It's an ongoing commitment that requires you to stay on top of multiple touchpoints. From defending your branded paid search terms, to monitoring your marketplace sales on Amazon, to keeping your social media accounts safe, there's loads of stuff that can go wrong in the digital space.
By getting on the front foot and addressing these five areas - Paid Search Defense, Marketplace Defense, Domain Defense, Social Defense and Content Defense - you set your business up for long-term success. The key is to stay switched on, stay informed, and make use of the right tools - like BrandVerity - to keep your most important revenue channels secure.
