• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2010

AdGooroo released its Hijacking Report Wednesday. The report runs as part of Trademark Insight, a tool that enables search marketers to identify and take action against other advertisers that illegally use their domain name in ad copy.

 

Trademark helps companies identify other advertisers that use an unauthorized term or trademark. The hijacking report identifies the use of domain names in search ad copy and display URLs.

Advertisers can automatically identify and stop "black hat affiliates" and competitors who deceive consumers by passing themselves off as legitimate merchants. It's a process that was once manual, but now automatically filters ads that contain specific domain names.

Marketers control the parameters by filtering ads deemed usable, leaving only the illegitimate affiliates and advertisers trying to pass themselves off as the official site and making it easy for rightful advertisers to take action.

AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes says display URLs are the URLs that get displayed in search ads. "Black hat affiliates or competitors would illegally use a brand's URL to gain false credibility with consumers and persuade them to click on their ad," he says. "Competitors do this with the goal of selling them their own products or selling them the same branded product after misrepresenting themselves as a different retailer."

Although this is not allowed in most market segments on Google -- with the exception of pharmaceuticals and a few others -- other search engines do permit this practice, Stokes explains. A reseller of Cuisinart kitchen appliances, for example, might illegally use a Kohls.com URL to give consumers the impression they will buy the Cuisinart product from Kohl's, hoping that once the consumer clicks through to the offending retailer and see the right product, they will settle with buying it from them.

Stokes says affiliates can be even more deceitful. "Often times, when an affiliate illegally hijacks a company's URL, it can be completely invisible to the consumer," he says. "In other words, they might see the Kohls.com URL and actually get sent to that page, but what they don't see is that the affiliate first takes them to their own site and then passes them onto Kohls.com, or some other retailer they've falsely identified themselves as."

By doing this, Stokes says the affiliate illegally represents themselves as the merchant and earns a commission if a sale happens. Still, it's illegal to include a display URL in a search ad that directs the consumer to any place but that actual URL. Stokes says until this report was available, it was next to impossible for an advertiser to track and enforce this on their own.