Anthony, thanks for posting and for being willing to change your terms. I hope people will sign up with The Safe Shop and you can benefit from your willingness to communicate with affiliates. I didn’t want to be pick on The Safe Shop particularly but just to show that at the moment a lot of PPC guidelines are being thrown into place on all networks that may not benefit the merchant in the long term.

Thanks for your point of view James & Vlad - you both make good points and it’s great to have your experience here.

In either event, I think it is good you take care of your affiliates. I think there is a bigger issue with online retailers who sell products (clothing, shoes and other items) and they do not hold the trademark themselves (exampple: addidas sportwear, micheal kors bedding- and so on). I acutally had an affiliate manager sending be what supposed to be a list of “best performing keywords/keyphrases majority of those keywords I could not use in my campaigns due to “trademark” issues and the affiliate manager could not do much about it.

Having read your blog I have to say we may have been somewhat short-sighted with regards to the term “safe shop” and “safeshop”.

This course of action was my initiative and was originally based on the term “The Safe Shop”. When we first launched 3 years ago our name had little relevance within our industry but over time we have gradually seen this change where we are now searched for on a name basis.

Our company name is first in the Google organic listings and as a result anyone searching for our name will automatically find us. We cannot allow someone to bid on our name and by being directly above (via PPC) possibly receive more clicks/sales than our organic listing. This does not make economic sense.

However as you mention “safe shop” and “safeshop” are entirely different and far more generic. If I had thought more about this before placing the block I would like to think I would have come to the same conclusion. We are removing any block preventing affiliates bidding on these more generic terms with immediate effect.

Regards,
Anthony
http://www.thesafeshop.co.uk

Actually I have 19 Affiliates that did it and 4 doing well with the campaigns.

When I told them what they needed they sent it to me in 10 minutes, sometimes less.

“To do that the affiliate has to send me there google ad#. Then I send it to google, that takes up to 5 days.”

Well at least this is one way to go aboout it. Unfortunately not many affiliates will be willing to do that. Specially those of us who do split testing and modify ads frequently. 5 days seems to be a long time to wait- this is only my opinion.

It is reallygood to hear on the issue from an affiliate manager. I hope you still follow this post. I am jsut wondering to what extent do you go iforcing your policy on “restricted terms”? Do you submit the terms to Google? If so I find that the process of convincing Google that I have permission to bid on those terms is not always easy. I do not necesserily mean ZIRH, but I did have experience with other advertisers regarding this.