Talking purely as an affiliate now, most affiliate programmes at the moment have PPC rules in place. Now I have no problem with these, if someone says don’t bid on the brand name I wont, someone says don’t use our display URL fine. If I don’t like these rules or think they are too imposing then I just wont promote the programme.
What does annoy me is when a programme has rules in place but they are ignored. I’ve just spent the past hour or so looking at the performance of a merchant that has been featured on one of my sites that uses purely natural traffic. This sites taken years to build up and is fairly well established in its area, the merchant in question had been performing reasonably well so I was looking at setting up a PPC campaign for them going direct to merchant. Upon checking the PPC rules I noticed that they do not allow brand name bidding, misspellings or confusingly similar terms – which as I mentioned earlier im fine with.
However when I go to google and do a search on their brand name and see an affiliate advert (and no other adverts) its quite annoying. So is there a closed group? If so shouldn’t it be stated somewhere? I like to know if im competing on a level playing field or if there an affiliate out there with the upper hand.
I don’t know the full ins and outs of this but id love to know if its just a case of the merchant not checking? Seeing an increase in sales from a particular affiliate and just rubbing their hands thinking “oh goody” rather than thinking, how are they making these sales and is there anything we can do to help them or increase it further. Maybe the affiliate managers taking a backhander somewhere down the line, or maybe they just don’t care? In which case they should drop the PPC restrictions and make it a fair programme.
If your going to have rules, you have to enforce them
