Brand bidding and PPC rules for affiliates: a sample policy

An affiliate brand bidding policy says that partners may not buy search ads on your brand name, its misspellings or combinations such as "yourbrand pricing", may not send paid search clicks straight to your site through their affiliate link, and must add your brand terms as negative keywords in any campaign that could match them. Brands restrict it because a person searching your name is already looking for you; paying commission on that customer, for example about $90 each on a $49 plan at 20% for 12 months, buys nothing new and raises your own ad costs. Google Ads does not stop anyone from using a trademark as a keyword, but it does not allow affiliates to advertise against the rules of their affiliate program [1][2]. That makes a clearly written rule in your terms the thing that actually protects you.

What is brand bidding in affiliate marketing?

Brand bidding is when an affiliate buys paid search ads that show for searches of your company or product name. The affiliate's ad appears above or next to yours, the searcher clicks it, lands on your site through the affiliate's tracking link, and signs up. The affiliate gets commission for a customer who typed your name into a search box before they ever saw the ad.

Three variants are common. Pure brand bidding uses your exact name as the keyword. Brand-plus bidding uses combinations such as "yourbrand discount", "yourbrand coupon", "yourbrand pricing" or "yourbrand login". And competitor-plus-brand bidding uses "yourbrand vs competitor" or "yourbrand alternative", which sits in a grey area because a comparison page can be genuinely useful. Your rule should name all three and say which, if any, are allowed.

Why brands restrict affiliate brand bidding

The first reason is that you pay twice for a customer you already had. The searcher was looking for you. Without the affiliate ad they would most likely have clicked your organic result or your own ad. With it, you pay the affiliate's commission, and if you also bid on your own name, the extra bidder in the auction can raise your cost per click.

The second reason is that it hides the real performance of your program. Brand-search customers convert well, so an affiliate bidding on your name will show excellent conversion and EPC. Those numbers look like a star partner, and they are really a toll on traffic you owned. If you do not separate them, you will make decisions about rates and recruiting based on a channel that creates no new demand.

The third reason is control of the message. An affiliate ad on your brand term can promise discounts you do not offer, use outdated pricing, or send searchers to a coupon page that teaches them to look for codes before buying. You cannot edit an ad you do not run.

Worked example: the cost of a brand-bidding affiliate

Suppose an affiliate's brand-term ads take 300 clicks a month that would otherwise have gone to your own result, and 10% of those clicks become paying customers: 300 × 10% = 30 customers. On a $49 plan at 20% for 12 months with 5% monthly churn, expected commission is about 9.2 × $9.80 ≈ $90 per customer. That is 30 × $90 = $2,700 in commission per month of brand traffic, paid over the following year, for customers who were already searching for you. All figures are illustrative.

What does Google Ads trademark policy allow?

Google Ads trademark policy separates keywords from ad text. Google does not restrict the use of trademarks as keywords: anyone can bid on your brand name [1]. What Google can restrict, after a complaint from the trademark owner, is the use of the trademark in the ad text itself, either by a direct competitor or in a confusing, deceptive or misleading way [1]. The trademark must appear in the ad, not only on the landing page, for the restriction to apply [1].

There are exceptions that matter for affiliates. Ads whose landing page is primarily dedicated to selling the trademarked product, such as a reseller, and ads for informational sites that mainly provide details about the trademarked product are not restricted, provided the ad and landing page are clear about whether the advertiser is a reseller or an informational site [1]. Many affiliate review pages fall into the informational category. Trademark owners file complaints through Google's reporting tool, complaints target specific advertisers by URL, and Google enforces only in the countries and industries where the owner has shown trademark rights [1].

The second policy is the one that gives your terms teeth. Google's Unfair advantage policy lists, as an example of what is not allowed, affiliates that advertise on Google Ads against the applicable affiliate program rules, and also trying to show more than one ad for your business, app or site in a single ad location [2]. In other words, Google does not decide whether brand bidding is allowed in your program; your terms do, and an affiliate who breaks them is also out of line with Google's own policy.

Microsoft Advertising and other networks have their own intellectual property policies, and trademark rules differ by country. This post describes Google's published policy and is not legal advice; for a trademark dispute, talk to a lawyer in the relevant market.

How to write a brand bidding rule affiliates can follow

A good rule is specific enough that an affiliate running a campaign can check it in a minute. Vague wording such as "no trademark abuse" invites argument. Name the terms, name the behaviors, name the consequence.

