Paid Search Monitoring FAQ
Do more with Paid Search Monitoring Advanced: When you upgrade to Paid Search Monitoring Advanced, you can monitor more than 10 times the amount of keywords across 17 search engines multiple times a day. You can upgrade your paid search monitoring edition, or reach out to your CSM (or contact support) to ask about upgrading.
How is Paid Search Monitoring used?
Partner paid search activity is monitored based on a list of brand-provided keywords.
Please include:
All trademarked keywords and combinations where you suspect a partner could be in violation. The more thorough your list, the more likely you are to catch violations.
All keywords prohibited per your partnership agreement.
How are keywords tallied?
Each keyword within a policy counts towards the total allowance. For example, having the same keyword in two policies, whether or not the policies are in the same campaign, will count as 2 keywords being used. A policy is configured per country/region, per language.
How is matching monitored? Is the match type of a keyword accounted for?
Keywords are crawled and matched exactly as they are provided and spelled out. The ads that appear on the SERPs may have shown for various match types in each brand's individual ad account, however, the tool only monitors keywords entered and nothing more. If you provide your brand name, the tool will not automatically gather results for your brand and “coupon”. Keywords are not case sensitive, and apostrophes are counted separately.
Can I monitor the same keywords across multiple policies/campaigns?
You can create policies with the same keywords, however, these keywords will count multiple times toward your keyword limit.
For example, If you have Policy A with 10 keywords and Policy B with 7 keywords (where 5 of the keywords are the same), you will still have used 17 keywords.
How long are screenshots available? When are screenshots archived?
Screenshots are never archived and remain available.
What is "Seen"?
Seen is how often the crawler sees a particular advertiser display URL divided by the number of crawls.
Which countries/regions and languages do you monitor?
The tool has the ability to monitor many different languages and countries/regions. We monitor what is agreed upon.
Does the tool click on ads and provide click data?
The system crawls an environment that does not click on ads crawled from each search engine. The crawler searches similar to a human searching and then crawls for keywords uploaded to the tool.
Why do my search results not match up with another vendor?
Crawling is randomized at different times of day and from various locations within your monitored countries/regions.
How do I know if a partner is bidding on keywords or is noncompliant with my program?
Within the paid search monitoring area, view the violation report and review all data. If any keywords populate that are noncompliant, you can send a violation to that partner with that request.
How long should I wait to see the keywords loaded into the tool?
Data can become visible as early as 6 hours from the time you upload your keyword list. A 6 hour waiting period does exist while the system crawls, however, a full 24 hours from the time you load your keywords to the tool is the suggested waiting period.
What do the ad labels mean?
Trademark Keyword: Advertiser is bidding on prohibited TM keyword.
Trademark Copy: Advertiser is utilizing ad copy containing prohibited TM keyword.
Ad Hijack: Advertiser is utilizing prohibited landing pages in ads.
Do I need specific user permissions to use this feature?
By default, Paid Search Monitoring is available for the Account Admin and Performance Marketing Manager roles. Custom users will need the following permissions activated in order to access:
Paid Search Monitoring
Paid Search Monitoring Policy
Paid Search Monitoring Violations
Can I set up reminder emails to notify me of new results?
Reminders can be configured from the monitoring screen by clicking on the mail icon in the top left of the table. These are configured at the user level.
Will the partner in violation be notified?
Partner users are opted in to receive an automated violation notification email by default within minutes of a violation being sent. They will also receive an in-app notification upon logging into their dashboard. Both notifications direct them to their Task Management System, where they’ll address the issue and keep you posted on the resolution status, commenting when applicable.
Are actions automatically reversed for search violations?
You need to manually check the severity of the violation and make a call if it is severe enough to reverse payouts or remove the partner from your program if they are a repeat offender.
What automation features are available?
Automation features can be configured on the policy setup screen. You may choose the following options:
Automatically create a violation if a contracted partner bids on your trademark
This option will automatically create a violation if the system finds an ad in violation of the configured policy. The partner will receive a system notification and email notification alerting them to the violation.
Note: If multiple partner accounts are associated with the domain in violation, each partner will receive a violation.
Close violations if ad is taken down by partner
This option will automatically close a violation if the system no longer sees the ad in question coming up in search results for more than 7 days.
Automatically send partners who have not completed violations reminder emails
Partners will receive 2 reminder emails: 24 hours and then 8 hours before the assigned due date.
Archive all ads older than 7 days
This option will set ads older than 7 days on the Monitoring screen to “archived” status.
In paid search violations, what are the Public & Private comment options?
When reviewing paid search violations, you have the option to leave a comment, but must specify if you would like the comment to be public or private.
Public comment: Your comment will be visible to the relevant partner and will appear in their notifications.
Private comment: Your comment will only be visible to your brand’s account users. Private comments can be used to make notes, provide context on the issue, or even to provide information for other accounts users.
Why am I not seeing results?
There are multiple valid reasons as to why you are not seeing results.
You have filtered the results. Clear your filters.
You have a newer policy, and the results need time to populate. Consider how long your policy has been active, and give impact.com 24 hours to populate results.
No partners are bidding on the keywords chosen in your policy. Check your assigned policy search engines and trademarked terms.
You have the free version of Paid Search Monitoring. With the free version, data is collected once per day. Consider upgrading to the paid version to increase the frequency of data collection.
I saw my trademarked terms in a paid search ad but not in my results, how can this be?
impact.com crawls your policies’ assigned search engines twice per day (for Paid Search Monitoring Free Edition accounts), so the partner potentially wasn't bidding when the last check was done.
Make sure the device types match between the found ad and your assigned search engines in your policy (mobile vs. desktop).
The keywords might not be an exact match. Make sure the policy is monitoring for the specific result you found.
How do I know the ad has been taken down after I file a violation?
Check to see if the partner marked the violation as completed.
You can do this by going to Protect → Violations and setting the Status filter to Completed.
If impact.com picks up the ad again, it will appear in the monitoring screen with an increase in the “number of times seen” and with an updated “last seen date”.
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