Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

Ever since I can remember there have been some strong views in the affiliate marketing world about brand name bidding and the latest hot topic in the industry is merchants de-duping their sales and reversing potential commissions to affiliates.

As someone that runs an affiliate network and someone that has in the past run a few affiliate sites I’ve been meaning to jot down some works about both for a while now and have finally found a few minutes to do so.

So let’s start with brand name bidding€¦

My view is quite clear - as a merchant there are very few reasons to allow brand name bidding - the only ones I can think of are:

a) You have a brand that is not possible to get trademarked
b) You’ve been waiting for ages to google to protect your trademarked brand
c) You don’t rank in position #1 in the organic search results

I’d welcome suggestions for other reasons but if your network is suggesting you allow it there is one clear reason why; they will make money from it.

I’ll highlight two things I have seen that show why on earth this is so mucked up.

A client being bullied by his affiliates

We were talking to a client based in American who sells online software. This client allows affiliates to bid on their very well known brand name and we suggested that they do this themselves and stop affiliates from doing so.

I was shocked when the client said they had spoken to their existing network and some of the affiliates and were told that if the policy changed, a number of the affiliates would stop promoting them and they would loose sales; essentially he explained that he felt he was being held to ransom by his affiliates but because they needed the sales they would allow this to happen.

What kind of world are we in when a client is saying he is being held to ransom by his affiliates!!

A network back hander

I’ve made it quite clear on previous occasions that when I have done affiliate work (especially the limited PPC I have done) I do not work with any programs that I manage; I feel this is an ethical decision that I have stuck to for years.

While we’re talking of ethics, imagine my surprise when a very large network that we were working with suggested to me that if we allowed a small closed group of brand name biddings, they would suggest that I myself was on that group.

Obviously I turned this offer down but imagine that this is not the first case of it happening.

So who should bid on the brand?

There are two very simple things you should do here/allow here:

1) Either set up your own campaign on Google, Yahoo and MSN for brand terms and bid on them yourself - you won’t need a large budget for this
2) If you work with an agency (on a % of media spend rather than % of sale basis) then get them to setup the campaign to do this, it will work out a lot cheaper.

I’d welcome further comments and suggestions from affiliates, merchants, agencies or networks about other reasons to allow this but still find it strange that there are so many closed groups for brands that really don’t need to waste money in this way.

Make sure that you come back to the blog soon for part 2 of my rant about merchant de-duping of sales!