Re: Affiliates & Brand Name Keyword Advertising
Karen Laughlin wrote:
>I wanted to get some feedback on prohibiting affiliates and other
>partners from purchasing advertising based on brand name keywords, both
>creative unit based advertising (buttons and banners) and search engine
>marketing. This is coming from a strong brand name with many channels of
>distribution on and offline.
Karen, our experience with both Google and Overture is that they have
procedures to challenge bidding on a trademarked term. We have clients
who have taken advantage of that and clients who don't care if
affiliates bid on their Trademarks. Google requires that affiliates make
their status clear in the ads in any event.
First of all, you need to make it clear as part of your affiliate
agreement what specific Trademark terms the affiliates are not supposed
to use in keyword advertising. Then you have to police the use and use
the processes of the keyword bidding engines to gain their cooperation.
If you are just asking whether it is a good policy not to allow bidding
on your trademark, that is something you need to decide for yourself. If
you are doing keyword buys on your trademarks yourself, it could make
sense to have a policy against affiliates competing against you.
However, if you simply depend upon the natural results for your top
position, it does not hurt to allow affiliates to bid on your trademarks
because searchers usually click on the "natural" results before the
advertised results. If they click and buy through your affiliates, it
will be because the affiliate communicated with them in some way that
your search listing did not. What I'm saying is that if a customer comes
through the affiliate ad rather than your free link, this may well be
business that you would not have had otherwise.
--
Miki Dzugan
Rapport Online Inc
mdzugan_at_roi-web.com
www.roi-web.com
Received on Thu Oct 02 2003 - 08:53:57 CDT
