Your brand keywords are your identity. But what if you’re paying higher cost for your brand keywords, or in worst case scenario – paying for your organic traffic.
Brand bidding is a technique used by affiliates and competitors where they bid on your branded keywords to divert your traffic to their landing pages. The impact of brand bidding in affiliate marketing is not just limited to ad budget wastage.
The brands have to pay more for their own branded keywords, they lose search traffic, and revenue drops.
In 2025, it is expected that the expenditure on search advertising will hit $351.5 billion worldwide, indicating a strong growth in the paid search sector. And with the demand for search surges, it is critical for brands to have the right protection against brand bidding violations.
According to our analysis done, we have found that 43% of affiliate traffic is invalid. This blog is going to unpack:
- Why brand bidding protection is critical in 2025?
- What Leading Brands Are Doing to Prevent It?
- How mFilterIt Protects Your Affiliate Program from Brand Bidding?
Why Brand Bidding Is Riskier in 2025
In 2025, brand bidding has become more than just a compliance problem; it has emerged as a strategic threat. It directly attacks the authenticity of your website, leaving users in a dilemma and baiting them to make the purchase from an affiliate’s website or tracking link. Let’s understand how brand bidding is riskier in 2025:
1. Increased PPC Brand Bidding = Higher CPCs on Brand Terms
Affiliates bidding on brand keywords are directly proportional to the cost-per-click. The higher the bidding, the higher the cost-per-click, leading to an increased cost of paid search campaigns, making the visibility achievement on search engines greater challenge.
2. Detection Becoming Harder Due to AI-powered Tool
Monitoring the actions of affiliates and enforcing policy violations rules have become tougher for brands as affiliates consistently use cloaking, dynamic redirects, and global targeting by AI to evade detection.
3. Exploitation of Performance Metrics
In 2025, brands are relying heavily on performance metrics, prioritizing channels that generate maximum clicks, conversions, and ROAS. Hence, affiliates aim to exploit these metrics by click baiting users and taking credit of the purchases, they made without creating any new demand. This boosts the performance statistics of affiliates through mispresented numbers.
4. Brand Goodwill at Stake
Misleading affiliate advertisements, fake discounts, and unreliable affiliate tracking links can severely hamper the goodwill of the brand by eroding customer trust.
Real Impact: How Brand Bidding Eats into Your ROI
Your market funnel is at risk; brand bidding is draining your profits. Let’s know how profit leaks are undermining your return on investment (ROI):
1. One Customer, Double Payment
If users who are your organic customers, are specifically searching for you, visit an affiliate’s tracking link and make purchases, you lose one organic user and instead pay the affiliate commission on a sale you would have gotten anyway.
2. CPCs Rise Manifold
Your PPC campaigns land in a competitive landscape when affiliates bid on your keywords, increasing the cost-per-click and affecting the overall paid search efficiency.
3. False Attribution
Affiliates gain commission from selling your products, but no new demand is created. The customers are the same buyers who would have visited your website, anyway, hence creating false attribution.
4. Poor UX = Lost Conversions
Misleading or outdated ad copy from affiliates can create confusion, frustration, or distrust — increasing bounce rates and reducing conversion quality.
How to Prevent Brand Bidding: What Leading Brands Are Doing
As major talks are going around how to prevent brand bidding in affiliate marketing, brands are also recognizing its importance. The following are the strategies opted by them to tackle the same:
1.Transparent Brand Policies and Contracts
Brands create their affiliate program agreements, forbidding affiliates to steal their trademarked terms. The agreement includes what keywords the brand can use; the penalties imposed on the agreement and more.
2. Real-time Monitoring through Automation
Brands are keeping a hawk’s eye on violations of their trademarks by affiliates. They monitor the landing pages, ads that appear above their official website and take action accordingly.
3. Negative Keyword Implementation
The tactic of negative brand keyword implementation is followed by several brands across the affiliate campaigns to prevent affiliate ads from triggering on brand terms.
4. Timely Audits & Reporting
Brands evaluate affiliate traffic through patterns, source, and conversion behaviour to detect and prevent suspicious behavioural patterns. This also includes reviewing landing pages and promo codes to identify any misleading information.
5. Cross-Functional Team Alignment (Legal, PPC, Affiliate Management)
Leading brands are bringing legal, PPC, and affiliate teams together to tackle brand bidding in affiliate marketing. Legal handles takedowns, PPC monitors brand keyword activity, and affiliate managers enforce the rules. When these teams work in sync, violations get caught faster and the brand stays protected.
6. Third-party Solution for Detecting Brand Bidding Violation
Third-party solution provides unbiased monitoring and detection of brand bidding violations. By offering an external perspective, it ensures transparency, credibility, and consistent protection of a brand’s search presence.
How mFilterIt Protects Your Affiliate Program from Brand Bidding
Every click, every booking, every creative asset your brand deserves to own them. Yet brand bidding and unauthorized promotions quietly cause loss of direct traffic, inflate acquisition costs, and dilute trust.
That’s where EffCent steps in, mFilterIt’s affiliate monitoring solution built to protect your performance marketing ROI. But how do we do it?
Let’s know now –
- Real-time Monitoring –Track brand keyword bidding across ad networks and regions to spot misuse instantly.
- Actionable Reporting –Deliver daily reports that highlight brand bidding violations for quick corrective action.
- Proprietary Detection –Use Effcent’s technology to precisely identify unauthorized bids on branded keywords.
- Restrict Violations –Enable immediate blocking of ad networks bidding on brand terms.
The numbers below speak volumes, highlighting the delivered impact of Effcent –
- 64% of brand keyword hours across cities revealed white spaces
- By identifying and reclaiming these gaps, brands saved ₹1.77 million in just 20 days
- CPC fell by 52.47%, while the cost per conversion dropped by 46.15%
- At the same time, organic bookings skyrocketed by 86.1%
But affiliates are not just confined to brand bidding, the threat goes beyond that. As affiliate fraud gets smarter, know Why Every Brand Needs an Affiliate Monitoring Audit Checklist for Fraud-Free Growth.
Conclusion
Brand bidding is a real threat to your performance, budget, and brand trust. As we move into 2025, staying passive means leaving your search traffic, reputation, and ROI exposed. The good news? With the right tools and proactive strategies, like those offered by mFilterIt’s Effcent, you can take back control. Protect your brand, clean up your affiliate ecosystem, and ensure every click and conversion truly counts.
