I am not a Pro when it comes to pay per click advertising, but I am not a newbie either. I spend some time online today to update my ongoing PPC campaigns and to setup new ones. I found a few good keywords with barely any competition that I will test drive over the next few days. When doing my research on a specific keyphrase I ran into the following Google ads. Good for me is that there are only 4 competitors. Bad for me that Omaha Steaks is pretty keen on their trademarks and you have to be careful what your bidding on and how you do that. They do not allow to bid on their trademarks which includes domain name and brand name.
In this case the affiliate in position #3 is stretching it a little bit. He is a) bidding on a term that is trademarked and b) he is using his affiliate URL as the display URL. Two big newbie mistakes. Don’t bid on the trademark term especially if your control panel at your affiliate network specifically points out the issue. And don’t use the cryptic affiliate URL as the display URL. Looks a) very unprofessional and b) will most-likely not convert properly at all.
Too bad for me that this keyword is dirt cheap to bid on. $0.04 keywords are awesome and a 3-digit number of searches per day is very tempting. 
Related posts: