Having collaborated with Search Engine Marketers for over fifteen years, The Search Monitor profoundly recognizes the importance of confidently allocating ad resources. This year, we announced Ad Armor, a powerful new tool to free up ad dollars by safely pushing traffic to your free organic listings without sacrificing traffic or conversions. Freeing up 20 – 40% of their paid ad budgets on keywords with strong SEO rankings without sacrificing clicks or conversions is a game-changer, and many brands are already taking advantage of it.

To build upon these advancements, The Search Monitor announced today that it has added a new Keyword Layout report for customers using its SEM Insights platform. This enhanced report shows the complete layout of the Search Engine Results Page, including critical metrics such as the % of paid ads, % of PLA Ads, and the page order of each organic section. This fresh view will serve customers in determining the allocation of resources towards specific ad units amid an ever-turbulent search market.

Yes, your affiliates are your partners in marketing. However, they will bend your program rules if it makes an extra buck. In addition, it can be tricky to know if an affiliate is brand bidding on purpose or accident. This gray area occurs because an ad can appear on a search engine results page (SERP) due to match type and a feature called ‘auto-apply recommendations.

Affiliate compliance begins with a well-crafted and well-thought-out affiliate agreement. This is not legal advice and is intended as business advisement. Many programs require customized contracts. These are examples of restrictions to aid you in deploying an effective compliance strategy:

When it comes to trademarks, there are three types of uses that brand owners need to watch out for on paid search:

1. Keyword Sponsors. This is when an unauthorized affiliate sponsors your brand as a keyword so that the affiliate’s ads appear when a user searches for your name or products.
2. Ad Copy Use. This is when an unauthorized affiliate uses your brand within ad copy text.
3. Display URL Use. This is when an unauthorized affiliate uses your brand as part of its display URL.

Lesson 1 | Brand Protection Crash Course

Lesson 1: Why is PPC brand protection important?

Unless you are entirely new to PPC, getting the significant gains we once saw is tough. PPC has matured as a marketing tactic for years, and few “easy wins” remain. Many categories are dominated by prominent players (e.g., Amazon), long-tail keywords have become expensive, and the most advanced marketers have complex technology and costly agencies.

Especially with first-page CPC bids on the rise, it can be tempting for advertisers to look for any opportunity to reduce costs, and sometimes branded campaigns get the ax.

If you’re reading this, you’re using Google Ads as an advertising platform for your business or strongly considering it. It’s the search engine that accounts for 93% of global searches. It’s the only platform where you can virtually guarantee your audience to use it.

But that certainty also means that the level of competition is high and getting higher, which in turn means that the cost of advertising on Google can increase with time. That means you need to do more with less unless your budget increases. So continual optimization of your ads is a necessity.

Branded pay-per-click ad campaigns—in which you bid on your own brand keywords—are the cost-effective means of driving sales and leads. For less-than-ethical affiliates, targeting your branded keywords can prove to be a temptation too powerful to resist.

If you’ve seen a decline in the impressions, clicks, and conversions of your branded ad campaigns, then you may be the victim of an affiliate ad hijacker.

Since as long as we can remember, The Search Monitor has been helping marketers to coordinate SEO and SEM efforts with reporting areas like SERP Share (since 2015!) which grades SEM & SEO performance against competitors, by keyword, to show the entire page real-estate in a singular view.  From these reports, SEM marketers have been able to make optimization decisions such as when to run ads, when to turn ads off, and to grade their overall SOV against the entire market landscape.

As an expansion on SERP Share, in early January 2023, we released a new reporting area called Ad Armor.

The Search Monitor is a powerful set of tools that empowers even the largest brands to stop trademark abuse in online advertising, saving them potentially millions of dollars in ad spend.

Avery Products Corporation, a label manufacturer that generates $175 million in revenue every year and employs more than 20,000 people, started using The Search Monitor to fight back against brand bidders who were abusing their trademark and driving up ad costs.

We are excited to share our latest whitepaper that covers six common challenges in optimizing PPC campaigns and how to solve them.

Optimizing search campaigns is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of every PPC team. However, it is also one of the most difficult to get consistently right. In this 6-step guide we are going to look at some of the most pressing challenges that face the PPC team when it comes to optimizing campaigns, why they’re happening and how to tackle them.