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:
| Manchester United Endorsed | |
| Keywords | Negative Match Type |
| man u | Negative broad |
| man us | Negative broad |
| man u fc | Negative broad |
| man u football club | Negative broad |
| man u football | Negative broad |
| man u rewards | Negative broad |
| man utd | Negative broad |
| man utd fc | Negative broad |
| man utd fcs | Negative broad |
| man utd football club | Negative broad |
| man utd football | Negative broad |
| man utd rewards | Negative broad |
| manchester united | Negative broad |
| manchester united fc | Negative broad |
| manchester united football club | Negative broad |
| manchester united football | Negative broad |
| manchester united rewards | Negative broad |
| manchester utd | Negative broad |
| manchester utd fc | Negative broad |
| manchester utd football club | Negative broad |
| manchester utd football | Negative broad |
| manchester utd rewards | Negative broad |
| MUFC | Negative broad |
| Red Devils | Negative broad |
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.
