In the busy online advertising world, companies spend a lot on pay-per-click campaigns to boost sales and get leads. These campaigns involve bidding on your brand’s keywords and help you connect directly with your desired customers.
Branded pay-per-click ads, especially those with brand keywords, are popular because they’re cost-effective. Read our article to learn more about the different types of marketing strategies for your brand.
Most brand affiliate partners bring in money for your business and earn fair affiliate commissions ethically, but some affiliates with not-so-good intentions can’t resist the temptation to exploit these branded keywords. This leads to a sneaky tactic known as affiliate hijacking, which can cause big problems for businesses and their online image.
Read on to understand how ad hijacking works.
What is Affiliate Ad Hijacking?
Affiliate ad, or URL hijacking, occurs when dishonest affiliate ad hijackers create tricky ads that look identical to a brand’s real ads.
They aim to fool online shoppers by making them interact with advertisements, making them click on a hijacked ad that seems official but leads to the fake brand’s site through affiliation. This can cause the original business’ ad impressions to go down or even disappear for a while.
As seen in the image above, these fake infringing ad copies use the same or similar website links as the real ones, taking advantage of rules that let them use trademark and brand terms.
For example, platforms like Google ads and Microsoft ads allow trademarked words in website links, even if the advertisers don’t own the trademarks.
As seen in the image above, they use the same headlines, descriptions, and display URL to divert clicks straight to the company’s website, bypassing the affiliate’s landing page.
Sometimes, the rogue partner won’t win the bid for the ad placement due to various factors. However, there are times when the business loses out and has to pay commissions to the affiliate. This happens because the hijacker stole the business’ direct search traffic.
Types of Affiliate Ad Hijacking
The common forms of ad reroute are called brand bidding methods. There are also other ways that brand bidders and rogue affiliates can damage your brand.
Paid Ad Hijacking
Paid ad redirection is when someone copies a brand’s ad in paid search results by outbidding the brand by a small amount. The original ad disappears, and the successful bidder, often an affiliate, deceives customers to earn commissions through an affiliate program. This disrupts the business’ search engine marketing and can cause channel conflicts. Many users are unaware that similar techniques are also used in some platforms that claim you can get paid to watch ads, where tracking mechanisms ensure commissions are earned through redirected traffic.
If there are no restrictions on branded search terms, the rogue competitor will bid on them and place affiliate cookies. The process involves leading users through an affiliate tracking cookie to the brand’s domain or using reroutes to hide the referral, placing a tracking cookie while avoiding detection.
Sometimes, the rogue competitor may redirect customers to their site, selling different products, displaying different messages, or eventually leading them back to the legitimate company’s domain for conversion.
Display Ad Hijacking
Display ad redirection occurs when someone copies a company’s display ads using the brand name or variations of your brand name, URL, and colors, even if the message isn’t the same. This affects multiple ads, especially in sectors like retail, which are vulnerable to ad fraud.
Traffic Hijacking
Affiliate traffic hijacking occurs when someone copies a company’s ad to divert visitors for shady purposes, like collecting personal information on a fake landing page. This often happens in fake prize giveaways.
Branded keywords can be diverted for coupon and price comparison sites. The hijacker or spoofer misguides customers through their channels, attaching them to affiliate cookies. Endorsement schemes also divert branded search terms, sending users to the affiliate’s account page or a custom landing page for redemption.
This hurts the business because people initially searching for it using branded terms benefit the affiliate instead.
Search Arbitrage
Search arbitrage is like a money-making game where people buy ads on search engines like Google or Bing, hoping to make a profit.
Here’s how it works: Someone buys ads for certain search terms they think people will search for. When someone clicks on the hijacked ad, they get directed to a website. If the ad is cheap but the website can make a lot of money from the visitor, the person who bought the ad can profit.
It’s like buying something for a low price and selling it for a higher one. But it’s important to play fair and follow the rules, or it can cause problems.
Quality Score Hijacking
Some sneaky quality score hijackers copy a successful brand’s display URL to boost their Adwords account’s quality score points. Usually, bigger brands have higher quality scores, making them a prime target for this tactic. It’s like they’re borrowing the reputation of big brands to make their ads seem more trustworthy.
Image: Infographic of the factors impacting quality score.
