Search Marketers Study Affiliate Agreement Terms and Conditions

05 Jan

Posted by admin as Marketing

As an affiliate marketer, you are an outsourced arm of your merchant’s advertising solution. Especially important to search marketers is the need to make sure that you understand all the aspects of your partner merchant’s terms and conditions, most notably any exception clauses that may be included related to trademarked or branded terms that you may not be allowed to use.

The birth of search marketer clauses
Most online advertisers spend thousands of dollars each year promoting their products and services outside of affiliate marketing channels. This includes things like pay-per-click search marketing, direct to customer marketing, email offers, and more. One relationship that has struggled to find a balance for a long time in the affiliate marketing industry is the relationship between affiliates and their partner merchants where their marketing efforts overlap. For instance, if an affiliate were to email their customer base the same day as a merchant emailed it’s customer base, there could be a conflict of interest – or worse – a fear that the merchant’s brand name would be associated with spam or in desperate need of customers.

Further adding to this complex set of relationships is the fact that the average online company spends tens of thousands of dollars branding themselves. Their company’s reputation is on the line every day – and that relationship can sometimes appear to be transferred to the affiliates themselves. In the early days of affiliate marketing, affiliates themselves were often encouraged to promote specific offers and help expand a brand’s reach.

Closing the brand and trademarks
Unfortunately, as many merchants came online and started their own affiliate programs, with nearly unlimited relationships with other affiliate brand marketers, a small number of negative events started occurring. Spam was one problem, but more so was the fact that brands were working hard on controlling their image to the public. A select few affiliates abused their partnership relationship in the quest for a quick buck, which included promoting things like family-oriented brands in conjunction with adult material, profanity, or other things that the brand just didn’t want to be associated with. Especially with online firms spending more and more on their brand, trademarks, and related marketing message, it became clear that affiliates could cause a great deal of disappointment for brand-centric companies.

In response, many affiliate programs started screening applying affiliates much more thoroughly, and created clauses about how a partnership relationship can be represented on the affiliates’ website. Some programs even banned the use of their name entirely in affiliate programs, rather letting the (often un-branded) products speak for themselves.

Search Marketers overlap Internal Search Practices
Another key issue that arose with the progressive growth of the affiliate marketing industry was the overlap between what affiliates were doing, and what was being handled in-house. Search marketers were busy bidding against their own partner company on trademarks and brand names in an effort to earn commissions and sales. Since online pay per click marketing generally operates on a raising bid cost as new bidders get involved, this means that the internal search gets more expensive as more affiliates try to promote the brand. This turns in to a double-edged sword for merchants – do they want the added exposure of greater search presence, or do they want to control the message themselves, and keep the bidding price down on their key words and phrases.

The conclusion for many merchants with successful internal search teams has been to close off the trademarked and branded keywords from affiliates. While many affiliates are actually superior to their internal search teams, the net effect means they can keep costs lower. It’s incredibly important for affiliates to study the terms and agreements of the offers they promote for trademark and branding clauses that prohibit them from marketing through search engines with specific terms. If there is any perceived ambiguity (which sometimes happens when affiliates are forced to read lawyer-written terms and conditions), search affiliates should make certain to engage their affiliate managers in a dialogue about what is allowed and what is prohibited. Some programs will even decline payouts if they discover affiliates using prohibited terms – others will simply issue a warning before serious consequences are enacted.

Open opportunities in Long-tail and outer-edge keywords
While losing out on branded words is a hardship (many affiliates consider these words the low-hanging fruit of the marketplace), there’s still ample opportunities for affiliates to tap in to related keywords and phrases outside of what a merchant is taking on. This “long tail” of the market includes generic phrases to describe branded goods. Even in some instances, affiliates are permitted to bid on common misspellings of a brand name even if they’re prohibited from marketing the main ones.

Another thing to consider is finding out if your programs’ internal search team isn’t using outer-edge search engines beyond the big 3, which include services like Ask.com and Abcsearch.com. If you’re really interested in promoting the brand name, you can oftentimes work with your manager to find out where opportunities are available for affiliate search marketers.