Writing Your PPC Policy
From Wiki
May 2012
Working with paid search publishers: 10 things to consider when writing a PPC policy
Many advertisers work with paid search specialists through the publisher channel to complement their in-house efforts or those of their search agency. Part of the job of the network is to help enforce the terms and conditions of their PPC policy and guard against infringements. But the network should also advise on what constitutes a good PPC policy. This article looks at 10 questions to consider when writing, or revising, your PPC terms and conditions for your publisher programme.
1. Do you allow publishers to promote your programme via PPC?
This will depend on what you are looking to achieve in your overall search strategy. Your aim might be to attract customers away from your competitors, build up awareness of your own brand, or push a specific campaign. The extent to which you work with PPC publishers will depend on your representation in the paid search space at present. How do you rank on key brand and brand + generic terms? Is this the same across all search engines? More broadly, where does your product or service stands in the market at present? For example, advertisers in the finance, mobiles and utilities sector all offer similar products, and many consumers view price as the only differential. Contrast this to a fashion house that sells only its own products and partners with resellers to distribute them.
Budget has an important bearing on every paid search campaign. An publisher network can offer access to a trusted selection of large, experienced PPC publishers with big budgets who will be prepared to work on a CPA rather than a CPC basis. Running some (or indeed all) PPC activity through the publisher channel can shield wary advertisers from the inherent risks of spiralling acquisition costs on CPC campaigns.
2. Can publishers link directly to your site?
Advertisers facing competition in the SERPs for either brand or generic terms may want to enlist the help of publishers to cover off terms which they themselves, or their agency, cannot. The ability to direct link on these will boost conversions. It is possible that publishers can convert long tail generic keywords better, on a higher EPC, or get better positioning than the advertiser themselves. Many voucher code sites convert brand + voucher code searches better than the advertiser, for example. As such, you might wish to grant publishers direct linking rights on these specific terms.
However, as Google and Yahoo only allow one ad per SERP to use the same display URL, advertisers risk effectively bidding against their publishers and causing CPCs to rise for both. To manage this, advertisers should stipulate which keywords they are happy for a publisher to direct link on and which they themselves will cover.
3. Can publishers use your brand in the ad title, ad text or display URL of their ads?
In considering whether to allow publishers to use your brand in their ads you should ask what results the user is likely to have returned with their searches. Someone looking for your site might be confused if they are presented with more than one ad using displaying your brand, but on the other hand, given that the use of the brand in the ad will add consistency and help improve conversions, this might distract users from the ads of competitors which display for the same keyword(s). Competitors may try to take advantage of the fact that Google does not restrict bidding on trademarked terms itself, and has recently also removed restrictions on the display of trademarked terms in ad text.
4. Are publishers allowed to bid on your brand terms?
The most common argument for not allowing publishers to bid on their brand is that these sales would have been made anyway, as searching on a brand term is a good indication that the user wants to go to that site. This is a legitimate argument and there are very few cases in which paid search on brand yields incremental sales. But advertisers should think of the decision to give publishers brand rights as a strategic one based on conditions in their market – specifically, the competitiveness of the search space and the competitive position of their product or service.
Again, what is the user’s experience at present? If advertisers run their own ads and no competitors are present users will have little trouble finding what they have searched for, and so there is little reason for publishers’ ads to appear in this space as well. This may not be the case on all search engines however, and publishers can be used to plug these gaps. Equally, for brands that lack recognition in a competitive market publishers can advertise, perhaps below the advertiser, to squeeze out competition and achieve better coverage of the search results.
Indeed, where competitors are actively bidding against your brand a certain amount of customers will search for you but end up at a competitor. This is particularly the case in competitive markets. If Easyjet were to bid on its rivals, a significant proportion of users searching for ‘ryanair’ will end up transacting on the Easyjet site, for example.