Key HighlightsCommon types of affiliate redirections include: • Paid Ad Hijacking: Affiliates copy a brand’s ad in paid search results by outbidding the company by a small margin and diverting customers through affiliate tracking cookies. • Display Ad Hijacking: Advertisers mimic a brand’s display ads using the brand’s URL, name, and colors, affecting multiple ads, especially in vulnerable sectors like retail. • Traffic Hijacking: Visitors are diverted from a brand’s ad to shady destinations for collecting personal information or engaging in fake prize giveaways. • Search Arbitrage: Buying ads on search engines to profit from cheap ads directed to lucrative websites requires adherence to rules to avoid issues. • Quality Score Hijacking: Copying successful brands’ display URLs to boost one’s AdWords account’s quality score, leveraging big brands’ reputations for trustworthiness. |
Impacts of Affiliate Hijacking
Ad hijacking has several negative impacts on the brands they target.
Reduction in Traffic and Sales
When someone clicks on misleading ads featuring branded search terms, they might end up on a different site than the brand’s own. The brand loses out on clicks, website visitors, and money because it competes with the spoofer.
Increased CPC
Spoofers bidding up the prices of important search terms can hurt a brand. This unnecessary increase in cost-per-click makes future advertisement campaigns more expensive for brands relying on those terms.
Illegal Commission
Paying a spoofer who stole a brand’s paid search traffic is expensive and undermines the brand’s marketing efforts.
Competing Channels
Search engines only display one ad per website at a time. This creates issues when a brand and an affiliate try to advertise using the same keywords and ad space.
Because both the affiliate and the brand aim to appear on the SERP, they end up competing with each other, which drives up the brand’s CPCs. Instead of bringing in new customers, the affiliate takes away existing ones.
Conflicting Messages
An affiliate’s ad might not match the brand’s intended message or could show outdated information, taking control away from the brand.
When you search on engines, they only let one ad from an advertiser’s domain show up per page. This opens the door for affiliate hijackers to swap brands’ ads with their own, stripping the brand of control over their message.
Damage to Brand Reputation
Brand bidders might mislead customers to low-quality sites instead of the brand’s high-quality ones, which can be very damaging to a brand’s affiliate, ultimately damaging the brand’s impression.
Detection of Ad Hijacking
It’s tough to spot when ad hijacking happens because there are sneaky methods in play, like domain cloaking and dynamic rerouting. First, use brand monitoring tools to track odd patterns or signs of ad rerouting.
Here are some signs to watch for:
1. Strange jumps in referral traffic or conversions from affiliates that aren’t usually high performers or trusted by your brand could be a sign.
2. Similar conversion rates for branded paid searches and affiliates.
3. Decrease in ad views and clicks.
4. URLs that don’t match your brand’s domain or suspicious links in ad reroutes.
Hijackers often go for branded keywords that attract lots of customers. Test brand restrictions to see if clicks drop and costs rise when these restrictions are lifted, which could indicate vulnerability to spoofers and hijackers.
Prevent Ad Hijacking and Protect Your Brand
To keep affiliate fraud at bay and stop ad hijacking, I strongly suggest picking a reliable affiliate marketing program that’s alert to scams and defines acceptable practices in your affiliate agreements. Make sure to outline your brand-bidding policies and enforce consequences for breaking affiliate agreements. Search for programs allowing brand restrictions and set up policies to flag violations.
But, without advanced tech or security experts, spotting and stopping affiliate hijacking can be tricky. Manual checks take time and can be error-prone if you’re unsure what to look for.
Browser add-ons like Live HTTP Headers can help track redirects and spot suspicious affiliate trackers after clicking an ad.
I recommend considering protecting your brand using affiliate managers or professional monitoring services to detect potential hijacking attempts early and prevent ad hijacking. They’re experts at identifying signs like incorrect tracking URLs, affiliate links in reroutes, typos, and geotargeting tricks.
These services work around the clock, detecting restricted ad campaigns nationwide to catch affiliate fraudsters trying to cover their tracks. They also check internal affiliate databases and query smaller search engines where affiliates may misuse your brand.
Key Takeaways• Impacts of Affiliate Link Theft: Competing Channels: Brands and affiliates vie for the same ad space and keywords, increasing CPCs and competition. • Prevention Measures: |
Conclusion
Brands spend a lot on online ads to get noticed and attract customers. However, a sneaky trick called ad hijacking can cause problems for brands.
Affiliate hijacking can hurt brands in different ways. It reduces their website visitors, makes ads more expensive, and damages their reputation if people end up on shady websites.
There are ways to spot and stop this threat, like keeping an eye on ad performance of your affiliate marketing and using tools to track where clicks go. It’s a constant battle, but with vigilance and smart ad fraud solution strategies, brands can stay ahead and keep their online presence safe.
