Reasons for trademark bidding

[PhoenixFlex]

Hi, Hopefully someone knows the answer to this. I've noticed that a lot of merchants on affiliate networks (Linkshare, CJ etc.) don't allow bidding on trademark names and URLs, although some of them do. This makes me curious - why would a merchant allow affiliates to bid on their trademarks, if it would draw traffic away from their natural (organic) search listing? Thanks, Phoenix

[rvrabel2002]

Originally Posted by PhoenixFlex

Hi, Hopefully someone knows the answer to this. I've noticed that a lot of merchants on affiliate networks (Linkshare, CJ etc.) don't allow bidding on trademark names and URLs, although some of them do. This makes me curious - why would a merchant allow affiliates to bid on their trademarks, if it would draw traffic away from their natural (organic) search listing? Thanks, Phoenix

Your right, many of them don't for that reason specifically. But, what worries me, is why DONT they let you bid on there trademarked terms. There rationale is, if we have 8 other advertisers (or in some cases more) underneath us, it raises the cpc for their direct link and increase there ad spending.

Hear me out on this before you start running to the papers. I got into a discussion with an AM about this, where trademark ppc was not allowed for an offer, yet when you type the offers trademark into, practically every other ad on the first page of google was a competing ad. Thats right folks, all the ads were bashing the product in question, then switching the user over to there "top 3 choices" or something like that.

So instead of having 8 affiliates competing over those ad spots and promoting there program, they now have the competition swooping in and getting traffic based on there keyword.

In addition, the brand was actually not even Trademarked (checked with trademark online search).

MAkes you think, why not just let your affiliates fight over the traffic?

[Tony Fox]

A lot of merchants don't let affiliates use their trademark terms because the merchants sees it as competing against their affiliates. rvrabel2002 is right though that the merchants are the ones missing out to competing merchants because they didn't want to lose "marketing" money.

The top reason why people bid on trademark terms is because the people who search using the trademark knows what they want and usually are very close to buying so they can convert very well.

[PhoenixFlex]

I think I get what you guys are saying - basically if a merchant allows trademark bidding they compete with their affiliates and get less money from their sales, but if they don't allow it they compete with affiliates/mechants of OTHER products bidding on their terms, and hence don't make the sales anyway. Guess there's no winning is there ;-) Kind of interesting how it works out that way though. Thanks for your replies though, both of you. PhoenixFlex

[rvrabel2002]

Originally Posted by PhoenixFlex

I think I get what you guys are saying - basically if a merchant allows trademark bidding they compete with their affiliates and get less money from their sales, but if they don't allow it they compete with affiliates/mechants of OTHER products bidding on their terms, and hence don't make the sales anyway. Guess there's no winning is there ;-) Kind of interesting how it works out that way though. Thanks for your replies though, both of you. PhoenixFlex

Exactly. The only way i think they would win is if they just didnt advertise there own product on there trademarked terms, and had all of there affiliates fighting over the top spots.

Thats at least how i would run things, but what do i know...