Affiliate Marketing Guide Online

When reading an affiliate advertiser’s terms and conditions, a common restriction says something like “you are forbidden from bidding on “ourbrand.com, brandmisspelling.com, and our brand name”.  For some PPC publishers, this means it’s time to move to a new advertiser.  But should you be so hasty to dismiss these brands?

More and more advertisers are hesitant to give up the rights for publishers to run PPC campaigns on their brand terms. While it may aggravate the publishers, the reasoning is sometimes sound. For the advertiser, small in-house paid search campaign is sometimes more cost effective than paying commissions, depending on the bid prices and the competition in the market place. A smaller business may pay only $100 per month to cover ppc fees to get some paid search coverage, but find affiliate commissions ranging in the $1,000 range for the same volume of sales. 

There’s also a large concern among advertisers over ad content. If a publisher forgets to turn off an ad for coupon or promotion that’s expired, the company’s customer support phone line may experience a huge volume of calls from customers looking for their “discount”.  At this point, the advertiser is almost always responsible for honoring those discounts, or stuck doing extra work to resolve the issue.

So, the question is, if brand names are off limits, is it possible to run a pay per click campaign successfully without having the brand name as a keyword? The answer is a resounding… it depends. I think maybe the best example of PPC without Brand is ClickBank. Here, hundreds of products get sold without any real previous brand exposure, just on their merits alone through sell pages. And the price points vary from $10 to $100’s.  But I’m not sure the example holds true for every product out there in affiliate land. Insider Tip: Bidding policies may not be fixed in stone.  Contact your advertiser if you have questions about their ppc policy and its restrictions.