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Introducing Two New PoachMark Features
At BrandVerity, we’re always looking for ways to improve our service and make our tools more useful. We know that compliance can be incredibly demanding, and our goal is to continually increase your...
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Game of Thrones Brand Gets Targeted in Paid Search
This Sunday marks the season finale of HBO’s popular “Game of Thrones” TV series, which actually set a record for piracy earlier this year. The data from that record-setting season opener was rather...
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Exposing Some New Trademark Poachers
We’ve recently completed a pair of investigations: one centered around coupon sites and another on the URL shortener ADFly. Our coupon investigation was just published on the HasOffers blog this...
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Fireworks and Paid Search: Advertisers Breaking PPC Rules?
July is the month for fireworks. Not just as an American ritual, but also in terms of search engine queries. There are far more searches for terms like “fireworks”, “firecrackers”, “bottle rockets” and...
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Law Professor Eric Goldman on the New FTC Disclosure Guidelines
The latest FTC disclosure guidelines (or .Com Disclosures) issued by the Federal Trade Commission have left many marketers wondering how they should respond. Expanding on the original FTC disclosures...
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Search Arbitrage Site “5earch” Goes Silent
When it comes to brand bidding and trademark abuse, the breaking stories often center around new schemes and tactics. But today we have some more positive news. 5earch.com no longer seems to be...
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Diverted Traffic on Google Mobile: How LINE App Is Growing in the US
As we’ve learned from a number of investigations in the past, popular branded searches can often become the target of search arbitrage or other brand bidding schemes. Advertisers choose to poach these...
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New Ad Hijacking Tactic: Redirects through Dropbox
Affiliates who violate their programs’ PPC policies are always trying new ways to hide. One of the most common tactics employed by ad hijacking affiliates (who display the brand’s domain in their ad,...
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The Endless Chain of PPC Arbitrage: Lessons from Monitoring SaveSmart
How is PPC arbitrage similar to Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon? It may sound like the setup to a bad joke, but here’s the point I’m hinting at: PPC arbitrage can produce multiple layers of...
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Users Exploit Referral Programs with Ad Hijacking
Referral programs are a useful means of acquiring new customers and users. By encouraging word-of-mouth with incentives, companies can accelerate growth at a reasonable, consistent cost. Referral...
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Display URL Violations Continue to Slip through on Bing
Whenever we come across particularly suspicious-looking ads in the course of our monitoring, we flag them for investigation. These ads often turn out to be affiliates cloaking their links, laundering...
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Affiliate Uses Screenshot to Create Phony Merchant Site
Blackhat affiliates frequently come up with new tactics for driving traffic. While the specific details of these tactics may vary, they’re all based on similar concepts: brand imitation,...
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Beware of Black Friday Brand Bidding
The holiday shopping season can be a great boost for merchants, but it’s not without its compliance challenges. Because of the tremendous uptick in demand, affiliates have more incentive to employ...
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Affiliate Hijackers Take Advantage of Cyber Monday
Online merchants were promoting deals in full force earlier this week, leading to a record high for Cyber Monday sales. That uptick should provide many eCommerce companies with a significant holiday...
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Affiliate Disclosure on Twitter: Still a Work in Progress
Earlier this year, the FTC released an update to its .Com Disclosure Guidelines. The document expanded the applicability of the original guidelines to new marketing channels such as blogs and social...
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When Is It Okay for Resellers to Bid on Your Brand?
Outside of the typical affiliate scenarios, there are plenty of other cases where marketing partnerships can run into brand bidding issues. Whether it’s hotels and OTAs, product manufacturers and...
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Reflecting on the Pinnacle Awards and Future of Affiliate Marketing
2013 brought a number of interesting twists and turns for the affiliate marketing industry. We experienced the abrupt shutdown of the Google Affiliate Network, some tough new questions to answer about...
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Affiliate Found Hijacking Rich Ads in Search
Yahoo made an interesting move a few years ago by introducing branded favicons for certain paid listings. The concept made a lot of sense at the time (and to this day). Not only would the new visual...
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Super Bowl Trademark Abused by Toolbar Sites
This year’s Super Bowl broke a record for online streaming. More people than ever chose to watch the game online, with an average of 528,000 devices tuning into Fox’s online broadcast each minute....
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These Valentine’s Day PPC Ads Made Us Chuckle
Valentine’s Day sure seems to bring out the creativity from paid search teams. Maybe it’s easier to stand out when so many advertisers are using the traditional jewelry and chocolates narratives, or...
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