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.