Band Protection – Protecting Yourself From Your Affiliates

Filed in Affiliate Brand Protection on Mar.11, 2010 By Keith Lunt

Do you protect yourself from your own affiliates? Could rogue affiliates be costing you cash and even chasing away valuable super affiliates?

Do you realise that if your website is promoted through an affiliate scheme then you should be doing your best to protect your brand from your affiliates? This might sound daft given that these are the people that could be driving you plenty of extra business. But there could be one or two rogue elements within your affiliates.

The problem is those odd affiliates that start what is called brand bidding. This is where they sign up to pay per click schemes and start bidding on your brand name and sending visitors to your website.

At first, this might not sound like a major problem. But when you think about it these affiliates are earning an income through sending you sales, from people that are already interested in your business. These sales could be coming from existing customers and customer referrals. These are sales that would not normally incur the cost of an affiliate commission. But if a few sneaky affiliates are brand bidding on your name, then this could be a large extra overhead that you have to cover.

Maybe your product does not have a huge repeat order base or you are not that bothered about the extra costs that this will incur. But this is only the tip of the iceberg as far as brand protection is concerned.

Many more potential customers will be being pre-sold your product by your affiliates. These customers will visit your website and then leave it before they decide whether to buy or not.

They will then return to your website, possibly by searching for your website on the search engines. If at this point they click on another affiliate’s advert, then the final sale will be attributed to this brand bidding affiliate, rather than the one who did the work to introduce the customer to the customer.

Does this affect you? Does it really matter to you if an affiliate commission is paid to the first or the second affiliate? On the whole all that matters is that the affiliate commission is paid?

Wrong! This could actually destroy your affiliate business!

The concern is that many large affiliates operate the affiliate schemes they take part in as small, and quite often not so small, businesses. They will assess for each of their affiliate schemes that they are members of how much each one is returning for them. Some might be investing their own cash in advertising or they might be comparing affiliate schemes they are promoting on their website. And if the results from one program drop against another, they might just move their links between programs.

This means that if you are not correctly protecting your brand from your own affiliates, the efforts of a few to scrape an income could turn away from you the mega affiliates that make the whole thing worth while.

This is why many schemes prohibit brand bidding on their names. And if you are not protecting your name, it could end up costing you affiliates and ultimately sales.

If you want to know more about affiliate brand protection then call into our website.

Article by Keith Lunt, of Janric, supplier of Merseyside Website Design services.