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Look out everyone, new standard verbiage has started to appear on CJ affiliate merchant agreements when merchants choose not to allow trademark bidding. It reads as follows: The word that causes me the most concern here is "indirectly". When you combine that with misspellings, it prevents affiliates from using any type of PPC search on a broad or phrase match basis. Let's look at an example so you can see what I mean. I ran into this exact problem with Network Solutions, which is why I had to stop marketing them and take the $200k per year in revenues I was generating to one of their competitors. Network Solutions is a good example, because they went through a lot of changes in their policy to arrive at the type of policy based on the wording above. If you ask Network Solutions for a list of keywords to market under, the will give you terms like Domain Names and Web Sites. So I will use these terms in my examples since they are the terms they really want to cover. Here are some policies they had and what an affiliate would have to do in their account to adhere to those policies: No Bidding on our Trademark terms: No showing up when Trademarks are included with other terms: No showing up directly or indirectly for trademarks or misspellings: This could have a great chilling affect over traffic volumes since a broad match or phrase match of "Domain Names" would catch searches like "I am having a problem with my Domain Name Provider", "How to I get a Domain Name". Now with this new verbiage affiliates must identify every possible search phrase and get it EXACTLY right to insure that they don't inadvertently show up when a trademark or misspelling is typed.
Quite frankly, as our 2-year profitable relationship with Network Solutions found out, it's just easier to move to a competitor who "gets it" than to struggle with one who doesn't. Comments (6) + TrackBacks (0) | Category:
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Adam Viener
1. David Lewis on November 8, 2004 11:11 PM writes...
Right on, Adam. Merchants need to look at the real effects of their policies. You have given a great example of unintended consequences (or chaos theory). Merchants need to find affiliates who are value-added resellers and add value. Instead of cutting off all affiliates, they should select their best affiliates and work closely with them.
Permalink to Comment2. Zip on November 10, 2004 12:44 PM writes...
I agree. I was making some good money with Sirius Satellite Radio when they joined Commission Junction a couple months ago.
Then they sent out an e-mail saying that you were not allowed to bid on Sirius or any misspelling, nor were you allowed to bid on anything related to the product they were selling, such as satellite radio, radio, music, or anything related to the specific content they provide, such as NFL games.
How the hell are you supposed to sell a product when you aren't allowed to bid on terms related to it? Like you say above, it's easier to take all of the work you've put into a campaign and move it to a competitor.
Permalink to Comment3. Jeff Molander on November 11, 2004 2:46 PM writes...
This "problem" is a result of "creative" affiliates turning out to only be a few days ahead of merchants. Suddenly, merchants are smart enough to recognize that someone who types in their brand name, in most cases, is trying to navigate to their site... and that anyone who stands in between to ONLY collect a toll (as *most* affiliates do) is not adding value.
Permalink to Comment4. David Lewis on November 12, 2004 5:14 PM writes...
Jeff, what you are talking about may be true for search arbitrage. If a users is only looking for a merchant when typing in that merchant's name, why would they click on anything else? It is possible for affiliates to provide value through sites that offer different value propositions to different users. This is more to the point when talking about other non-brand terms. In those cases, affiliates will have no choice but to promote competitors. Note that this is not a threat. I am opposed to affiliates threatening merchants. This is very different from an affiliate telling a merchant that s/he will promote the merchant's competitors on his/her site if [fill in the blank].
Permalink to Comment5. Adam Viener on November 16, 2004 7:20 AM writes...
Jeff,
Remember we are talking about indirect bidding, so this is the case where the affiliate isn't actually bidding on the company's trademark terms they are bidding on generic terms and the searcher is including a trademark term or more importantly a misspelling of the trademark term in their search phrase.
Should an affiliate really be expected to come up with all the possible negative misspellings of the trademark to make sure a search like "Netwonk Sloutions domain names" isn't triggered by their bid on domain names?
Adam
Permalink to Comment6. Jeff Molander on November 17, 2004 9:55 AM writes...
David:
So, what you're saying is that if you can't have a few branded terms then you're not willing, as an affiliate, to even play around with other terms... or the merchant at all? I've heard this before too. Look - it's this simple. If the affiliate has so damn much value in the mix and such great traffic, how long will it take that affiliate to figure out that it should be taking CPC, not a pure rev share. This whole model is whacked and slanted toward the merchant. This push-pull between merchant and affiliate is un-necessary IMO and forced by this utopic, immature (frankly) model foisted on the world by merchants... expressed as an "opportunity" for affiliates to be "creative." It turns out to be nothing more than encouragement to behaive poorly (in many cases) and to complain (and rightly so since they've moved the goal post!) when they want to change things (disallow trademark bidding).
Adam:
Permalink to CommentYes, I missed that part. You're right. What's an "obvious" encroachment on a mis-spelling? That's difficult to really make a call on and I think merchants are pushing their luck on that one. I will say that crap like this www.blueflys.com is wrong. Who do I really call the foul on, though? Frankly, I call it on the merchant who is asleep at the wheel. That kind of stuff should have been taken care of YEARS ago.