HOW TO STOP AFFILIATES BIDDING FOR YOUR BRANDED TERMS IN ADWORDS
You are a local, independent business who partners with big affiliate sites like Expedia, Trivago, Booking.com, Agoda, Hotelscombined, Wotif, Hostelbookers or hotels.com, etc and you believe your own Adwords campaign has become your own competition as all your affiliate Search Ads display your brand name in the headline and are driving traffic to those affiliate sites instead of your own website.
It is a fact that you make less money when people book through those affiliate sites as you have to pay commissions. But also it is important to remember that you are actually bringing more revenue overall by allowing these massive affiliates with big Adwords budgets and Adwords optimisation specialists to bid for your brand name on Adwords.
Can you stop them bidding for your branded terms but most important should you stop them?
THE REALITY: YOU CANNOT STOP THEM BUT OUTPERFORM THEM!
I wrote the above situation for a hotel owner but it can also applies to any industry where there are a handful of big re-sellers or affiliates dominating the online space generating the majority of online leads and sales for your industry.
What you need: you are looking for insight into some creative solutions to stop this happening.
Read > Best Affiliate Guidelines Template
HOW TO STOP AFFILIATES BIDDING FOR YOUR BRAND NAME
Overall your client is actually making far more money using those big affiliates. That situation is shared by thousands of hotels. Hotel owners do not have a voice on how how those big affiliates snap leads even for branded terms. This situation is like if those affiliates were standing in front of the hotel entrance with a big sign getting people to pay them a booking fee before entering your hotel.
What you gotta do is:
- Analyse your branded terms Adwords Ad positions specially the ones that you are not number one position.
- Be strongest bidder on the ones that you are not right above affiliates’ ads positions
- Once you hit position one, SLOWLY start decreasing bids ONLY once the next steps are completed.
- Ensure your adwords ad copy has the exact branded keywords
- Publish an offer on your Adwords ads that your affiliates do not have. Essential as this will make a big difference compared to your affiliates’ Adwords text ads.
- Publish an expiry date on your Adwords ad copy to create urgency and bookings.
- Optimise your landing pages including information that educates customers on the benefits of booking directly.
This has been a proven to be successful Adwords optimisation process for our clients but might take around a year to keep reducing CPC for branded terms to the point that it should be our clients cheapest terms.
Note: Affiliates will keep bidding for your branded terms but they should no longer be in higher ad positions than your ads and more likely they gotta pay higher CPC than you.
Contact us if you are looking for an agency to optimise your Adwords campaign.
HOW TO STOP AFFILIATES BIDDING FOR YOUR BRAND NAMES IN ADWORDS
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