trademark bidding

Setting Violator's Commissions at Zero Hurts Other Affiliates

This morning as I was reviewing affiliate applications in our clients‘ programs, I had to dig into one specific affiliate’s feedback (it was a ShareASale-based affiliate program, and they equip their advertisers with this great feature). It was their negative score that raised a red flag. This affiliate positioned himself […]

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Lori Weiman of The Search Monitor on Affiliate Paid Search Compliance

Last week The Search Monitor, creators of the Affiliate Monitor tool, announced: The Search Monitor analyzed the compliance level of all affiliates found advertising across The Search Monitor community to create a snapshot of affiliate behavior. The analysis found that 71% of affiliates using paid search are following the program

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Case Study on Affiliate Brand Abuse in PPC (SEM) Channel

Earlier this month @SMNWebcasts tweeted: Naturally, I was among the first folks to request the whitepaper; but only now I’ve finally found time to blog about it. The case study starts by quoting some sobering statistics from an analysis by Artinsic Interactive of “hundreds of advertisers”: There are no hard

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5 Tools to Police Affiliates Violating Trademark Restrictions

Trademark violations happen in multiple forms, but the more frequent ones are: bidding on trademarks in paid search campaigns and registering domain names with merchant’s trademarks in them. Both of these methods yield fairly easy money to violating affiliates, and neither of these will ever stop. Also, just because you

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Affiliates, Domain Names and Trademark Violations

It isn’t unusual to see the following affiliate paid search policy set out and enforced by a merchant: In the vast majority of cases the above PPC policy is one of those best practices that every affiliate program should implement. The reason is obvious: such affiliate activity adds no value

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Trademarked Names in Affiliate Domains

A merchant has just asked: I have an affiliate that just registered “trademarknameproducttype.com” and is going to start marketing our new [trademark name] product line. Is this acceptable? I know he’s doing marketing for us, however he’s using our trademarked name. The intent of the above-quoted affiliate is obvious —

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Trademark Violators — a Type of Parasite

While parasitism in affiliate marketing frequently being synonymized only with downloadable applications that intrude with the end user’s shopping experience with a purpose of facilitating cookie setting/swap on the customer’s machine, the term should really include everyone who is extracting wealth from merchants/advertisers without assisting them in any way to

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