PPC & Trademark Bidding Policy

LinkApprove is approved as a publisher on upstream affiliate networks, and we redistribute that access to partners who would not be approved on their own. Every click a partner sends is attributed to our publisher account rather than to theirs. So when one partner bids on an advertiser's brand name in paid search, the advertiser does not see that partner. It sees LinkApprove competing against its own search team for its own customers, which is one of the quickest ways for a publisher account to be thrown out of a program.

Removal is not usually limited to the partner who caused it. An advertiser that finds brand bidding coming from our account can close the whole account, and every other partner promoting that advertiser through us loses the program with it. Some advertisers escalate to the upstream network instead of coming to us, which puts our standing at risk on programs we have no involvement in. That is why trademark bidding is prohibited across the network rather than negotiated advertiser by advertiser, and the rule is identical for every partner, every program, and every tier.

Trademark bidding means buying paid search placement on keywords that contain an advertiser's brand. That covers the company name, its trading names, its product and app names, its domain name, and close variants of any of them. It applies on every paid search platform, including shopping ads and marketplace search ads, and it applies to placements bought through an agency or any other third party acting for you. If a person typed a query containing the advertiser's brand and you paid to appear against it, that is trademark bidding.

Intent does not change the outcome. Accidental brand bidding usually happens through broad or phrase match, where you bid on a generic term and the platform serves your ad against a brand query you did not type. The advertiser sees the same thing either way, which is a paid ad sitting on its brand term and paid for from our account. For the purposes of this policy, a brand query you served an ad against is a brand query you bid on, whether you chose the keyword or the platform chose it for you.

The following patterns are prohibited across the network. The advertiser's brand name on its own. The brand name plus a modifier such as coupon, coupon code, discount, discount code, promo code, voucher, deal, offer, or free trial. The brand name plus a purchase or account word such as buy, price, pricing, sign up, or login. The brand written as its domain, with or without the extension. Product names and program names belonging to the advertiser. Anything an ordinary person would read as a search for that specific company.

Misspellings and variants count as brand terms. That includes a dropped or doubled letter, a transposed pair, a missing or added space, a hyphen added or removed, plurals, and the brand transliterated into another script. Search platforms commonly match these back to the brand, which is why they look cheap to buy and why advertisers watch them closely. Bidding on a misspelling is treated as bidding on the brand and carries the same consequences. If you cannot tell whether a term reads as the advertiser's brand, treat it as one and ask us before you spend.

Paid search on generic, non-brand keywords may be permitted, but only where two things are true at the same time. The advertiser allows affiliate paid search on its program at all, and we have given you written approval for that specific program in advance. Generic means the query stands on its own without the advertiser's brand anywhere in it, such as a category term or a description of the problem the product solves. Approval is specific to the advertiser, the platform, and the ad account named in your request.

Approval is not something you can infer. Silence from us is not approval, a friendly reply from someone at the advertiser is not approval, and the fact that another partner appears to be running paid search on a program tells you nothing about what they were approved for. If you cannot point to written approval from us naming the program, you do not have one. We can withdraw an approval at any time, usually because the advertiser changed its own terms, and you must pause the campaign as soon as we tell you. Spend that continues after a withdrawal is treated as an unapproved campaign and carries the same commission reversal as any other violation.

If we approve you for generic paid search, you take on a negative keyword obligation. Before the campaign goes live you must add the advertiser's brand name, its domain, its product names, the common misspellings, and the brand plus coupon and discount patterns as negatives at campaign or account level. Broad and phrase match will otherwise pull brand queries into a generic campaign within days. The negative list forms part of the approval rather than being an optional extra, and we may ask to see it before we approve anything.

You are responsible for reading your own search terms report. Check it regularly while a campaign is live, add any brand query that slipped through as a negative, and pause anything you are unsure about. Search platforms can change matching behavior without telling advertisers, so a list that ran clean last month can leak this month. Serving on brand queries because your negatives were incomplete is still a violation of this policy, and it carries the same commission reversal. We assess what your ads actually appeared against, not what you intended to buy.

Ad copy must not use the advertiser's brand name, logo, or slogan, and must not suggest you are the advertiser, an official store, or an authorized representative. Do not advertise a discount code you do not hold. The display URL must be a domain you control and must not carry the advertiser's brand or domain as a subdomain, a folder, or a lookalike spelling. Nothing in the ad should lead a person to believe they are clicking through to the advertiser's own listing rather than to your content.