1. List the protected terms: your company name, product names, common misspellings, and your domain, plus any combination containing them.
2. Ban bidding on those terms in any paid search network, in any match type.
3. Ban using those terms in ad text, display URLs and ad extensions, unless you give written approval for a specific campaign.
4. Ban direct linking: paid search ads may not send clicks to your site through an affiliate link or redirect. Paid traffic must land on the affiliate's own page first.
5. Require negative keywords: any broad or phrase match campaign that could match your terms must include them as negatives.
6. State the consequence: commission from violating traffic is reversed, and repeat or deliberate violations end the partnership.
7. Say what is allowed, so good affiliates are not scared off: bidding on generic category terms such as "invoicing software for freelancers", and SEO content that ranks for your brand name organically.

Negative keywords: the part affiliates get wrong

Most brand bidding by affiliates is not deliberate. An affiliate runs a broad match campaign on "invoicing software", and the search network decides that "yourbrand invoicing" is close enough. The fix is negative keywords, and there is one detail that catches people out: Google says negative keywords do not match close variants or other expansions [3].

That means a negative keyword for "yourbrand" will not automatically block "yourbrnad" or "your brand". Affiliates must add each misspelling and spacing variant they want to exclude. Google offers three negative match types for Search campaigns: broad, phrase and exact [3]. A negative broad match blocks searches that contain all the negative terms in any order; a negative phrase match blocks searches containing the terms in that order; a negative exact match blocks only that exact query [3]. For brand protection, a list of single-word negatives in broad match, one per variant, covers the most ground.

Give affiliates the list. Put a ready-to-paste negative keyword list on your program page or in the welcome email, with your name, product names and the five or six misspellings you see most in your own search terms report. Affiliates who want to comply can do it in two minutes, and the ones who do not have no excuse.

How to monitor affiliate brand bidding

A rule nobody checks is a suggestion. Monitoring does not need special software; it needs a short routine that uses tools you already have.

• Auction insights. If you bid on your own brand, the Auction insights report in Google Ads shows the other advertisers appearing in the same auctions, with impression share, overlap rate and how often they rank above you [4]. A new domain appearing on your brand campaign is the first sign.
• Ads Transparency Center. Google's Ads Transparency Center lets anyone search by advertiser name or website and filter by region and date [5]. Search for affiliates whose names appear in your auction insights to see their ads.
• Manual searches. Once a week, search your brand name and two or three brand-plus terms from different locations if you can, and note any ad that is not yours.
• Referrer and landing data. Clicks on affiliate links that arrive with paid search parameters, or customers attributed to an affiliate who also searched your brand, are worth a look.
• Conversion outliers. An affiliate with a much higher conversion rate than similar partners is often sitting on brand traffic. Check before you celebrate.

Keep evidence. A screenshot with the search term, date, location and the ad's display URL is what you need for a conversation with the partner, and for a trademark complaint if it comes to that. Be fair in the first conversation: most first violations are a missing negative keyword, and one warning with the negative list fixes them.

Sample brand bidding and paid search policy text

The text below is a starting point you can adapt. Replace the bracketed parts, and keep it on your program page where partners and AI assistants reading your terms can find it.

Paid search. Partners may not bid on [Brand], [Product], [brand.com] or any misspelling or combination containing them (for example "[brand] pricing", "[brand] coupon", "[brand] login") as keywords on Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising or any other paid search network, in any match type. Partners may not use these terms in ad text, display URLs or ad assets without our written approval for a specific campaign. Partners may not link paid search ads directly to [brand.com] through an affiliate link or redirect; paid traffic must land on a page you own. Any campaign using broad or phrase match on related terms must include our terms as negative keywords; our current list is at [link]. Bidding on generic category terms and ranking organically for our name are allowed. Commission from traffic that breaks this rule will be reversed. A first violation receives a written warning; repeated or deliberate violations end the partnership.

Two notes on the sample. The ban on direct linking is what stops the most common workaround, where an affiliate bids on generic terms but sends clicks straight to your homepage so the ad looks like yours. And the explicit "allowed" sentence matters: affiliates who build real comparison content should know they can rank for your name, because that is the content you want.

Enforcing the rule fairly

Enforcement works best when it is predictable. Reverse commission only for traffic you can tie to the violation, not the partner's whole balance. Hold commission during a review rather than deleting it. Write down the warning, the date and the evidence. A partner who fixes the problem the same day is a partner worth keeping.

In RelayWonder, commission sits in a 30-day hold before it becomes payable, and corrections are negative ledger rows rather than edits, so reversing commission from a violating campaign leaves a clear record of what was removed and why. Fraud flags for self-referral and click bursts help with the conversion outliers that often accompany brand bidding.