Should You Allow PPC Keywords For Shareasale campaigns?

For shareasale and other affiliate campaigns, make the decision on whether or not to allow affiliates to use them. What you dont want is affiliates bidding on the same PPC keywords as you.

Are there any words that you don’t want the affiliate to associate with your brand?

Unwanted words and keywords that you target? For example: minimal use of seed words in your campaigns e.g. your brand name, or references. Decide on your list of PPC keyword choices used on Adwords, and whether you disallow certain keyword sets, or allow any keyword set chosen.

The argument here is do you want PPC ads that are sending traffic direct to your main site or to an affiliate’s own site, or squeeze page.

For example, if an affiliate is bidding on your keywords, that increases the competition for you when doing your own PPC ads. You could be spending money on PPC ads that don’t appear as another affiliate has grabbed the spot, so you could end up spending money on PPC ads that don’t appear.

The off shoot is that an affiliate may have the spot on Google and has sent a sale anyway.

Some merchants don’t allow PPC at all for these reasons (if they have effective PPC campaigns). Or, disallow the use of certain keyword sets.

If you choose to allow PPC ads that are ‘direct-to-merchant’ ads or DTM ads then maybe consider adding these conditions:

Do you accept DTM? Yes/No.

Do you allow your site in the display URL? Yes/No.

Do you have keyword restrictions for PPC ads? Yes/No. (for this, you need the PPC keywords to disallow)

Can affiliates geo-target your locality?

Do you wish to have affiliates branding themselves as YOU in the PPC ads?

Its known as trademark bidding, and you need to decide if you allow it or not?

Add guidelines to the merchant account, and if an affiliate breaks those guidelines, send one warning, breaks it again, disable his affiliate account – I adopt that no BS approach; its necessary for me to monitor registered members submitting articles where duplicate content and plagiarised content is concerned.

Report affiliates breaking your policies to shareasale directly which can affect their status as a member.

When you have affiliates whom are selling well using PPC, perhaps you could then reduce your PPC budget and let them do the work – in effect.