If an advertiser’s brand is closely associated with a generic keyword competitor ads are likely to appear in the search results due to broadmatching. Users searching for an Egg credit card, for example, are unlikely to search on ‘egg’ but ‘egg credit card’. In these cases, publishers could be tasked with bidding on these brand + generic terms and giving them the right to use the brand in the ads will improve click-through rates, relevancy and therefore ultimately lower click costs whilst pushing competitors down in the rankings.
5. Are publishers allowed to bid on mis-spellings of your brand?
If an advertiser does not allow brand bidding it is common to also forbid publishers to bid on mis-spellings of the brand. However, for major brands this is increasingly unnecessary as the search engine is likely to recognise a mis-spelling and provide an automatic correction. For advertisers without a well-known brand however this might not be the case and if competitors are persistently active on mis-spellings it would be reasonable to conclude that this it profitable for them, and that a certain proportion of customers that would otherwise have converted for the advertiser are being converted with a competitor.
6. Should publishers add your brand name into their negative keyword list?
Requesting that publishers add negative keywords to their paid search campaigns will mean that their ads never display when a user searches for that term, even in combination with a generic term. This term is usually the brand, but advertisers should be mindful that asking publishers to negative match generic keywords when their brand contains these keywords (‘sports shoes’ or ‘low cost holidays’, for example) might be unrealistic.
The phraseology used in PPC T&Cs can also be important. Rather than listing all possible terms on which publisher activity is prohibited advertisers may wish to specify that no activity is allowed “on brand or mis-spellings of brand terms, including but not limited to....” Similarly, by specifying that publishers are not allowed to “appear”, rather than not allowed to “bid” on terms you have asked them to negative match against, will make it clear that broadmatching should not be an excuse for infringements.
7. Are publishers able to send traffic from their ads to landing pages before referring traffic to your site?
This is an alternative to the issues raised with direct linking. Advantages include that it allows greater coverage of the search space and could offer free exposure on high traffic sites at no upfront cost. Advertisers can work with publishers to design bespoke landing sites – rather than single pages – which represent the advertiser well and achieve a good Quality Score through providing relevant, unique content.
Because Google discourages thin sites that offer little extra to the advertiser’s own site, many landing pages will promote other advertisers’ products. Advertisers should therefore be mindful of how well these sites represent their brand, and how suitable the landing page is to the term that was searched on.
8. Should publishers be allowed to advertise on brand + generic terms?
Again, advertisers should ask: who is best able to convert traffic relevant to brand + generic search terms at the lowest acquisition cost, the advertiser or the publisher? Certain brand + generic terms might be highly relevant to a publisher’s area of business and, as previously mentioned, in some cases the publisher can rank higher and convert better than the advertiser themselves.
Competitors are likely to share the same generic search terms as an advertiser in brand + generic searches (‘Comet electricals’ or ‘Sky broadband’, for example), so again advertisers should look at their representation in the search space and whether publishers might be enlisted to help on these terms.
9. Should you use a ‘closed group’ of publishers to bid on brand and/or brand-related terms?
A closed group of trusted publishers with certain rights can be tasked with optimising the paid search landscape. They will need to be managed effectively to ensure that CPCs do not become unaffordable and that publishers remain in agreed positions in the SERPs, if these have been agreed.
In the interest of fairness to other publishers advertisers that operate a closed group should note this in their programme description.
10. Where issues arise
Advertisers should specify a procedure to be followed where breaches of PPC T&Cs occur. If a publisher’s ads display for restricted keywords an attempt to contact the publisher should always be made in the first instance. Where a response is not forthcoming, the advertiser may want to suspend the publisher from their programme but this will disable any publisher links so potential customers may not be referred through these ads. An alternative is to inform the publisher that their commissions have been zeroed until action is taken. This will mean that their ads are still live but no commission is payable on them. Advertisers should bear in mind however that the cookies of other publishers could still be overwritten by this publisher.
Advertisers should review their PPC T&Cs as and when Google or other search engines announce changes in their own policies. Networks can advise on how best to respond to these.