Detecting Brand Bidding

Looking for help detecting bidding on our brand in Yahoo

[robdwoods]

Hi all,

In our affiliate program we disallow bidding on our brand name in PPC. This is fairly easy for me to detect and correct in Google, despite the fact that the offenders like to geo-target areas away from my location and day-part. It's fairly easy to parse the Google PPC URL to find the affiliate ID and remove them from our program.

Does anyone know of a way to determine which affiliate is bidding on my branded terms in Yahoo? The URL there seems to be more heavily encrypted than Google PPC URLs. While I can see it's an affiliate doing a redirect to our site, I cannot tell which affiliate it is.


P.S. before a lot of affiliates get excited and say I should allow bidding on my branded terms, when someone searches for my branded terms I'm getting that sale anyway from other work I've done, I'm paying the affiliates to drive new sales, not drop cookies on users already looking to find my site.

[MrHard]

Using conditions is a slippery slope, For example, what if a customer pays by phone, I'm paying affiliates for online sales, etc. Greed can think of a thousand reasons to skim.

[eljefe3]

Your affiliate software doesn't show you where the clicks came from? It should and from there it should be pretty easy to find out which URL/affiliate is bidding on your brand name. Of course you could have someone manually search and then see which affiliate has bids on your name.

[robdwoods]

what if a customer pays by phone

currently if a customer pays by phone the affiliate does not get paid. We have a predictable % of sales which occur by phone compared to online. We adjust the affiliate compensation accordingly to compensate for sales they may drive that cannot be tracked.

[robdwoods]

Your affiliate software doesn't show you where the clicks came from? It should and from there it should be pretty easy to find out which URL/affiliate is bidding on your brand name. Of course you could have someone manually search and then see which affiliate has bids on your name.

I actually feel pretty silly but the easiest way to tell was to simply click on the ad, purchase something myself, see which affiliate that order number was attributed to, then cancel the order.

Thanks for the responses.

Rob