Next - do you allow affiliates to brand name bid or not?
As most of you are probably aware today marks the day that Google implements it’s new trademark policy on AdWords. Read all about it here. Having a quick browse around the web today I haven’t really seen any affiliates bidding on previously trademarked terms - the recent glut of emails with revised ppc terms from merchants has seen to that.
There is one exception however and that is every affiliate’s favourite merchant, Next Retail.
Here are the first 3 results that I saw when I searched Google for the term “Next” today May 5th 2008.
As you can see there are now 3 affiliates appearing for the term, all with thin landing pages that have no other purpose than to drop an affiliate cookie and push the visitor to the official Next website.
Now I could be wrong - but I don’t think I am - but before today Next had a pretty tight control of affiliate ads on Google. In other words they didn’t allow anyone to bid on Next trademark terms. Here’s the relevant bit from the affiliate terms and conditions:
Brand and brand generic bidding is not permitted on any search engine. This includes, but not limited to, next, next directory and any related misspellings. To avoid accidental broad matching we recommend you set next brand terms as a negative match in your search campaigns.
Affiliates are not permitted to use next.co.uk or any of its extensions as a display URL in PPC ads. The terms Next and Next Directory may be incorporated within your url, for example, next.sitename.com or sitename.com/next.
Affiliates must also not bid on competitor terms or misspellings.
Affiliates found to be breaking terms and conditions may have all commissions generated from the activity reversed.
This was backed up when iLevel held a teleconference in early April to respond to the heavy criticism the affiliate programme has received. The following is an extract from the minutes that were circulated to the teleconference attendees in late April.
Affiliate brand bidding
• Next do not currently allow affiliate as it is currently not perceived as adding incremental value.
• Next’s affiliate brand bidding strategy is being reviewed given Google’s recent trademark policy changes.
• If, after 5th May it is determined that affiliate brand bidding is necessary a full RFP will be implemented.
The important thing to take from these minutes is the last bullet point where it states that if, after the 5th May, (i.e. today) it is determined that affiliate brand bidding is necessary a full RFP will be implemented.
So it would seem there are 2 scenarios that could be possible here.
1. The 3 affiliates that have put up landing pages and are bidding on the Next terms are all breaking the terms and conditions and will have their commissions reversed. Naughty.
2. iLevel have changed their mind and already determined before 5th May that brand name bidding from affiliates is necessary. However if this is the case then where is the RFP that was promised from the meeting minutes? I haven’t seen one and there wasn’t one published on any of the affiliate forums.
What do people think?
What I’m listening to right now: Novel – “Solo”
Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Hi Kieron,
Hope all is well, been a while.
Looking at next these affiliates have the term in the title, suggesting next have permitted this - in line with the google change that it cant be used in the copy only as a trigger term. To allow it for the ad copy next will have had to give them permission to use the term (so for trigger, text, urls etc).
Have next been tricked into allowing these affiliate to bid on the brand?
Looking at some of the major brands - there no change?
O2 have a few, but again only by affiliate ‘protecting their brand’. If it really was open TM id be expecting Orange, Vodafone, Three etc to be all over the O2 keyword, and they’re not?
I’ve actually just tried to set up a campaign to test my theory bidding on a merchants brand, with an ad for a merchant in the same sector - ad wont display. Everything on it is set up fine, no TM alerts or anything the ad just wont display.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
hi keiron contacted u awhile back about manutdpoker.com would like to here your thots on this and other sites
May 5th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
Dan - thanks for your comments. I agree it looks like the 3 affiliates do have permission. I’m just wondering why there wasn’t an RFP as promised by iLevel though?
Gerry - I don’t recall. Please email me via the contact form on this blog.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Alas, it does rather look like these are authorised brand bidders. After what I thought was a good step towards building trust in the programme, it seems they may have um… “lied” to their affiliates.
If this is an authorised brand bidding exercise, its another reason for affiliates not to promote Next. I assume Next’s network doesn’t have a specific cookie for brand bidders which means the already reduced commission rates will be further squeezed.
Knee jerk reaction to May 5th? Looks a bit like it.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:07 am
The three affiliates in the Next brand space are all approved by Next.
On the conference call it was discussed that from May 5th we would be using 3 affiliates with a proved track record in the space. It was also discussed that Next will be undergoing a full RFP with a view to go live by Q3. The reason we took the step to work with these 3 affiliates is because of the timelines involved. A full RFP would not have been completed by May 5th given the lead time provided by Google. Next have been quite open about this strategy and it was discussed in detail in the conference call and the event presentation.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Thanks for clarifying the position with BBG lets hope they add value by giving incremental sales that the client wants.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I recall reading something earlier this year that someone had suggested Next may have been bidding on M&S keywords. Interestingly, the first ad for the term ‘marks and spencer’ is an AWin affiliate link!
