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Marc Bitanga recently created a flowchart for Google’s Adwords Trademark policy. Although the flowchart doesn’t address affiliates, shopping engines, etc. it does do a great job of visualizing many of the common trademark complaint cases.
Also, although the graphic states that his flowchart is for the US, UK and CA, it only represents the US [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in Affiliate Watchlist, BrandVerity, PoachMark, PoachMark Pool
25 Nov
This morning we publicly announced the Affiliate Watchlist. The Affiliate Watchlist has been available within PoachMark for a while, and now we’re finally comfortable with the breadth and depth of information available.
The list consists of the IDs of affiliates that we’ve found to consistently violate merchant PPC policies. In many cases they’ve [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in Affiliate Tactics, affiliate marketing
06 Nov
We recently discovered a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Bit.ly that is being used by affiliates to insert affiliate links into bit.ly accounts.
A quick primer on CSRF attacks (from wikipedia):
The attack works by including a link or script in a page that accesses a site to which the user is known (or is [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PoachMark, affiliate marketing
05 Nov
As PoachMark has grown, we’ve added detection for the affiliate networks our customers were utilizing. We’ve just recently added our fiftieth affiliate network. A few of the recently added networks include: ClickBooth, FlexOffers, CommissionSoup and CX Digital.
If you see a network that we currently don’t monitor that would be helpful to you or [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PoachMark, affiliate marketing
05 Nov
Commission Junction provides merchants the ability to offer encrypted affiliate links. These encrypted links usually look something like this:
http://www.tkqlhce.com/b274nmvsmu9CBGFJEC9BADHIEHC
PoachMark frequently finds affiliates utilizing encrypted links in their search redirects. PoachMark is now able to decrypt the encrypted affiliate link to show its original form:
http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2165942-10572459
This saves merchants substantial time and improves PoachMark customers’ visibility [...]
Techcrunch has a series of scathing articles about the CPA offer spam found in Facebook games. I don’t expect that this is a surprise for many in the CPA world, but they are a must read for any program offering CPA offers and wondering about the quality of their CPA payouts:
How to spam Facebook [...]
I’m speaking at SMX East panel Trademarks and Search – How have things changed Monday at 3:45.
Please stop by and say hello!
We’ve found a number of Google Places advertisements appearing on searches for ‘Brand + Product Category’ and include a link to a competitive local retailer. The advertisements represent an entirely new AdWords unit that we hadn’t seen before and seem to be designed specifically for Google Places. A handful of examples below:
A search for [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, adwords, case law
22 Sep
An adviser to the European Court of Justice just issued an opinion that “Google has not committed a trademark infringement by allowing advertisers to select [trademarked] keywords”.
While the opinion is non-binding, the court is generally expected to follow the opinion.
Google has moved to aggressively open up trademark bidding in the US, the UK and [...]
We’ve seen advertisements similar to the one below for “top-rated-coupons.com” appear in Yahoo search ads for a number of the programs that we monitor:
The ads are typically shown for “brand” + coupon searches. This particular advertiser isn’t an affiliate though. They are actually selling a mobile recurring billing scheme that gives “access” to [...]