Back in March, I wrote a post going over my opinion on ethical paid search. I had always meant to go back to the post for part two, but it's been on the back burner for a while because of my very busy but very enjoyable paying job. Now that I'm largely writing posts on the weekends and scheduling them for the week, I hope to revisit a couple of missing part twos - the first installment is Ethical PPC.
In Part One, I talked about Brand Bidding and Duplicate Display URLs, the bread and butter of an unethical PPC arsenal. The next two, while still relatively standard in cheating the system, are a little more advanced and take longer to set up and monitor.
Dayparting Tricks
You're an affiliate, let's again pick Argos for ease of reference, and you're not allowed to bid on their brand term. You don't want to use their display URL, that's too costly and you can run the huge risk of being caught once they've seen a dip in brand traffic. However, you still want desperately to get those easy brand conversions they talk about on your affiliate forums.
Dayparting, a technique that brands use to maximize spend and ROI, is used frequently by affiliate marketers to fly under the radar and still bring in those brand sales. How do they do it? Simply factor in working hours (weekdays, 8 to 6), and use your campaign settings to switch the campaign off during the day when you're most likely to be noticed bidding on a brand. The theory behind this is that brand monitors, whether they're working at the affiliate program or the brand partner, will normally perform checks during the day to make sure their brand is protected. In the evening and on weekends, when they're not thinking about the brand or work, the playing field is left wide open for affiliates to come in and bid on the brand terms they're not supposed to, with little perceived risk of being caught.
Of course, most affiliate programs nowadays have a system in place to check brand searches 24/7 - Snoopy from Affiliate Window being one of them - reducing the potential for getting away with brand bidding. If you run your own in-house affiliate program, tools like AdGooroo can also monitor which display URLs have shown up on your brand searches, even if you're on a beach in Thailand, sipping a margarita and not thinking about brand bidding affiliates.
Fooling Automated Editorial
Back when Google removed brand protection from the UK, the playing field was wide open for competitors and affiliates alike to bid on previously fenced of brand terms. Google assured us that we were still protected; our competitors couldn't have our brand names in the title because Automated Editorial would pick it up and reject it right away. It didn't, and doesn't, work like that.
Take Direct Line Insurance for an example. A brand search on "DirectLine" (no spaces) serves up ads aplenty from competitors and affiliates. How do they skirt the automatons from Google? Fairly simply. Misspellings, the absence of spaces and hyphens or plus signs don't flag automatically in Google's automated review system. So, if you want to grab a quick listing for a couple of hours or days before a human reviewer notices, look no further than leaving out a space between a two-word brand term or missing off a letter in the display URL.
Since Google doesn't prevent competitors or affiliates from bidding on trademarked brand terms anymore, it's relatively simple for their ads to appear against your brand search. Combine that with a very easy workaround for highlighting your brand term (even when it's not the brand), and you've got a recipe for cheap and easy success for affiliates and competitors.
I hope the four classic tactics of unethical PPC campaigns are useful; hopefully, armed with this new information you can further protect your brand and your bottom line. Turn the tables, and let's get some integrity in the SEM industry.
