Trademark Poachers

A few months back Yahoo started allowing people to send traffic to a site that they do not own, so the trademark abusers are now on Yahoo. Yahoo is a little trickier though because you can’t right click the link and see the contents of it like you can on Google. Yahoo is all encrypted.
Fortunately there is a Firefox plug-in that will help with this. It is called Tamper Data and it shows you all http requests after you click a given link. Thank you to a merchant for bringing this to my attention. It is a handy tool to have in the fight against trademark abuse.

This information was posted as a comment to another post on this site. It warrants being a post of its own.

Here’s some information on how to track trademark poachers that utilize geo targeting to avoid merchants from discovering their ads.

On Google:
Do a search for your URL or trademarked expression then add the following to the end of the address for the results:

&gl=us&gr=us-ST&gcs=CITY

Replace the “ST” with the two letter abbreviation for the state and replace “CITY” with the name of the city you’d like to have search results for. Make sure you hit the enter key after making the changes to see the results.

For Example a results url of http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&q=WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM&btnG=Search

Becomes…..
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&q=WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM&btnG=Search&gl=us&gr=us-IL&gcs=Chicago

This works quite well in Google but variations on this method are required for Yahoo & MSN. I’ll try to post those here on another occasion.

In addition to doing this you may need to check the link properties (linked URL) to verify what ads are actually yours. I’ve seen too many instances of affiliates that go so far as to copy ads word-for-word so you may not even notice an ad as not being yours. I recommend occasionally making small changes to an ad’s punctuation or capitalization to make it easier to see which ads belong to you.

Over the past year or so we have seen the proliferation of a new breed of cheater in the affiliate marketing industry. This is not about affiliates using adware or spyware or anything like that. It is much more simple and possibly even worse for affiliates, merchants and the industry than rogue software applications. Fortunately, it is easy to detect and with the right enlightenment and education this new trend can be eradicated and affiliates can get their conversions back and merchants can increase the ROI from the affiliate channel.

Please read all of the pages of this blog before you pass judgment as there are many different aspects and interpretations to what we will be talking about. If you have a dissenting opinion, feel free to post it.

Feel free to comment if you like. No login is necessary to comment.

The networks have much more to do than monitor affiliates abusing a merchant’s PPC terms. With adware and spyware as big as they are today, the networks are working to keep up with this element of rogue affiliates.

This issue is the merchant’s or the affiliate manager’s responsibility to police and maintain compliance. Also, it is the merchant’s responsibility to spell out in no uncertain terms their policy on paid search affiliates. A merchant who sees what is going on, gets upset and lashes out, all without having a PPC policy in place needs to step back and take a look at themselves as they were the one who left the door unlocked.

I have posted what I feel to be a fair policy for affiliates using PPC whether you want to allow trademark bidding or not. It will need some customization to fit your site, but feel free to copy all or part of it and use it.

I am an affiliate marketer and have been for several years. I have seen many developments in the affiliate marketing space. As the use of adware and spyware applications have become more and more widespread, the focus of those in the industry who police compliance issues has turned to these applications. While I fully understand that adware and spyware have a huge impact in the affiliate marketing industry, I also see other issues that tend to lurk in the shadows.

I truly believe that the impact of affiliates abusing merchants’ trademarks surpasses that of adware when assessing the financial damages to merchants with affiliate programs. If a merchant has a monthly expense of $50,000 in the affiliate channel and 15% of these commissions ($7,500) are being paid to affiliates who are doing nothing but abusing the merchants’ trademarks and domain name(s), then that means that those who drive incremental sales could be earning more if the merchant did not have the “dead weight” of paying those who add no value at all.

It is not my purpose to get anyone in trouble nor is it my purpose to shock anyone or point any fingers at anyone. My only purpose here is to educate affiliates and merchants about what is happening that they could be unaware of. The impact of this activity affects other affiliates as well as the merchant. Furthermore, it makes some affiliate programs show unrealistic EPC figures, which can lead to the failure of those entering the industry who do not know what to look for, setting the newbies up to fail so to speak.

I hope that this blog will open your eyes to what is going on around you and empower you to change it. Be you an affiliate who can help by letting your affiliate managers and merchants know that this behavior is unacceptable or a merchant who sees how you are being fleeced and puts a stop to these poachers in your program, you can make a difference and help get the PPC segment of the affiliate marketing industry back on track.

I will not monetize this blog in any way as this is not a mission to make money. It is a mission to keep the affiliate marketing industry healthy and alive and to allow merchants to pay higher commissions to those affiliates who do add value and drive incremental traffic.

Thanks for reading it.

Clear the cookies on your computer. Once a Google ad is shown a number of times and it is not clicked on, Google stops displaying this ad on your computer. Clearing your cookies and looking for the ad again should show you what you are looking for.
Before clearing your cookies, you can go to Google’s Ad Preview Tool and select a location other than your own and view the ads. This will show you when an affiliate is using geo-targeting in an attempt to keep from seeing them.

This is not a viable solution because most PPC search engines score a campaign on many factors. If you tell your affiliates that they can’t bid more than 10 cents on a given term such as your trademark, then you set your own bids to 30 cents to cover it, their ad can still show up over yours if:

• Their CTR is higher
• Their ad content is better or more relevant
• Their campaign has a history of high CTR (which most trademark poachers usually do)

Furthermore, you have no way of knowing how much they are bidding. They can tell you they are bidding a dime when they are bidding a dollar and you have no way of proving anything.

