Brand bidding: Mitgo’s research shows alarming results
Mitgo has long been aware of the brand bidding practices in the advertising industry and how damaging they are to advertisers and the reputation of the partner marketing industry as a whole.
We recently conducted research into the current status of global brand bidding – and the results seem worrying.
What is brand bidding?
Brand bidding (or trademark bidding) is a type of online advertising fraud that involves the bidding on a competitor’s branded keywords. The goal is to capture traffic by redirecting it away from a brand and towards your own, ultimately taking revenue from them and tarnishing their brand image.
Already a problem for online brands and advertisers, its impact dramatically increased in June 2019, when Google decided to abolish its anti-brand bidding restrictions.
Without these restrictions, the only protections that remained prohibited competitors from using another brand’s trademarked name in their ad copy. There were no rules against bidding on branded keywords. This meant that unscrupulous marketers in over 200 countries were suddenly allowed to bid on and purchase the branded keywords of their rivals.
Researching the impact of unauthorised advertising practices
To further protect our partners and advertisers working with us across our partner marketing platform, Admitad, and native-advertising network, Takeads, we began to collect detailed data on how brands and brand names are being violated through unauthorised advertising practices.
First, our team selected a few key worldwide industries and markets to focus on. These included fashion & apparel, consumer electronics, beauty & personal care, home & furniture, food & beverages, sports & outdoors, books and music & entertainment. For each category, we looked at major advertisers in their industry – more than 100 brands in total, from leading online retail stores to sports goods and homeware manufacturers.
The research took place over the period of just one week, April 10th till April 17th 2023. Its results would surprise even experienced marketing and advertising professionals.
The surprising rise in unauthorised brand usage
From a country perspective, France led the list with over +13K cases of illegal brand bidding in just one week. They were followed by the UK (12.5K), Germany (12.4K) and the USA (12.3K).
Cases of direct brand bidding, landing page brand bidding, coupon brand bidding and unauthorised brand usage (both direct and through CPA) all appeared in our findings.
The most popular method brand bidders used was unauthorised brand use. This is where a brand’s name is used in an advert or content advertising without the prior consent of the brand itself.
Direct brand bidding, surprisingly, accounted for less than 1% of detected cases, while coupon brand bidding proved to be the second most-used practice after unauthorised brand bidding. Brand bidding through promotional sites accounts for about 5% of all detections. For more detailed information on these types of fraud, please see our recent article on Brand Auditor.
Through our monitoring, we saw a clear intent of brand bidders – to target European and US brands and drive their traffic across 17 leading partner networks worldwide. When it comes to the search engines and platforms, Google and Bing were targeted in Europe, while USA’ major brand bidding source remains Yahoo.
Safeguarding your business against brand bidding
We have only shared a few key results in this article, but all research and data acquired will be used to continually improve our brand bidding monitoring tool, Brand Auditor, enabling us to detect and block more cases for our partners and advertisers than ever before. We plan to share more research data on brand bidding as we constantly monitor such cases for our clients and partners.
Brand Auditor is an ad fraud monitoring tool that detects and blocks any and all brand bidding violations, as well as other aggressive tactics used by competitors to divert and exploit a brand’s most loyal and valuable customers.
If you are interested in implementing Brand Auditor into your marketing strategy, why not try it free for one week? Simply click the Request a free trial button on our Brand Auditor product page contact form.
For longer-term co-operations, please contact Artem Ozerkov directly for an informal chat.
Would you like to know more about how Mitgo can help your business grow? Come, visit us in Hamburg at OMR 2023, or drop us a line here.
Stay tuned for more news and updates coming your way soon!
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