May 6th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I am very disappointed that iLevel chose to select 3 affiliates based on previous track record. This is something I mentioned on the voice conference, saying that it takes no more than a monkey to brand bid. There is 0 previous track record as far as I am concerned.
I suggested that if they required a small number of affiliates on a closed BBG, then they selected them from a group of affiliates who are sending lots of sales either organically, or via generic PPC terms. I think any idiot can send via a brand name.
As I say, I pointed this out during the voice conference and I would welcome, from iLevel, the basis of selection for these brand bidders. Did you choose affiliates who are;
a) performing well for Next organically
b) performing well for bidding on brands
As I said in my write up on my blog, I felt I was heard, but suspect this confirms my suspicions that I wasn’t listened.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
The affiliates chosen were so based on their history both in the retail and PPC sectors. As Fiona mentions a full RFP wasn’t realistic in the timescales involved, but will be rolled out for Q3 where all affiliates can pitch to be part of Next’s brand strategy.
May 6th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Why anyone would ‘want’ to be part of this program I’ll never know. Each to their own of course!
May 6th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Somehow I don’t think they all had a proven track record on previous sales for Next.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Fionah, thanks for your response. My confusion arises from the fact that the minutes seem to contradict what was actually said at the teleconference. You say that it was discussed on the conference that 3 affiliates would be brand bidding from May 5th, but there is no mention of this in the minutes.
May 6th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
For any company that sells their own exclusive products I see limited value in affiliates having brand permissions. If you’re searching for Next, you’re looking for Next - it makes little difference whether M&S or Dorothy Perkins is listed alongside it unless they try to run spolier ads with compelling pricing or offer led creative.
In light of the negligible competitor ads it’s stretching credibility to see where the value ad is here – I would imagine Next’s CPAs on brand terms has sky rocketed whilst content affiliates have also taken a bashing. It’s also worrying that more often than not the ‘official’ Next ad either doesn’t display or alternates where it is positioned.
Compare this to ‘M&S’ on Google. Given they’re not bidding on their brand, content affiliates aren’t hit on brand cookie overwrites and competitors are firmly on the right hand side of the page. Not to mention the absence of PPC spend. Anyone who’s seen eyeball tracking software in action will know how little traffic M&S will be losing.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Fiona
As we discussed by email this morning, I am pretty certain this was not discussed during the affili.net teleconference (although from Chris’s reference above it sounds as if it was discussed in the buy.at teleconference).
Either way, as I pointed out, the minutes of the teleconference should have reflected this and they clearly do not, which has me slightly worried as to what else may have been omitted.
I don’t quite buy the ‘no time to do an RFP’ argument either - given that the teleconference was in early April I would have thought three weeks would have been ample time - a week for affiliates to respond and a week to consider the replies should be plenty of time - if everyone gets their act together there is no reason why it should take longer than that.
May 6th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Why don’t merchants just open it for to everyone rather than closed groups?
Doug
May 6th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
you couldn’t make it up could you !
So rather than take 3 affiliates who did many generic sales(who knows why at the rate they pay), they’ve picked 3 guys with a “proved track record in the space” who can do exact match [next] better than everyone else .. all the untrained generic chumps out there huh..
well it is a tall task, not every affiliate can do it.. well only those over the age of 6, with opposable thumbs and penchant for bananas etc. .. for gods sake any chimp can brand bid !! why does everyone think it’s a freakin science, dark art, black magic only worthy of being practiced by a chosen few !?
In fact the only one better I’ve heard is of a merchant who’s reducing commissions by 30%, removing cookies !! and gone from 1 to 3 monthly reporting and is still expecting affiliates to send traffic.. now there’s a some forward planning ideas for Next !
why don’t agencies reward the guys driving generic sales before this “proved track record in the space” culture bites them in the butt, all it’s doing is winding up genuine affiliates who drive generic sales !!
As a result of seeing how this has been handled I’d rather send traffic to a dead page in preferance to next or any other I-Level managed merchant !
If the next/I-level saga were a film I’d be saying it was a poor script with non existant dialogue, skeleton characters showing zero knowledge, intelligence and wit! an extremely poor job from start to finish and the sequel sucked even more ! in fact the best thing about it was the way out sign at the end !
May 6th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Will there be a name change to I-Liar-Evil (say it quickly)?
May 6th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Ive been following the Next stories with interest, even though im not a retail based affiliate. Suffice to say I wont be touching any ilevel managed programs in the future.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I was asked if I was going to blog about this, but to be honest I simply couldn’t give a**ed.
Its been bad from the very beginning, and I did think things would change with the voice conference. As I say, I had hoped that “proven affiliates” would mean just that, sadly I dont think it does. Its all very wishy washy IMO and I think the voice conferences, although welcomed, hasn’t changed a single thing.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Interesting to see that the brand name bidding on “Next” seems to have now stopped.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Look on the bright side - at least they’re listening - lol!
May 8th, 2008 at 11:45 am
The BNB stopped yesterday morning - interesting isn’t it?