I received an email from Tradedoubler, who run the Manchester United Credit Card program which is a credit card issued by MBNA.

I hope you had a good weekend.

Throughout the year we have had a number of conversations with MBNA about affiliates appearing on mbna and it?s endorsed partners brand terms. Although we appreciate in most cases this is due to broad matching, affiliates appearing on these terms can negatively affect the performance of mbna?s own brand bidding strategy.

We have finalised a list of negatives which you can download from here:
http://hst.tradedoubler.com/file/172823/mbnanegatives.xlsx This should be easy for you to add into your accounts. Please would you ensure these have been added as negatives across all engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) by end of play Wednesday 19th July?

We’re using tools to monitor coverage over a large number of these keywords so we have a map exactly who has been bidding on these brand terms. Any affiliates found appearing on these terms after Wednesday 19th July will have commission for the relevant card reversed until the problem is rectified.

I don’t want to sound heavy handed but hope you appreciate the business rational around this decision.

If you could please confirm when the full list has been added across all it would be appreciated.

Many thanks,

I was amazed that they would attempt this – it wipes out any chance of a PPC affiliate managing to run these campaigns profitably. These are the keywords they want blocking on a Broad, Negative match for the Manchester Utd Credit Card:

There is absolutely no way that we could run a profitable campaign promoting Manchester Utd credit cards, without bidding on terms related to Manchester United.  I think whoever is setting this up has no idea about the concept of football fans.

If I was forced to only bid on terms like “credit cards” I would be paying far too much and already be out of the game. But for talking sake, lets say I could buy traffic for “credit cards”.  Since I can’t bid on anything related to Man utd, Manchester, Red Devils etc,  these are all just going to be people searching for credit card related things etc.

From those, a massive proportion of them will have no interest in football whatsoever. Unless you are offering them a great APR or bonus for signing up, they are simply not going to be interested in having a football logo on their card and paying extra for it – which you’re doing here since the APR is 16.9%.

So we’ve already lost a massive portion of the traffic we bought, purely because they have no interest in football. But it only gets worse from here, since of all the football fans we have left, many of them are Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea and so on fans – offer them a Manchester Utd credit card with 0% APR for life, free balance transfers, no penalty for missing payments and the card personally delivered by a page 3 model of their choice and the conversion rate is still going to be horrendous.

The very concept of a (specific) football club credit card is polarising – the chances are someone is either going to absolutely love it, or completely detest it. There is no way you can make money buying expensive page views from the haters just to get a handful of prospects.

If anyone has any idea of how you go about profiting in this situation, I’d love to hear them in the comments and I’ll update the main post with your thoughts (and credit links).

Of course if you wanted to target Manchester United fans, you could use geo targeting only to show your adverts from any location south of London…

MBNA have cited brand issues for implementing this, but in this situation that is simply not correct in my opinion. For a start we’re not attempting to bid on MBNA terms, merely things related to Manchester.

Since this campaign can no longer possibly be profitable, we’re running ads like these:

If someone is searching for “manchester united credit card” I would far rather take the easiest path to an affiliate payment and sell them what they are looking for. Instead because of the restrictive terms, I need to actively trash what they are searching for to poison them to it, then sell them an alternative.

The one silver lining to something like this, is it drastically lowers the competition since all the people who choose to stay with the MBNA program can’t bid on the keywords that I can.  Sometimes its far more profitable to simply leave affiliate offers that are becoming too restrictive, bid on whatever you like, and send the traffic to a direct competitor.

Costa Bingo (costabingo.com) have made a strange move and banned their affiliates from link building. Their announcement basically says:

As of this date affiliates are not permitted to acquire any links for [Bingo Site] terms from third party sites for the purpose of deep linking to their own [Bingo Site] review and information pages. Any affiliate found to have broken this term from this day onward will have any affiliate commissions withheld. The brand owner has made this move in order to guarantee the quality of reader experience when a user searches for their branded terms in search engines.  source

I am amazed a company would be so short sited to do this.  Surely affiliates are going to write more positive content than someone without something to gain financially?  Who wouldn’t want 10 positive things in the serps for brand searches? Like Anthony Shapley says,  perhaps Costa Bingo should be concentrating on their own seo, instead of trying to artificially tamper with the search results.

How are Costabingo.com going to enforce and carry out this part:

Any affiliate found to have broken this term from this day onward will have any affiliate commissions withheld.

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally I’ve been known to write a post that actually picked up a natural link   If I write about Costa Bingo on a gambling affiliate site, and someone happens to link to it without me actively trying to link build, can I kiss my commissions goodbye?

The whole point of writing high quality, engaging content is to get people to link to it naturally. So is this counted as “link building” in itself?  If it is, should I be deliberately writing content so bad that it won’t pick up any links?

Then how are they going to differentiate someone building links from someone just trying to wreck a competitors payouts?  It would be extremely easy for me to build garbage links to a Costa Bingo affiliate. Google is sophisticated enough to simply ignore these links to prevent sabotage, how are Costabingo.com going to deal with this? I get the feeling they are going to be judge, jury and executioner and solely decide, then steal your commissions.

What do you think of Costa Bingos stance here? If you think its worth getting it out there what they are doing, a link to this article with a “Costa Bingo” or a “Costabingo.com” anchor would be much appreciated

I was reading some affiliate things tonight and I am not impressed at all at how Vivastay.com structure their affiliate program. It seems that rather than pay their affiliates out of the profit margin, they simply increase the price and pass it on to the end user instead.

Here is a typical hotel if you visit the site normally:

And the same hotel if you visit via an affiliate link:

This is disgraceful, Vivastay and Affiliate Window are  just adding on the 5% affiliate commission to the sale price, stiffing the end user and the affiliate in the process.

How can you legitimately build up a loyal readership on your site once the readers realise they are going to get screwed every time they follow one of your recommendations?  The readers who do understand how affiliate links work then need to clear their cookies before buying, even although you convinced them to book that hotel in the first place – how is that fair to the affiliate who sent the traffic, when they get paid nothing for a converting customer?

Thanks to Keep Your Woman Happy for providing the images used.

Further reading on the Affiliate 4 Travel blog.