The merchant can reverse at will and select any reason (the best is always “other”) without being held accountable for it. He is not required to provide some verifiable reference or proof that the reversal and the provided reasons are true and conform with the affiliate agreement.

That means that an affiliate has virtually no way of proving its case in court, because no records by a 3rd party exists.

This creates a right-free area where the advertiser can act as he likes to without the fear of repercussions.

Regarding the PPC guideline as a requirement. Well, if the merchant does not specify any restrictions in that regards, than everything goes that does not violate any other rule or law. Google is extra cautious to protect themselves in case of a doubt so no problem there.

The advertiser can not institute new rules that are valid retroactive and penalize affiliates for breaking the new rule in the past. And here comes the ability to do reversals at will into play, where advertisers could take the “law” into their own hands and make it retroactive, without admitting it.

ShareASale (not in Europe) has separate “PPC Keyword Bidding Guidelines and Rules” the merchants have to maintain. It contains the information about what is allowed and what is not.

Even a Keyword grid that has the following options.

Keyword, Bidding Allowed?, Bid Limit and Notes

You can’t search for advertisers by restriction though, but you have to check that per individual merchant manually anyway. The restrictions are visible to affiliates prior joining.

CJ has somewhat buried a so called “Keyword Link” to be used for PPC Affiliates.

It contains Usage Recommendation, Protected Keywords, Recommended Keywords and Non-compete Keywords.

If such a link was not maintained by the merchant and the terms do not prohibit ANY paid search, everything goes I guess.

There is already a bit today, much more than there used to be, if it is sufficient or easy to use is a different story.

http://www.bumpzee.com/affiliatemarketing/entries…

That merchants should have clear PPC policies and it should be a requirement.

"ShareASale (not in Europe) has separate "PPC Keyword Bidding Guidelines and Rules" the merchants have to maintain."

They have a section for it but merchants don't have to maintain it. An incident is what prompted me to start the dicussion I just linked too above, where an SAS merchant didn't have clear policies and then it kind of blew up.

All networks should have a section for PPC policies and merchants should be required to fill it out before the program goes live. It's a very simple thing to do and prevent a lot of issues down the road.

"think you probably meant the PDF versions of the powerpoints"

I fixed that . Thanks for pointing it out.

Shawn said that he will make all videos from the sessions available online for free this time. Give him a few weeks to get them all done and up on the web. I am also looking forward to see them, because I missed 1-2 sessions that seemed to be interesting (for me).

Thanks for the kudos Durk and Andrew.

Durk: As you have been in the session too, you know that the session was a bit different than what I wrote in this post. I wrote what I was thinking when I heart the stuff mentioned in the session.

I don't want give advertisers the idea that what was said there is only important to super affiliates and that the session title might have been a bit misleading. Okay, some of the things mentioned were specific to them, but that was the smaller number of things.