Direct linking is prohibited unless we approve it in writing for a named program. You may not send paid traffic from an ad straight to the advertiser through an affiliate link, and you may not use a redirect, a bridge domain, or a shortener to disguise that you are doing it. Paid traffic must land on a real page you own carrying your own content, and the affiliate link goes from that page. Hiding the true destination from the platform or from us is a separate violation, it is treated as a serious one, and it moves an account straight to the escalated response described below.

Some advertisers prohibit affiliate paid search completely, brand terms or not. Others allow it only for a short list of partners they know by name. These conditions sit in the program terms held on the upstream affiliate network, they are set by the advertiser rather than by us, and they can change without anyone telling us first. It is your responsibility to establish the position for a program before you spend anything on ads, and the way to establish it is to ask us in writing.

Treat a program as closed to paid search until you have been told otherwise. Where the program terms are ambiguous, or an advertiser contact has told you one thing while the network record says another, assume the stricter reading applies. We would far rather answer a question that turns out to be unnecessary than reverse commission on a campaign you have already funded. Money spent on ads for a program that did not allow paid search is not recoverable from us and is not recoverable from the advertiser, and the commission that traffic generated goes as well.

Violations reach us by several routes. Advertisers and the networks we are approved on run their own brand monitoring and send us evidence such as screenshots showing the time, the location, and the query that triggered the ad. Our own reporting shows referring URLs, sub-IDs, and traffic shapes that look like paid search, including a sudden concentration of conversions on high brand intent queries. Competing partners report each other, and we look at those reports whatever the motive behind them. We also review partner accounts whenever an advertiser places our publisher account under review for any reason.

Our monitoring is not exhaustive and we will not pretend otherwise. A campaign can run for a while before anybody sees it, and the party that sees it first is frequently the advertiser rather than us. Do not read the absence of a warning as permission, and do not treat a quiet week as evidence that a campaign is compliant. Detection after the fact still leads to commission reversal and, where the advertiser demands it, to removal from the program. Traffic that has already converted is not protected by the fact that you paid for it.

A first violation that looks clearly accidental normally starts with a written warning and an instruction to pause the campaign immediately, and we expect confirmation the same day. If the campaign stops and the leak is closed, that is often the end of it. Where the advertiser has already seen the ad, we usually also reverse commission on traffic from that campaign, because the advertiser reverses it on us. Commission only releases once the advertiser validates the sale, typically 30 to 60 days after the transaction date, so a balance already showing in your account can still be taken back. Reversal can extend across a whole period where we cannot cleanly separate compliant traffic from the violating campaign.

From there the response escalates. Repeat violations, deliberate brand bidding, cloaked destinations, or misspelling campaigns lead to suspension of the account and to your balance being held while we work out what is genuinely owed. A suspension stops payouts whatever frequency your tier normally runs on, whether that is daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Serious or repeated cases lead to termination, with commission earned through the violating traffic forfeited. If we have already paid you on traffic that is later reversed, we will offset it against future earnings, and where there are no future earnings we may ask you to return the money. An advertiser or an upstream network can also require us to act faster than our own process would.

We do not reimburse advertising spend. The platform itself is free to use, with no monthly fee and no minimum spend, but none of that extends to money you hand to a search platform. If you run a campaign that breaks this policy, you carry the cost of every click you bought and you lose the commission those clicks generated. That is the whole downside in one sentence, and it is worth reading twice before launching a campaign nobody has approved. Brand bidding looks profitable precisely because the traffic converts at a high rate, which is also the reason it is the first thing an advertiser goes looking for.

There is risk outside our network as well. Brand owners can file trademark complaints directly with a search platform, and platforms can restrict or suspend an ad account on the back of them. That sits between you and the platform, and we have no ability to influence the outcome. We also cannot promise that an advertiser will leave you alone where it believes its trademarks were misused, and an advertiser may choose to pursue you directly. Nothing in this policy limits an advertiser's own legal rights, and nothing in it transfers your liability to us.

Send the request to support@linkapprove.com before you build the campaign. Include the advertiser and program, the paid search platform, the ad account you will run it from, the exact keyword list with match types, your intended negative keyword list, the ad copy, the display URL, and the landing page the traffic will reach. Requests that arrive without the keyword list and the negatives cannot be assessed, and they will come back to you unanswered on the substance rather than sitting in a queue.

We put the request to the advertiser through the network we are approved on, so the answer depends on the advertiser and on how quickly it responds. Some reply within days, some take weeks, and some do not reply at all, which we treat as a refusal. If approval is granted it comes in writing from us, names the program and the platform, and lists any conditions the advertiser attached, so keep that message. If you later change keywords, ad copy, or landing page in any material way, ask again before the change goes live. Written correspondence can also be sent to LinkApprove LLC, 117 South Lexington Street, Ste 100, Harrisonville, MO 64701, United States.