This article is dedicated to brand bidding and we hope we’ll help you figure out why it is a problem, especially in affiliate marketing.
What is brand bidding?
Talking about affiliate marketing, we mean CPA networks. They act like facilitators between you as a business owner and different webmasters, who offer their services.
So, brand bidding is a technique that webmasters use to attract traffic to your resource. Doesn’t sound suspicious? Let’s explain this with an example.
Firstly, you as an advertiser need more traffic to your site. So, you choose to start working with a CPA network to reach this goal.
Then you choose a webmaster with good reviews. They create and launch a contextual ad, keywords of which include your brand’s name. So, if a customer types the keywords in Google or other search engines, they will most notably see the webmaster’s ad, cause it’s paid. In this way the webmaster can attract traffic to their own resource and then redirect it to yours.
It’s simple. If a client, who was attracted to your site by the webmaster, commits a target action, you pay to the webmaster. But let’s see how it works from the point of view of your money.
What’s wrong with this?
Ads created by the webmaster include your brand’s name. In fact, when a customer searches for something associated with your brand, at least they have already heard of it and remember the name. So your site would in any case be the first among the search results and the searching customer is already your target audience. In this case you don’t actually need additional ads created by the webmaster.
They use an opportunity to pass such customers off as if they were redirected to your site by them. But in fact it doesn’t function like this. So you overpay for unnecessary and moreover dishonest advertisements.
For this reason, “in most CPA it’s prohibited to use brand bidding as a source of traffic”, – says BluePear.net, a company who specializes in digital brand protection.
Such statements need to be proven. Statistics show that 80% of brand term searches result in a click on a paid ad. According to this, we can say that as a brand owner you hardly ever need these paid ads.
How can you safeguard your business from brand bidding?
It’s not that easy to detect brand bidding. A direct form of it illustrated above is very simple and surprisingly isn’t popular among webmasters. It takes only 1% of all bidding incidents, because contractors use different instruments to hide it.
First of all, you can try to detect bidding incidents yourself manually. But you’ll be able to find only the most obvious violations. In the long run, this will merge time, as efficiency will be close to zero.
The pros are:
- cheap;
- suitable for small brands.
The cons are:
- time-consuming;
- inaccurate;
- not suitable for large brands.
That’s why specially designed safeguarding mechanisms are gaining popularity. A good example of them is BluePear.net. Their service allows you to gain automatic reports on brand search queries of yours. In this case you’ll have an ability to detect third-party advertising. This way you can prove your case and will not be required to pay for dishonest contextual advertising.
But it’s not the only product with such functions. Let’s analyze them in general.
The pros are:
- the ability to detect even the most non-obvious incidents;
- continuous automatic monitoring by geo, devices, time of day criteria.
The cons are:
- money-consuming.
Now you know the brand bidding problem’s key points and have several ways to interact with it. Good luck and take care of your budget and brand’s security!
