Tradedoubler moves into PPC

As competition to its own affiliates

[Kandevil]

Anybody else seeing this? Or is this old news? It's news to me anyway, have just noticed Tradedoubler recently starting competiting with me on some of my more lucrative merchants for PPC on Overture.

One is not amused. Especially when their title is very, very similar to mine for one particular listing.

The site link I shown on the listings is tracker.tradedoubler.com but clicking their listing loads the merchants web page directly.

[jeremy goodrich]

If there was no pre announcement, I for one would be upset. Let them know how you feel, etc.

Though, if you are a very small part of their business, to them you will be 'just another affiliate'...as we all know, there are affiliates, and then there are partners.

Better treatment, imho, is just 1 perk of becomming a 'partner' with a company. The outlook change is also huge.

[Kandevil]

Suprised nobody else has commented on this.

Take into consideration, Tradedoubler have my statistics, none of my other competition have access to these. Tradedoubler know my conversion rates and how much I earn per visitor. Therefore Tradedoubler know the maximum I can bid per visitor to make a profit. Tradedoubler have another 2% to play with.

Surely competiting against their affiliates is unethical and unfair.

Also if I put users straight through to Tradedoubler's access url, they also have all my terms in their logs. So we do all the work, find profitable merchants, find profitable terms, then Tradedoubler muscle in on these using all our statistics and information against us.

[webdiversity]

I can't see it as being any more unfair that Google bidding on Adwords for Adwords related keywords, or Espotting bidding on PPC related keywords.

I can't see how your stats will be of benefit unless they know how you obtain your sales in the first place.

Tradedoubler are only trying to make money and maybe they have some problems or are trying to boost revenues for a merchant that has threatened to walk unless they get better sales.

I know that some of the affiliate networks have got significant search engines signed up as affiliates, it's all about making money.

[Drastic]

I held off replying since I don't work with tradedoubler, I'd hoped some TD folks would speak up.

If a network I work with suddenly started doing ppc in comp with what I'm doing, you better believe I'd take notice. I would be looking for another network to work with, immediately.

A network's business model is to supply a mechanism for tracking, payment, etc. This is a service for which they get paid and profit from. If they decide they want to play the affiliate side at the same time, it's a poor decision.

That said, are you sure it's not another affiliate using ppc with aff links, rather than preselling on their site?

>Google bidding on Adwords for Adwords related
That's different. That would compare to TD bidding on affiliate network terms, not specific merchant terms.

[Kandevil]

I know it is Tradedoubler and not another affiliate, as the url that its going to is tracker.tradedoubler.com this is not an affiliate url, its tradedoublers own subdomain.

[Kandevil]

Slice of humble pie required I believe.

Gulp.

Very strange way of setting up their links by another affiliate.

Mmmm PIE!

[Smiley]

It's possible that a merchant marketing through TD is using TD *only* to track and measure the results of a PPC campaign.

So perhaps its the merchant is competing with you.

Smiley