Every business owner knows the importance of building a brand. This is why they employ strategies to safeguard their brand against practices like brand jacking, cyber threats, and brand impersonation.
Especially in paid search, you need to safeguard your brand from resellers, affiliates, and competitors who misuse your brand’s reputation. Research shows that there is a high concern for brand safety now compared to previous years. But how do resellers, affiliates, and competitors expose your brand to exploitation in paid search?
- Keyword bidding: Competitors or threat actors may bid on the terms you use for your brand, which can cause your ads to drop in search results.
- Trademark misuse: Your brand name or trademarks may be used on their ads, which could divert traffic and mislead customers.
As the business owner, you need to know how to protect your business against brand jacking. Through the use of digital brand protection strategies, you can secure your online reputation and presence by:
- Ensuring you get found by customers first
- Keeping your brand on top of search engine results
- Protecting your brand equity
3 Common Brand Jacking Practices You Need to Know About
Brand jacking refers to the unauthorised use of a brand’s name, logo, or identity for fraudulent or negative purposes. Such practices include spreading false information, promoting a competitor’s brand, engaging in scams, or to increase personal gain.
In the advent of technology, the best way to protect a business against Brand jacking is to be aware of the common practices. These include the following:
Domain Hijacking
Image Credit:LinkedIn
There is a common misconception that once a domain has been purchased, it will already belong to you for as long as you like. While this is good in theory, it isn’t practised in real life.
Surprisingly, this can happen to the biggest names in the online world. One such example is the hijacking of Google.com.vn, the Vietnam domain of Google, in 2015.
The Lizard Squad hackers were able to access the search engine via a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) hacking method, which allowed them to take down the website and redirect users to a website that sold hacking tools.
Fortunately, Google caught on quickly and managed to get the domain back.
Social Media Impersonation
Image Credit: Forbes
There has also been a proliferation of social media impersonation scams in Singapore. In fact, the police have warned against the resurgence of such scams that made use of compromised WhatsApp accounts. Also, The Straits Times reported on at least 120 victims who lost $330,000 to social media impersonation scams.
Although these scams make use of spoofed social media accounts, they have also been used to impersonate specific brands.
The past victims were approached and enticed to join or vote in a campaign that was allegedly organised by the brands. After clicking on a link sent to them by these accounts, they were led to a fraudulent site that held the DBS Bank logo.
Another case of social media impersonation is from Eli Lilly & Co., a pharmaceutical company from the US. A fake user created an account impersonating the brand and tweeted “insulin is now free,” which sparked thousands of reactions and retweets. After confirming it was fake, Twitter removed the post.
Unfortunately, the damage had been done to Eli Lilly & Co. The brand lost billions in value, with their share prices dropping the following day.
If in doubt you are being scammed, you can check this website for more information.
Ad Hijacking/Affiliate Hijacking
Image Credit: Hostinger
In paid search, a common brand jacking practice that is done by competitors, affiliates, and resellers is called ad hijacking or brand poaching/affiliate hijacking. This happens when an affiliate impersonates a brand that is running ads so that traffic can be routed to them instead. They make their ads look identical to the legitimate brand by copying:
- Headlines
- Descriptions
- Display URLs
By copying these, they can increase the chances of getting the clicks and can earn as much as 10% commission on such purchases.
How Ad Hijacking Works
Image Credit: SearchEngineLand
To show how ad hijacking works, we’ll need to look at an example captured by Adthena’s Ad Hijacking Detection tool. For anonymity purposes, the name of the brand was changed to a generic one.
In this example, a user searched for the name of the hotel and was directed to a website that showed the original hotel’s brand name, header, display URL, and site links. Sounds legit, right?
Unfortunately, the hotel did not place an ad for this. Instead, an affiliate bidding site placed the ad and hijacked the hotel’s copy.
Ad hijacking can affect a paid search campaign through:
- Lost sales and revenue: Paying for clicks that aren’t reaching your website, which leads to diverted potential customers and reduced sales.
- Increased costs: Legitimate advertisers unconsciously compete against hijackers who are bidding on the brand terms (e.g. your brand name), which drives up the CPC (cost-per-click).
- Data skewing: For advertisers that use affiliate programs, the data metrics can be inaccurate and difficult to track.
- Customer mistrust: Customers no longer trust the brand after clicking on a hijacked ad and having a negative experience. This damages your brand’s reputation as the experience is associated with your company.
How to Spot Ad Hijacking
As a digital practitioner, you need to be on the lookout for red flags on your branded ad campaigns. The best way you can fight ad hijacking is to be proactive in the first place. You can do that by monitoring these things:
- Performance drop: Has there been a sudden drop on the clicks and conversions you get on your branded ads?
- Copycat conversions: Does an affiliate have similar conversion rates as the branded ad campaigns you run?
- Suspicious spike in affiliates: Has there been an increase in conversions or referral traffic from an unknown affiliate site?
- URL mismatches: Have you noticed strange redirects or mismatched URLs pointing to your domain?
These are warning signs that can alert you if your ad has been hijacked by a competitor or an affiliate. The next step is to take action to protect your brand.
