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Compliance Issues to Watch
Out for This Holiday Season
By Joe Obringer
LinkShare Corporation
As we move into the busy holiday season, an important way to ensure your program
is running smoothly is to make certain that publishers are complying with
your Terms and Conditions. Below, you will find descriptions for a couple
of the most common compliance issues in the affiliate industry, as well as
steps you can take to identify violators.
Trademark Bidding
Most programs have restrictions related to bidding on trademarked terms
in search engines. Trademarked terms provide the highest click through
rate and the best conversion, thus making them extremely appealing to
publishers in the pay-per-click (PPC) game. The best way to find violators
is to manually search for your trademarked keywords. However, you should
be aware that this method is not always reliable. Publishers have started
to use several methods to sneak around the manual search, including geo-targeting
and ad scheduling.
1. Geo-Targeting: Most PPC programs offer the option of targeting
an audience
by geographic region (city, state, and/or country). Violators will
use geo-targeting to their advantage by trademark bidding on terms
in areas other than your current location, thereby preventing
them from coming up in your search results. One way to identify
these geo-targeting trademark bidders is to ask a friend or coworker
in another office to try searching.
2. Ad Scheduling: Many affiliates will schedule their ads to run
only at night to ensure that the publisher manager searching between
normal business hours will not see their ads. This method is called
ad scheduling and can be automatically set up through most major
search PPC programs. Try searching from home at night or on weekends
to catch these publishers who are bidding on your trademarked terms. |
At LinkShare, we recommend a three strike rule to handle publishers found
in violation of your Terms & Conditions. The first violation involves a
written notice, the second consequence is a temporary removal from your
program, and the third is a permanent removal from your program. When
approaching first-time offenders, we strongly recommend attaching a screen
shot of the violation ad to prevent the publisher
from denying any wrong-doing.
Most
publishers comply immediately after their first violation warning, but
it is important to have more severe consequences in place for repeat
offenders.
Typosquatting
Typosquatting, by definition, occurs when a publisher purchases a domain name
that is a common misspelling or typo of a merchant’s website URL. When an unknowing customer mistakenly enters the misspelled URL, they are automatically redirected to the merchant’s website by the typosquatting publisher, who then earns a commission. Below are a few common techniques typosquatters use to find domain names:
Original Domain Name: “WidgetStore.com”
1.
If the domain is composed of two or more words adding a hyphen in
between: “Widget-Store.com”
2. “wwwWidgetStore.com” or “WidgetStorecom.com”
3. Common misspellings: “WidgitStore.com” or “WigetStore.com”
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If a typosquatter is identified, your company's legal team should be immediately
notified before further action is taken, especially if this is a corporate
brand situation. Publishers found in violation of typosquatting should
be sent a ‘Cease
and Desist’ letter.
If the issue is not immediately resolved, they are permanently removed
from the program.
Every merchant’s terms and conditions are different, so without continual
enforcement, some publishers may knowingly or unknowingly abuse them.
These violators are taking traffic away from high-quality publishers who
work hard to earn your commission. If you regularly monitor the compliance
issues described above, not only will you be ensuring the integrity of
your program, but you will also be on your way to a profitable and safe
holiday season.
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