A few months back Dave blogged on his concerns with affiliate marketing in PPC.
After the week I have had with affiliates I have created a follow up post to express my concerns on affiliate activity within PPC. Firstly let me tell you that not all affiliates are unethical, however there seems to be an increasing number of affiliates looking to make a quick buck using black hat tactics to deceive the merchant by violating their affiliate terms and conditions.
This week I have been pulling my hair out over a certain affiliate who has been consistently breaking our clients affiliate terms and conditions by;
Bidding On Client Brand Keywords
Using Clients URL in Affiliate PPC Display URL’s
The affiliate has made an informed decision to ignore the clients affiliate terms and conditions in order to try and fly under the radar, therefore directly competing with the clients (in house) PPC accounts.
This affiliate has also gone to the length of masking their affiliate id in their display url to avoid detection by setting up a redirected URL within their destination URL’s in their adwords account e.g www.clicktracker1.com/?324p5 ensuring the affiliate window affiliate url isn’t initially visible which then triggers their affiliate window tracking URL before landing the visitor on the client’s site.
In order to identify this unethical affiliate we ran the www.clicktracker1.com/?324p5 through a http header status checker which then provided us with the following affiliate window URL allowing us to identify the affiliate’s actually identification;
http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=XXXX&id=XXXXX
With affiliates ignoring PPC restrictions and using our clients domain name in their display URL this will jeopardise the performance of the in house PPC account as Google will only show one ad per sponsored listings page for each top level domain based on CPC bid and ad quality score.
I would recommend the following solutions to minimise unethical affiliate activity across all affiliate networks.
Trademark Brand – Trademark your brand with Google to prevent affiliates using your brand name in adtexts.
Monitor Activity – Continually monitor affiliate activity in PPC against your affiliate terms and conditions (in and out of office hours).
Google Analytics Tracking – Setup affiliate tracking in Google Analytics, passing the referring keyword that affiliates are using to direct traffic through to the site, allowing you to easily identify any brand related keywords and therefore any unethical affiliates!
Affiliate Terms and Conditions – Ensure your terms and conditions in your affiliate network are clear concise and state unethical affiliates will not be tolerated and all commissions reversed!
As an agency PPC campaign delivery manager there is nothing more frustrating than unethical affiliates. I will be continuing my blog posts on this topic over the upcoming months as I try to worm out the bad eggs from the good!
To be continued…..
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