Stopping Affiliate Hijackers
Understanding the Paid Search Dashboard
your dashboard shows you what's happening with your paid search brand monitoring at a glance everything you need to identify and respond to fraud starts here how marcode categorises ads understanding how ads are categorised helps you quickly spot what matters marcode analyses three things what the ad says where the ad links to who is running the ad based on this, ads are grouped into categories hijacker (red flag) an ad where the destination is your website , but you're not running it almost always, affiliates stealing your paid traffic, though occasionally consumer fraudsters use this tactic these are at top priority note css advertisers technically meet this definition (they run ads to your site), but we separate them into their own css report infringement (gold flag) an ad that uses your brand name in the title or description but links to another website here, you'll find a mix trade partners, competitors using your trademarks, brand bidding affiliates, and discount code sites pay particular attention if this rises competitor (blue) anyone running an ad on your keywords who doesn't use your brand name and doesn't link to your site usually legitimate competitors not a fraud concern, but useful for competitive intelligence navigating the dashboard report selection access different reports in two ways left hand menu click "reports" to see all options click the doughnut chart quick access to each report type main affiliate reports hijacking report all hijackers infringement report trademark usage tracking discount ads report voucher site brand bidders css report google shopping css partners date selector location top right corner choose your date range to view historical data or focus on recent activity default is last 30 days market selector location top left corner switch between different markets to see region specific data only shows ads detected in that market's search engines navigating to other parts of marcode location far left hand side in gold bar switch to the extension and discount code report (if enabled) and the task manager dashboard visualisations doughnut chart centre number total advertisers bidding on your terms coloured segments percentage breakdown by category reading the chart larger red segments mean more hijackers time to investigate advertiser breakdown shows how many advertisers fall into each category at a glance quick check if "hijacker" count is growing week over week, prioritise taking action