Bing’s announced some big changes to their paid search advertising policy that will allow the use of trademarks in ad text and as keywords for triggering ads, closely mirroring Google’s update last year. These new changes go into effect tomorrow (3/3/11), and apply only to ads targeting the US or Canada. Along with relaxing trademark restrictions, Bing [...]

There’s a small but significant change being made to AdWords this week you should be aware of. Google announced they will now display only lowercase domains in ads, for example “Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory. . . will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory.” The change already has a few detractors and will doubtless accrue more, but Google has little cause to capitulate and gains more (like an increased [...]

Be careful this Affiliate Summit when using WiFi. The affiliate accounts at many major networks vulnerable to being hijacked by Firesheep, which means your account could be quite easily compromised. This vulnerability was recently demonstrated on popular sites such as Twitter and Facebook, but we have tested and found several affiliate networks vulnerable as well. [...]

BrandVerity PoachMark now integrates with the Commission Junction API! A number of aspects within PoachMark are now enhanced due to this integration. We are able to provide a much more comprehensive view of individual affiliates and their associated properties. More importantly, it is now much easier to get contact information for affiliates so that your [...]

We understand the importance of knowing that the data you are viewing is as fresh as possible. We’ve always delivered data the same day it was collected and have steadily reduced the time it takes to report on collected data. We made several steps forward recently and now the data in our system was collected [...]

Do you run an in-house affiliate program that uses your own (or a third party) technology to track affiliates? We recently improved our support for in-house programs and are now able to provide the same affiliate-level reporting and analysis for your in-house programs as we provide for the major networks that we monitor. Contact us [...]

The recent flutter about Firesheep, prompted us to do something we really should have done a long time ago: Transition our entire site to SSL. Of course, our password, payment and other sensitive pages were always https, however the vulnerability that Firesheep exploits takes advantage of the cookie your browser presents when you visit http [...]

It’s now easy to contact infringing affiliates from inside PoachMark! From any ad detail page, just click the “Contact Affiliate” button. We’ll save the affiliate’s email address for future use and your violation notice and comment can be used automatically the next time. When it’s possible we’ll link directly to an affiliate’s network profile (just [...]

In a recent, controversial blog post Shawn Hogan has alleged that eBay program managers manipulated him into employing “grey area” techniques by assuring him there wouldn’t be consequences for breaking their terms of service. After agreeing, he says managers then began suggesting different fraudulent methods he could employ, and even ways to hide from internal compliance [...]

Last week Google announced two significant changes to its trademark policies: The largest change will allow competitors to purchase trademarked terms in most of the European countries that were excluded in the May 2009 change. It brings the trademark policies in most European countries into alignment with its policy in 190 countries. The second change [...]