Brand Jacking Strategies to Stop Ad Hijacking
So how can you stop ad hijacking? Businesses need to adapt strong digital brand protection strategies so they can minimise the occurrences of ad hijacking. You don’t have to wait for your brand to be victimised by ad hijacking. There are some proactive measures you can make to protect your brand:
1. Secure Your Brand
There are two ways to secure your brand identity: register your trademarks and brand terms so you can get legal help when you address hijackers; or use brand monitoring tools to look for online mentions.
How to Trademark Your Brand in Singapore
Image Credit: IPOS.sg
The process of trademark registration in Singapore usually takes a total of nine months. The process includes:
- Trademark Protectability Search: Conducted to identify existing trademarks that may be in conflict with your brand
- Filing of Application: Filing a trademark application with the Intellectual Property office of Singapore (IPOS)
- Examination: IPOS examines the eligibility of the trademark
- Publication: Publication in the Trade Marks Journal as a transparency measure for public scrutiny, the period usually lasts two months
- Registration: The applicant gets exclusive rights to use the registered mark
Once the trademark has been registered, owners need to maintain and renew it to ensure continued protection. In Singapore, trademarks get an initial registration period of 10 years. Upon payment of renewal fees, the trademark can be renewed indefinitely in ten-year periods.
For more information on registering a trademark in Singapore, visit the IPOS website.
Monitor Your Brand Mentions
Image Credit: BrandMentions
Another way you can secure your brand is to use online monitoring tools so you can keep track of every website or user that publicly mentions your brand, service, or product. These tools collect data, which you can use to protect your reputation, increase brand awareness, measure your marketing campaign results, and many more.
The data is collected from various online channels, including blogs, websites, social media, videos, podcasts, forums, review sites, and many more. Some of the most popular tools include:
2. Defend Your Branded Keywords
Image Credit: Search Logistics
You can also protect your branded ad campaign by paying attention to your keywords. Identify your negative keywords and exclude them from showing for such searches. You can also consider trademark bidding, especially on your branded keywords.
Using Negative Keywords
You can add negative keywords to your paid campaigns so that your ads won’t appear on searches, sites, or videos that are irrelevant to yours.
An example to this is excluding the keyword “free” to your pop-up store in Bugis. When you add this term as a negative keyword in Google Ads, anyone looking for a pop-up store in Bugis looking for a free sample of their product will not be served your ads. As a result, using a negative keyword can help you:
- Save money: You don’t have to pay for clicks from people who are not looking for your product or service.
- Boost conversions: Your ads only appear on the right searches, you get to have a more effective ad spend and make the most out of your budget.
- Improve Quality Score: Google will boost your Quality Score since you are serving the right ads to relevant landing pages.
- Protect your brand: Your brand does not get associated with the terms or topics that you are not fitting to your company.
Consider Trademark Bidding
Also called brand bidding, trademark bidding is the practice of targeting paid ads to a branded keyword (or some variation of it). In our example, we tried to look for our own brand.
This is a common practice among brands for good reason:
- They get cheaper clicks: Since the ad is specific to branded keywords, the searches for your brand are lower. As a result, its CPC is also low.
- You get more control: With brand bidding, you get to adjust the messaging you wish to use right away. You don’t need to wait for the change to appear on the search engine if you opt for organic results.
- You block competitors: You get to stop competitors and affiliates from trying to use your branded keywords to divert your customers.
Crisis Management for Brands
Image Credit: Tech Target
Unfortunately, every brand is susceptible to brand hijacking. In such cases, knowing how to respond to an attack can be the best course of action. If your brand falls victim to such practices, you may need to implement your crisis management to protect your brand identity and recover from damages.
Here are some actions that you may take in response to brand jacking:
- Cease and Desist Letter: This is a legal notice that you can send to the brand jacker to demand them from stopping the use of your intellectual property. Usually, this is an effective first step that can be used.
- DMCA Takedown Notice: Another legal action that you can include in your crisis management is the use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which allows copyright holders to request infringing content to be removed from websites. If your copyrighted content was used without your permission, you can send a DMCA takedown notice to the offending website.
- Domain Dispute Resolution: If a domain name was registered yet infringes on your trademark, you may use the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) to take care of the dispute. This will allow you to dispute how your domain name is being used negatively.
- File a Lawsuit: At the worst scenario, you can file a lawsuit against your brand jacker, especially if you’ve exerted all other options of your crisis management plan. You may sue for copyright or trademark infringement.
Can Brand Jacking Be Used for Good?
Image Credit: Greenpeace
There is a growing concern on whether brand jacking can ever be ethically good. Although it isn’t a recommended practice, it happens in our everyday lives without realising it, such as in counterfeit products, a fake social media account, misleading iconography, and etc.
In some cases, brand jacking is a conscious collaboration between two brands, as in the case of Greenpeace and some brands it partnered with.
In the field of digital marketing and SEO, brands are always trying to compete against each other on the search results page. Some brands turn to brand hijacking practices to take away traffic from their competition.
But is it really worth the effort? You need to spend a lot of time, resources, and money to stay competitive. Google has even spoken up against this practice:
“Advertisers may use a trademark term in ad text if they are a reseller of, offer compatible components or parts for, or provide information about the goods and services related to the trademarked term.”
The best advice is to focus on your own SEO and paid search campaigns instead. Not to mention, it could open you up as the next target for other brands to hijack too. Unless you’ve established your digital brand, you’ll be in the clear to use brand jacking as a strategy.
