CONNECT WITH US
Tech

Tech

Rising CPC? You’re Funding The Competition. Here’s How To Trace It.

Search Engine Journal logo

Published on

Add as a preferred source on Google
Rising CPC? You’re Funding The Competition. Here’s How To Trace It.

Explore the reasons behind rising CPC. Discover how affiliates can impact your cost per click and affect your ad performance.

This post was sponsored by adment. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Branded keywords should be your cheapest clicks. So why are your branded CPCs going up?

You’ve checked Auction Insights, your bid strategy, and seasonality, and none of them explain it.

Who else is bidding on your brand, and why are you paying more for traffic you already earned?

Surprisingly enough, the competition in that auction may be your own affiliates.

When they bid on your brand to increase their sales, you pay twice without realizing it: higher CPCs on your ads, and a commission on each sale they intercept. Your affiliate reporting won’t show that it happened.

Most mature affiliate programs track clicks, conversions, commissions, and partner performance. What is harder to see is what happened before a conversion entered the affiliate platform.

A report may show that Partner A generated 150 conversions. It may not show that the same partner was bidding on restricted branded terms and using redirects to hide that activity before the conversion was attributed.

Detection often requires manual work. Managers search branded keywords, check advertisers, follow redirects, and match their findings to partners.

The problem is coverage. Paid search changes by market, keyword, device, and time, while brand bidders can change domains, targeting, and redirect paths. Keeping up with this manually can become a full-time job in itself, taking affiliate teams away from actually growing the program.


Source link
Related Topics:Tech

Disclaimer

We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We TheMorningPulse.fyi want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It's possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.