· Issue 19 · August 2012
k r a m e d a Tr Bidding S
Mike Gunn
Good, Bad and Ugly of Gunn e k i by M
their site only to have the customer leave and go to their
hould affiliates be allowed to bid on your trademark or brand name?
favorite coupon or cash back site (affiliate). Merchants often pay for marketing costs (direct mail,
You’re paying for multi-channel advertis-
email, paid search charges) and also pay commissions to
ing, which drives traffic to search engines or directly to
affiliate partners for the same sale, thereby increasing the
your site, and someone else, the affiliate, is driving traffic
cost of each sale.
though paid search using your trademark.
Possible Solution »»Add a no trademark bidding paid search policy
The Good: Trademark (example: Target) and trademark plus
»»Provide a list non-compete keywords »»Consider reduced commissions to coupon sites
(example: Target Discounts) bidding returns more SERP (Search Engine Return Pages) results for your brand. The more ads returned on a trademark means that your competition is less likely to show up on that page, plus your
The Ugly Truth: If you bid on your own trademark, allowing affiliates to also bid will drive up the cost of your clicks.
site will show up several times, which means more clicks to your site.
Policing Trademark Bidding Violations
If your trademark or domain name is a general key-
Merchants should be monitoring the paid search en-
word term like Weddingcakes.com, there will be lots of
gines to ensure that affiliates are not violating your trade-
competitors buying paid search clicks for wedding cake/s,
mark policies. Popular monitoring solutions such as The
and therefore the more times you show up on that SERP,
Search Monitor and BrandVerity have flexible filtering op-
the more you control the keyword.
tions that perform keyword trademark bidding across mul-
So, if affiliates are willing to bid on the trademark term, it might make sense to let them, so that you show up several times on the SERP. There are several affiliates who earn commissions by
tiple paid search engines and timeframes. Affiliates bidding on trademarks are usually quick to comply in removing the paid search ads once notified of the violation.
bidding on misspellings of your trademark, which you may
Just remember to be very stern about your trademark
or may not be included in your paid search marketing plan.
bidding policies and terminate any affiliate from your pro-
Possible Solution »»Consider allowing trademark misspelling and trademark plus bidding »»Consider setting a bid limit on trademarks
gram who does not comply within a reasonable period or has been previously warned and committed a second time violation. Merchants, the good news is that all of this is in your control. You can use website analytics (Google) to track the
The Bad: The reality is that merchants who have aggressive online and offline marketing initiatives will drive traffic to
initial click to your site and the click from an affiliate to credit each accordingly thereby understanding the true ROI of each online channel.
Mike Gunn is an OPM with an extensive history working with Catalog & Retail merchants.
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