Competitors or unscrupulous webmasters often practice the use of brand keywords. The answer to the question: what is brand bidding in affiliate marketing will be a special type of fraud in which the purpose of offenders is to conduct their own advertising campaigns in search engines. According to the rules of the affiliate program, such actions are prohibited.
The problem often underestimated by large brands. They incur significant expenses on a daily basis due to the fact that they are not able to track the brand issue. As a result, the money goes to pay for the traffic of the partner network, or to an unscrupulous webmaster. BluePear will help you understand what losses we are talking about and what needs to be done to prevent them.
How to discover scammers activity
Members of the affiliate program receive information about impressions, conversions, and sales in their personal account. Fraud can be noticed if you study the statistics in detail. There will be inconsistencies in it that should alert you. For example, a sudden increase in data conversion compared to the segment average.
What tools can be used to detect fraudulent activities:
- Automatic signals about abnormal user activity come from bots. Thanks to them, both massive fraud and minor violations of the rules are detected.
- The use of artificial intelligence.
- Reports that are created automatically are suitable for analyzing the dynamics of activity.
The above tools are used to identify low-quality traffic. It is usually artificially created for the purpose of conducting unfair activities that allow benefiting from the affiliate program.
Here are a few situations that indicate the presence of violations depending on the type of chosen traffic. When using iframe traffic, the statistics revealed a conversion rate of 1/30 thousand. This indicates that cookies from the advertiser are actively used, but the audience is not targeted.
When toolbar traffic is selected, there is an increase in orders, while conversion from other sources is noticeably reduced. It can be explained by the fact that orders from browser extensions affect the reduction of incoming sales flows from other channels.
The growth of bot traffic to the site is evidenced by the presence of template behavior. With on-board traffic, users have the same type of emails and short-term activity.
Ways to protect against fraud
In affiliate marketing you can always face the violations risk. Blue Pearl will help not only track the traffic quality, but also quickly identify attempts to use it to benefit fraudsters. How is the fight against brand bidding being conducted:
- conducting a detailed threat search across all search engines, taking into account geographical regions and languages;
- real-time alerts to the client on the identification of potential threats;
- reporting with accurate data received on the day of notifications;
- collection of evidence for the response takes place automatically: links and screenshots are provided;
- assistance in processing and sending complaints: information about the detection of fraudulent activities will be transmitted to the advertiser and the violator himself;
- recommendations for their elimination.
If brand bidding is detected, the system will notify the advertiser automatically. Screenshots will be taken to prove illegal actions with the application of context to the brand. Potential threats will be blocked. As a result, advertisers’ marketing budgets will not be misused and will bring profit to interested parties. Blue Pearl specialists are in touch with customers 24/7 and provide support in resolving disputes.
What violations are being protected from
When fraudsters use a direct context on the brand, the tool allows you to protect the company’s image using a special list of pre-keywords. Their use or prohibition is approved in advance. The keywords will be used in the affiliate program.
The tool will help detect and block fraudsters’ attempts to lure valuable traffic from brand resources using coupon aggregators and promo codes. If the partner has not passed moderation in the program, the use of brand keywords will be prohibited. With the help of the tool, any attempts to act with fraudulent purposes will be prevented.
Fraud attempts can be considered as part of affiliate marketing. It is necessary to apply modern solutions for effective struggle. They involve a detailed elaboration of the terms and conditions of the affiliate program, taking into account the subtleties of the business. As a result, the company will become the owner of high-quality traffic that allows optimizing business processes and achieving any goals.
