Yesterday and today, there was an affiliate who has been bidding on our brand name and outbid us. We had big drop in our sales (may or may not related to this incident.)
Affiliates. Read each Merchant's TOS before you bid on the brand terms. Don't do it just because you CAN do it. You will spend lots of money and we WON"T pay a dime to the affiliates who violated the TOS. Yes, you will not get paid for even previous earnings.
If you think it is not fair, think again. The TOS cleraly states that we don pay for affilliate who violated the TOS. Bidding on brand terms is a serious one for us.
I guess you're just letting off steam, but I don't think that the types of people that defy TOS' will give a flying fig at a message they read on a message board.
If Any of you are bidding on the brand terms after the Google policy change, read TOS again for each merchant. You should be happy about us not suing you.
I did have some sales but dropped them just because they thought they owned the Websters dictionary.
I certainly wouldn't entertain a business relationship with you, no danger!
This guy broke the rules, kick him out and send him his money. To keep the money he earned before you changed the TOS is dirty and unethical and you're making yourself no better than him. You want to sue him, take him to court, crush him, teach him a lesson so every other filthy dirty affiliate out there knows you mean business . . . refresh my memory again - why do you have affiliates?
We have never failed to pay the commision to our affiliates for many years.
We may have to deduct the ill-earned commission from the affiliates and kick them out.
But why do you bid on brand terms when merchants say do not do it several times? We have sent several emails recently specifically not to do it. We even changed our welcome email to emphasize "Non Brand term bidding policy" in red.
There ARE still a few affiliates doing it.
It is because they know our brand name is popular and the conversion is REALLY good. And there is no one else bidding on them except..us. So you would think you canmake fortune after thie Google policy change if you out bid us only 10-20% of the traffic, you might be OK.
Wrong. If you bid on our brand terms knowing that it is against TOS, it is unethical.
If you bid on our brand terms without knowing it, you need to read TOS closely.
I sent out an email to our affiliate program manager about the affiliate. She will decide what to do with the affiliate. Could be just a warning...could be a kickout.
Then ascertain where you appear in organic results. If you don't hit number one each time, then you will suffer potential leakage of business. A shrewd affiliate fills this void by limiting this leakage of customers, in essence protecting the brand at the forefront of search in return for commission.
It's actually surprising how many brands cannot even convert on various phrases / variations / exact match of their own brand name.
When we do this, we call it a litmus test on the brand ROI. If successful we look at more product targeted terms. If the ROI is still favourable, then we may even go more generic.
When a merchant remains blinkered to the pros & cons, we give them a wide berth & usually don't even bother exploring further. There are numerous merchants we give at least a million $ in sales each year on non brand related terms becuase they are open minded.
A compromise maybe to say, please don't bid on an exact match, but phrases and mispellings are acceptable.
Now if your epc is publically available to affiliates like on CJ, a brand name which converts should have a high EPC which looks attractive to recruiting more quality affiliates which equates to more sales. It can be a win win situation.
If your brand consists of two words, an advertiser - maybe even your competitors, using enough negative keywords can appear for your brand without actually bidding on it, because of broadmatch.
All too often the merchant clamps down on affiliates rather than competitors, then when an agency gets involved obo merchant they bid too much, so many bid values we see made by agencies are laughable. Affiliates are very good at high ROI with low CPA. The affiliate is the one taking the financial risk and it's not in their interest to flitter money when an agency gets a kick back or cut from both ends.
Otherwise, we could always get into a debate on who actually owns the brand, the consumer or the trademark holder.
[edited by: Qui_Gon_Jinn at 11:29 pm (utc) on Jan. 19, 2005]
For the brand terms, we are number 1 for most of the keywords and variations naturally.
For paid search, we don't worry about the competitors. If they bid on our brand names, they will get sued and you will see the names on the major newspapers. Those big companies do not risk for small money. They could lose more than a few million dollars by doing it.
For the TOS, that's why we sent a few reminders to the affiliates. For the last two years, we barely had problems with the affiliates. They knew the rules and followed. A few month ago, we openes oiur affiliate application to smaller publishers and I believe this one is one of the new ones. If you had little problems for almost two years, that is pretty good affiliates I would say.
Is the "you" you are addressing on this forum? If not, then why are you here griping at us about it? I think you should deal with the person/people causing the trouble directly.
You think you own the world, but affiliates know better than to think there is only one merchant in each niche. He will most likely drop you if you treat him poorly.
And I am not talking about just a few thousand dollars of sales here. It is more than that. And yes, we have been warning those affiliates who violate the TOS and most of them didn't do it again. I actually do not know if we kicked anyone out for the last year. If I am an affiliate program manager, I wouldn't want to bother with those small affiliates who just want to cheat on the affiliate program.
There are so many hard working and ethical affiliates on our affiliate program. Only few of them (mostly new ones) try to make quick money by violating the TOS with/without knowing it.
Eventually it is our affiliate program manager's decision on this. She has been on the same line with me on this for the last few days. I have warned her and other people in our company that there will be a few affiliates who will bid our our brand names, because I know it will make quick moeny for them from my experience as an affiliate.
Usually our affiliates are very cooperative and we support them in many ways. I hope we can keep the relationship that way.
"If you don't like the TOS, leave the program"
That is the concensus there. We have paid every single penny even when the kicked out affiliates violated the TOS seriously. Google Adsense DOESN"T pay anything after they suspend the account.
I think large affiliates know the rule better and play by the rule. They do not risk just for quick money. They care about the long term relationship, which is what WE care.
[webmasterworld.com...]
I just checked and that CJ affiliate has gone from number one about a year ago, to the bottom of the list. It's hard to put the genie back in the bottle after you insult people that are risking their own money to sell your product or service. You might want to think about that before you send out some stupid email to all affiliates like that other company. I'm sure their entire IT department while feeling good about being tough on the TOS, are now looking for new jobs.
Something to think about!
You are right... I was in the same situation.. But with linkshare program..
Now I don't have single link to the linkshare and CJ on my websites...
Thanks for the link.
In fact I read the thread before. Yes, I agree that there should be an explanation before the termination. I think our affiliate program manager is more reasonable and less arrogant, :), so I think she will handle this properly when she comes back from a business trip.
MarkHutch, Thanks for the heads up.
Since I didn't send the email reminder to our affiliates and our copy writer reviews the emails, I believe the emails were nicer than I am saying here.
I guess I am just letting off steam as christh said earlier...because I am cooling down a little bit now. :)
Click Here For Mystery Merchant - even though we can't tell you who it is, we assure you it is a good place to buy stuff. come on just try it.
It was something Interflora tried to do in the UK, and is used as an example benchmark of how not to & can't do with regard to imposing restrictions on publishers - whether an affiliate or not.
To the point where you were not actually permitted to use the word Interflora in an text link or copy.
OTOH, the claim of "risk" bidding on most brand names isn't quite accurate. If a company has a recognizable brand, the conversion rates from their own in-house PPC programs, organic listings, and affiliates who bid on the brands tends to be much higher than most generic keywords.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to at least request that affiliates keep bids on branded terms to below the official site. I always stay away from the ones that start telling you how you can and can't optimize your site, especially the ones that don't want to use their brand name in your site but then post links in the network that contain the brand.........
You should allow your affiliate to do what they can to get sales for you. That way you can concentrate on product development and affiliate support.
Strange...
We have already paid for our brand name over the years and its not out of the question to ask affiliates to steer clear. If not, merchants just end up paying for their brand name all over again through commission payments.