Setting bid amount restrictions for affiliates is an unenforceable rule. It used to be a viable solution, but it is no longer a good idea and only shows an educated affiliate that your program is not up to date and that the manager probably does not know what they are doing.

Go to Google and type in the merchant’s name with or without the dotcom, either merchantname or merchantname.com. Look at the PPC ad that has the merchant’s URL displayed on it. Right click the link and select “Copy link location”. Then paste the results into a notepad. You will see the URL where the link really goes. If this is an affiliate URL and you do not allow this, you have some work to do and you need to do it quickly before any future affiliates see this and are turned off to your program all together.

Should I Trust My Affiliate Manager to Keep Up With This?
It is certainly their job, but just as any other employee or contractor needs to be kept in check, so should your affiliate manager. If you are paying your affiliate manager on volume of the affiliate channel, you should re-consider this as they have no motivation to stop the cheating. Reported “Volume” of sales is not the real goal, getting your affiliates to bring you new customers, ones you can’t easily get yourself - make sure your affiliate manager knows the goal is new sales. Your other marketing channels grow your brand, your affiliate program should do that as well - it should not cannibalize the other channels.

I have brought this to the attention of my affiliate manager and they have failed to stop it. I want it stopped.
If this is the case, you need to fire your affiliate manager and hire one with the ability to stop it and the responsibility to police it on your behalf.

If you, as a merchant, run your own in-house PPC campaigns on your trademarks (highly recommended), you need to make sure that affiliates are not copying your ad and stepping in between you and your customers. Keep them out for long enough to get a pattern of how much traffic you are getting through your trademark campaigns, then you will be able to see fluctuations in the traffic levels. These fluctuations will often be an indicator that someone is poaching your trademarks.

Also, a trademark poacher will often use a URL that looks like it is a PPC management firm or some kind of ROI tracking tool. In Google, anything that follows “&q=” should be a domain owned by the merchant or by a service provider they use, anything else is likely a poacher. At MSN and Yahoo, you can’t see the domain in the ad url, so you may have to click on it and observe what cookies are created to learn that it’s an affiliate link - this technique also works at Google. Intentionally clicking on someone’s ad costs them money, helps their ads performance stats and may violate some ppc search engines terms, so do your research before clicking.

Change trademarkpoachers and trademarkpoachers.com to your name and select whether or not you allow trademark bidding at all.

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TrademarkPoachers.com Paid Search Advertising Policy for Affiliates:

Affiliates are not allowed to bid on our marks and domain names including Trademark Poachers, TrademarkPoachers or TrademarkPoachers.com in any PPC search engines, including but not limited to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Exceptions for affiliates with dedicated product websites may be granted on a case by case basis.

Affiliates are not allowed to use TrademarkPoachers.com in the Display URL of a paid search ad bidding on “TrademarkPoachers”, “Trademark Poachers” or “TrademarkPoachers.com”.

In short, you are not allowed to use direct-to-merchant PPC when bidding on our trademarks. When bidding on our trademarks, you must send all traffic to your own site and then have the customer click through to our site from there.

Using direct-to-merchant PPC when bidding on products is allowed but we reserve the right to grant this privilege to select professional PPC affiliates. Please contact us regarding this.

Any affiliate who is caught bidding on our trademarks and sending the traffic directly to our site, as if the ad were placed by us, will be immediately terminated from the program and all commissions will be reversed. In order to maintain a level playing field for all affiliates, as well as to maintain our own ROI in our affiliate program, we have a Zero Tolerance Policy here and there are no second chances.
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This policy does several things:

1. It allows legitimate direct-to-merchant PPC traffic. This traffic and these affiliates who promote products can be the best friend of any affiliate program.

2. It disallows affiliates from poaching your trademark and domain name and infringing on your own ROI as well as keeping them from cannibalizing your other affiliates and their return days.

3. It clearly spells out that you do or do not allow affiliates to bid on your trademarks.

4. It clearly gives affiliates a warning that if they are cheating by poaching your trademarks and you catch them, they will pay the ultimate price of removal and forfeiture of all commissions.

5. This policy will tell an educated affiliate that you are interested in keeping your program fair so that affiliates will be able to perform based on their ability and will not be hindered by a trademark poacher.

You can open your own Google Adwords account, bid on “merchantname” and “merchantname.com” and monitor this and continue to review the ads that show up on a regular basis to make sure an affiliate is not poaching them. Also you need to expressly disallow bidding on “merchantname” and “merchantname.com” and displaying your URL in the ad in your program terms and make it very clear that you will immediately remove any affiliate caught doing this and reverse all of their commissions. This means that an affiliate will not be able to bid on your trademarks and send the traffic directly to your site.

If you do not want to open your own Adwords account, still disallow bidding on “merchantname” and “merchantname.com” and displaying your URL in the ad in your program terms and make it very clear that you will immediately remove any affiliate caught doing this and reverse all of their commissions. This will keep your program from being held hostage by a trademark poacher who acts as a parasite to your other affiliates as well as your own bottom line.

I have posted some sample terms here if you wish to review them. You may copy and paste them and use them verbatim if you wish to have the most successful affiliate program possible.