July is the month for fireworks. Not just as an American ritual, but also in terms of search engine queries. There are far more searches for terms like “fireworks”, “firecrackers”, “bottle rockets” and other patriotic explosives in July than in any other month. Just check out the very consistent July spikes in this Google Trends graph:

We've recently completed a pair of investigations: one centered around coupon sites and another on the URL shortener ADFly.

This Sunday marks the season finale of HBO’s popular “Game of Thrones” TV series, which actually set a record for piracy earlier this year. The data from that record-setting season opener was rather impressive: over a million downloads within 24 hours and more than 163,000 users simultaneously sharing a single torrent.

At BrandVerity, we’re always looking for ways to improve our service and make our tools more useful. We know that compliance can be incredibly demanding, and our goal is to continually increase your efficiency and effectiveness.

In a recent BrandVerity investigation, we identified a new form of advertising arbitrage. That arbitrage relied on a special form of low-cost clicks: ads targeting branded keywords related to logins, sign ins, and other account activity. For example, an advertiser would bid on something like “Bank of America Login” and then load their landing page with ads based on a much more expensive keyword, such as “low mortgage rate.”

The impending closure of the Google Affiliate Network (GAN) has forced a large number of advertisers to suddenly seek an alternate network. As we've spoken with our customers that are seeking another network, I've found myself providing guidance on what questions to ask networks about their compliance capabilities. While I may have sharpened my responses with each call, I always felt that I could have answered more crisply. That's why I'm writing this post.

We know that the past few days have been very complicated for all of you who have had any sort of relationship with GAN. The sudden change has created a whirlwind through the affiliate marketing industry, with many working around the clock to develop and execute their plans of action.

One of the advantages of running paid search monitoring on a large scale is that you occasionally uncover valuable data by accident. Kick up enough dust, and sometimes it settles in an interesting, unexpected way.

After our initial findings last Friday, we uncovered some more interesting behavior in the Yahoo toolbar.

For companies looking to engineer some extra (perhaps non-organic) traffic, toolbars are a pretty clever strategy. They take much less investment than full-fledged web browsers, but afford options such as setting the user’s default search engine. Those options can help companies work their way into users’ browsing activity.