Hello to everyone,

I haven’t seen any post related to this, so I open this one about brand hijack.
This practice is used for affiliate networks to get paid for each booking they get. They bid for your keyword brand name, on their ad they show ”official webpage” or even sometimes copy your ad, which is not allowed by google policy.
I’ve risen my bids a lot, even 4 times more, I’ve created new ads to get higher CTR to increase my IS (impresion share), but even with all that effort I only get 20% of IS. I already sent a message to affiliate and google, without positive results. Has anyone any ideas to increase my IS and show my ad? similar experiences? any comment will be appreciated.

Best regards

Daniel

Hi Daniel,
I have dealt with brand bidders before, but this sounds a little strange. This kind of practice should be ruled out in the terms of the affiliate program. Usually the problem with shady affiliates bidding on your brand is just finding them. They bid on your ad during the night, on weekends, or they target other states. Basically it’s a cat & mouse game.

With only 20% IS left the affiliate can’t be hiding that well. If you can see the ads you should be able to identify the affiliate and kick him out (plus canceling all open payments). Then there’s no more incentive to spend money on your ads and the problem goes away.

… or what did I miss?

Martin

I’ve detected the affiliate, but I’m waiting for affiliate networks to block him and they are quite slow. If you say that’s all I can do to fight them that’s what I wanted to know. So let’s play cat and mouse game. Thank you for your answer Martin.

Daniel

That’s all you can do; or tell the affiliate networks that he’s breaking your affiliate agreement so you won’t pay out on his commissions – that’s sure to get them moving.

You can file a copyright dispute with Google since its not your account and it says official site. That can take a little while, but you do have recourse there.

However, he must be doing something right as well that you might want to try and learn from. If you can’t beat his with that much higher of a CPC, there might be other things he has done with the targeting, other ads, etc that I’d try to spot if I were you.

I’ll say from experience that the OTAs (online travel agencies – expedia, etc) are horrible with this. I had Booking.com bidding on my brand name for our property. We asked them to stop all SEM for our property. They are still bidding on the brand term in top position. The ad copy is not imitating the brand as badly as before.