I spoke on the Affiliate PPC Issues panel Tuesday at Pubcon with Jon Kelly and Adam Jewel.  I touched on a number of proven strategies that we’ve seen our clients utilize to build strong affiliate PPC policies and procedures. My slides are here.  I think I may have gone a little bit far in avoiding [...]

Tony Wright has an excellent post up at SearchEngineLand on establishing search marketing rules for working with franchise organizations.  Since affiliates are in some ways franchisees (and plenty of ways not), some of his guidelines are quite useful.  He provides three rules: A heavy hand at the beginning saves heartache down the road. Set your [...]

We’ve gotten a number of questions about PoachMark identify affiliate ads.  While some of our approach is proprietary, it is one major thing that we do that differentiates us from our competition. We use a combination of automated and manual techniques to determine if an advertiser is also an affiliate: Examine and follow links in [...]

Jeremy Shoemaker pointed out this thread on Digital Point where an affiliate manager requested access to an affiliate’s AdWords account. The affiliate manager was trying to determine if the affiliate had violated the keyword policies of the merchant.  Obviously, there is a lot of sensitive data in there and affiliates should be extremely reluctant to [...]

Trademark use management remains one of the greater challenges for brands that maintain affiliate programs. Most of the sessions that I’ve been to so far touch on trademarks and their use/abuse at some point over the course of their talk. Andy Rodriguez touched on setting and monitoring policies for keyword bidding in his Sunday session [...]

Google recently announced that while it will jettison Performics search marketing division, it will keep the Performics affiliate network. We’ve found it difficult to definitively distinguish merchant search marketing campaigns run by Performics from ads run by Performics affiliates so this move should clearly separate the two link structures over time. Here’s the email from [...]