Trademark Plus Affiliate Partnerships: Optimizing Brand Control and Boosting Revenue
Trademark Plus empowers Acceleration Partners' clients by allowing them to leverage a trademark bidding strategy. In turn, Trademark Plus lets clients alleviate two common affiliate marketing pain points. These challenges include competitors that bid on a client's branded keywords and keyword hijacking.
With the help of Acceleration Partners' Trademark Plus framework, clients can optimize brand control. Additionally, this solution leads to a better return on ad spend, facilitates free exposure through AP's media subsidies, and increases total revenue.
$7Myear-over-year revenue increase
$500,000media subsidies generated free exposure
1546% increase in return on ad spend
Two of the most frustrating challenges facing Acceleration Partners clients include:
- Losing valuable web traffic to competitors bidding on a client’s branded
keywords. - Having branded keywords hijacked by rogue bidders (websites or affiliates not part of their program) and other undesirable domains, and then used to promote unapproved offers that drive up cost per click.
Our in-house search expert aligned with our affiliate program management team to come up with a unique Trademark Plus (TM+) strategy for leveraging their affiliate partners to help eliminate—or at least drastically reduce—how often their competitors showed up in search results when their branded keywords were used.
Through TM+, clients can execute a more effective trademark bidding strategy. With TM+, a brand’s name is used plus another keyword; clients can authorize high-value affiliate partners to launch a paid search campaign using their trademark and words such as “coupon” or “review.”
The end goal is to eliminate or significantly reduce the visibility of a client’s competitors by pricing them out of the paid search results section.
Acceleration Partners selected nine clients to test the TM+ program. AP’s in-house paid search expert worked with each client to help them develop a tailored strategy based on their unique challenges and budget, which included:
- Careful and explicit selection of bidding keywords
- Clear, customized trademark bidding campaign parameters
- Conscientious selection of affiliate partners
- Strategic partnership and placement agreements
