Affiliate marketing glossary
Trademark bidding
In one sentence
Trademark bidding is the practice of buying paid search ads on an advertiser's brand name, and it is prohibited by the large majority of affiliate programs.
Advertisers prohibit it because an affiliate bidding on the brand name competes against the advertiser's own ads and captures commission on traffic the brand would have won for free.
Breaching a trademark bidding policy is one of the fastest routes to permanent removal from a program, and in a sub-affiliate structure it can put the network's own upstream relationship at risk.
Common questions
Trademark bidding, answered
What counts as trademark bidding?
Buying paid search placement on keywords containing the advertiser's brand: the name itself, misspellings and transpositions, spacing and hyphen variants, and brand-plus-keyword combinations such as the name with 'discount code'. The test is whether the query is looking for that brand, not whether you typed it exactly.
Why do advertisers prohibit it?
Because the affiliate competes against the brand's own ads for traffic the brand would have won for nothing, then charges commission on it. It converts a customer the advertiser already had into a customer the advertiser paid twice for.
What happens if I do it by accident?
Broad-match campaigns are the usual accident, and a first breach that clearly looks accidental normally starts with a warning and an instruction to pause immediately. What does not get reimbursed is your ad spend, and the commission from the affected clicks is forfeited. The full policy is published on this site rather than buried in an onboarding email.
Keep reading
More from the glossary
Every term here is written to answer one question completely, then point at the next one worth asking.
Sub-affiliate network
A sub-affiliate network is a company that holds approved relationships with affiliate programs on major networks and lets smaller publishers and creators promote those programs under its account, sharing the commission it receives.
Affiliate network
An affiliate network is a platform that connects advertisers running affiliate programs with publishers who promote them, handling tracking, reporting and payment between the two.
EPC (earnings per click)
EPC is the average commission earned per click sent to an advertiser, calculated as total commission divided by total clicks over a given period.
Cookie window
The cookie window is the length of time after a click during which a resulting purchase is still credited to the affiliate, commonly ranging from 24 hours to 90 days.
Last-click attribution
Last-click attribution credits the entire commission to the final affiliate link clicked before a purchase, which is the default model across almost all affiliate networks.
Attribution
Attribution is the process of determining which marketing touchpoint receives credit for a conversion, and therefore which affiliate is paid.
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