An Adwords Puzzle

**Andrew** · 02-04-2009, 07:42

Gill, I had loads of problems with Affiliates PPC bidding on needundies.com, needundies, needundies Uk etc etc on Google, MSN, Yahoo. I managed to ban them from my program with AffiliateFuture but it still took ages for them to eventually realise that they were wasting money advertising our brand.

One tip I would give is to create ads on your PPC campaigns on your own brand name, then when the Affiliate eventually does give up, you will then appear for your own brand.

**Guest** · 02-04-2009, 08:16

Gill - do you have a rule in your aff program that states that affs must not link directly to your home page or use your url as the visible url?

If you do, then I suggest you have a chat with your aff program manager or representative or contact the affiliate directly. It's usually possible as the page is transferring to see the affiliate link details in the bottom left of the browser screen.

If you don't have that sort of usage rule in your program, it might be time to think about one -it's fairly common practice to not allow affs to bid on your company name or other key derivatives, as well as not allowing them to link directly to your site.

If it's not an affiliate, then I'd scratch my head and thank them for spending their money advertising your site!!

**entertaintoday** · 02-04-2009, 08:19

I don't get what the problem is with doing this though... Surely no matter how the customer gets to you, if they get there, it's a good thing? You have to pay your affiliate, but it's his cut that gets lowered by paying for the advertising.

If it was me I'd allow it.

**Guest** · 02-04-2009, 08:29

It's a contentious issue - some companies take the view that users would eventually find your site therefore saving you the aff commission, others take the view that allowing affs to spend their money getting you business is a sensible decision.

Personally, I've always allowed affs freedom - it encourages them to set up ppc campaigns and saves me money. Also if you've got 5 affs running ppc campaigns it crowds out competitors (although it can at times look a bit schizophrenic).

The other downside with allowing affs freedom is that it's incredibly difficult to get a balance between profit and loss for the affiliate (outgoing ppc cost vs incoming aff commission) so they tend to drop out suddenly or ask for more commission based on the volume of sales they're getting you.

**Gillf** · 02-04-2009, 10:26

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all the useful tips... I don't mind affiliates advertising us if they want to - its their spend, although I would prefer they used key words/phrases where we are not already on page one. When I clicked through I did try to see who it was, but unlike past incidents when it was easy to spot, this time the click through seemed to go directly to our site without any third party between, so I was puzzled how anyone could benefit from this (other than us of course

). Perhaps there is an affiliate out there who does not fully understand the process... as they say in Cornwall "the dear of 'm".

I'll look for it again later and also perhaps send out a mail to the affiliates.

Thanks again everyone.

Gill

Brazilian Bikinis

**Green East** · 14-04-2009, 20:59

Does sound like they are mistakenly advertising "for you" and not for them selves to gain "from you". I don't think anyone would have done that intentionally.

Perhaps a way to address it might be to email all your affiliates stating what you have noticed. No harm in reminding people what should happen and someone will probably be grateful for realising why they aren't getting their commission share.

**AndyUK** · 15-04-2009, 12:53

Letting affiliates ppc bid is a really bad idea..

Firstly if they are bidding on your brand name they are effectively stealing. If people are searching for your site by name in google, you should run your own google ppc camaign, even if it's just for your brand name. Your own name is the lowest of all bids - so your your paying next to nothing. 4p a click etc. It's easy percentage for the affiliate.. why should u pay them a commission when you done the hard work and got customers to find you direct.

they can also be very sneaky. I have seen affiliates only run name bidding out of hours.. e.g. from 10pm - 6am, in the hope you don't spot them - and at weekends etc. they can also run ads in different part of the country to where you are - so use google preview tool.

also with your own name - if peple get a discount code from you etc (on back of invoice etc) then they go to google - enter your site - click on ppc ad from affiliate - then enter discount code... you are loosing twice - discount and affiliate.

I stopped using affiliates all together - they rarely bring in new revenue, it's just a model now to take a percentage off retailers. We used to generate 50k a week from affiliates, but after a lot of research and hard figures, we rarely made any money after all the payments, over rides and discount codes... the cost of programmes was a lot - huge amount of fraud and only about 10% of it was brand new revenue.. don't be fooled by voucher sites - this is not new revenue. it's your existing customers seeing if they can save money... When you dig down with tools like hitwise and the like you soon see.

hope this helps

Andrew

**petad** · 15-04-2009, 14:09

Thanks Andrew - useful post. I was considering setting up an affiliate programme, and now I'm having second thoughts.

I'd be interested in anyone else's experiences?

Regards

Pete

**Andrew** · 15-04-2009, 18:17

As Andrew states, letting Affiliate PPC is a great way of throwing money away, we only pay about 4p for clickthroughs on our brand name and all derivaties. We had a real problem about 2 years ago with this, but as soon as we removed the affiliates from our program and advised them they were now wasting their own money the problem was overcome relatively easily. Once you have grabbed the destination URL, certainly with Google PPC, no one else can advertise under that destination URL so the problem should never occur again for us (hopefully).

You do need to manage your affiliate program very closely, we check every couple of days, to make sure there are no obvious signs of fraud. A very blunt example is we had a spate of orders that wanted to pay by cheque with values over �250, on closer examination they were very definately fraudulent, but if we had let them pass we would have lost over �25 per fraudulent order as you have to cancel the affiliate payment within 5 days!. Needless to say we would never have received any cheques.

Isn't eCommerce fun.....

An Adwords Puzzle

An Adwords Puzzle

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