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.

Google ranks first in the United States as the most popular multi-platform web property accounting for nearly 83% of U.S. desktop search traffic—a market share of more than 61% among the leading U.S. search engine providers. With such a stronghold on unique visitors within the landscape, Google prioritizes continuous improvement of the quality of users’ search results, most recently completing an algorithm update that improves sites’ compliance with their quality guidelines and spam detection systems. More specifically, the changes deprioritize commercial links that are not correctly annotated—compliance updates that may negatively impact affiliate links.

Quitting. A word that often connotes feelings of frustration, discontent, even anger. But sometimes you leave a place because you have to, not necessarily because you want to.

In today’s complex ecommerce landscape, there are endless opportunities for bad actors to practice less-than-savory methods of promotion within the affiliate channel. Not surprisingly. this unscrupulous activity can result in detrimental waste of ad spend, time and resources for marketers. In fact, within the partnership channel alone, it’s estimated that 9% of all partnership transactions are affected by fraud and on average, 1.5% of conversions are potentially fraudulent. Bottom line: Affiliate marketers are expected to lose a staggering $1.4B to fraudulent transactions over the course of the year. 

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 ppc 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.

Each year, $1.4B is lost to affiliate marketing fraud—ad spend allocated to expand reach and acquire new customers that is instead cannibalized by nefarious affiliates. This risk makes brand safety relevant to all marketers, regardless of whether they’re actively monitoring for suspect activity within their affiliate programs.

More than ever, marketers are leaning into the affiliate channel because of its attractive performance-based pricing model that allows a cost-controlled solution to optimize in any economic climate. While the channel boasts benefits such as scale, automation and outcome-based pricing, affiliate (like anything) also carries the potential for significant risk if not monitored—compliance that is impossible to achieve through manual affiliate search audits.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES, May 11, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- BrandVerity, a global leader in brand safety and fraud prevention technology and services, today announces its freemium solution granting affiliate marketers fundamental brand safety and fraud protection at no cost. The free-to-use protection ensures channel compliance by providing always-on search monitoring across affiliate programs.

Compliance managers at credit card issuers, networks, and publishers have the unenviable task of keeping their affiliate programs compliant in a constantly changing space. Every time a credit card issuer changes a rate, for example, there is a risk that webpages across the ecosystem of content housed on the web, will be out-of-date. The risk for non-compliance is high and the consequences range from frustrated or misinformed customers to fines and legal action taken by regulatory agencies. Every word published—by the issuer, by a partner, by an affiliate, or even by a consumer—creates an opportunity for risk.

The search engines’ rules around trademark use in paid search ads in the United States are nuanced and complicated. Unless you work with them every day, as we do, it can be difficult to know when an ad complies with the rules.

What is crystal clear though is the frustration you have when you see a competitor showing up on the search engine results page (SERP) using your branded keywords. Infuriating? Yes, but is it allowed? It depends.