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.

After observing the Super Bowl trademark be subjected to potential misuse and misrepresentation by advertisers, we decided to look into the paid search surrounding another monumental event: the Oscars.

Brands and agencies do it, as do bars and restaurants, but do your affiliates take full advantage of the price anchoring effect when creating a contextual environment that upsells products on their websites?

For decades, the big game has been television advertising’s darling. It draws in record or near-record ratings each year. That makes it a stage in high demand—brands are even willing to spend $4 million for 30 seconds on screen.

Credit: Robert Scoble

Yesterday, Google concluded a 6-year legal contest with the Australian government’s consumer protection agency, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The Australian High Court ruled in favor of Google, who had argued that it was not responsible for the messages in the ads placed by advertisers on its results pages.