Trademark brand bidding is legal today - let the madness begin Closed brand bidding groups - why do they exist
May 06

This is a quick snippet of a great post over at the Moose, all about Brand Bidding Groups:

  • Search for “Sky TV” on Google and you’ll see about 5 ads, a couple of which have sky in the bought domain (hmm). Most of which if not all of them are Buy.at affiliates. The landing pages are of reasonable quality, though not long ago some were directing straight to the merchant via an affiliate link.
  • Extend this to the numerous hybrid phrases like “subscribe to sky” and there are even less ads & so forth. So these affiliates are even lazy sycophants on hybrid terms (brand+generic).
  • Check out “watch football on sky tv”, there are no BBGs, which suggests they are only [exact matching] and not even broad matching. Talk about lazy & milking the brand!
  • Yet, when you extend this still further to generic terms like “watch football on tv”, there is not a sausage (not a single BBG Affiliate). That’s how lazy most of them are!

Now imagine you are someone who builds useful organic sites and drops cookies in the hope that people will come back to the merchant directly and purchase. How many of your cookie sales are being stolen by the Brand Bidding Groups who are just dropping the cookie when the customer searches for “sky”, as an example.

Being someone who does build organic sites it has made me think that I will ask now if a merchant allows brand bidding. I’d prefer to know if I have the chance of being stolen from. If you are a merchant and you want to make it public then either post here or PM me as I am sure I can help you:)

Doug wondering

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written by Doug \\ tags:

3 Responses to “Affiliates stealing from affiliates”

  1. Moose Says:

    Doug do you feel like creating a merchant list where merchants have to opt out ie they don’t have bbg’s or don’t dedupe on own brand activity in paid search.

  2. Doug Says:

    Would love to…

    Emailed you

    Doug

  3. Barry Wright Says:

    Hey guy, I would be very interested to see the results of your list, especially merchants who dedupe across their own PPC channels.
    As a seasoned affiliate I can tell most the time when I am losing money with CBBG’s. However its almost impossible to tell without running extensive tests whether a merchant is using adwords and their own PPC activities to lower their ‘affiliate’ outgoings and overwriting local last referrer tracking by bidding on their own brand.
    I also assume that many brands may be forced to dedupe when bidding on their brand now, after the new google trademark rules have come into action and they may be seeing their own trademark bidded on by comparable competitors.

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