Rising CPC? You’re Funding The Competition. Here’s How To Trace It.
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Adomas Ronkaitis September 24, 2026 ⋅ 7 min read Adomas Ronkaitis CEO at adment Bio Follow 234 READS Editorial Reviewed: SEJ Editorial Editorial Reviewed This post was sponsored by adment. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Branded keywords should be your cheapest clicks. So why are your branded CPCs going up? You’ve checked Auction Insights, your bid strategy, and seasonality, and none of them explain it. Who else is bidding on your brand, and why are you paying more for traffic you already earned? Surprisingly enough, the competition in that auction may be your own affiliates. When they bid on your brand to increase their sales, you pay twice without realizing it: higher CPCs on your ads, and a commission on each sale they intercept. Your affiliate reporting won’t show that it happened. Most mature affiliate programs track clicks, conversions, commissions, and partner performance. What is harder to see is what happened before a conversion entered the affiliate platform. A report may show that Partner A generated 150 conversions. It may not show that the same partner was bidding on restricted branded terms and using redirects to hide that activity before the conversion was attributed. Detection often requires manual work. Managers search branded keywords, check advertisers, follow redirects, and match their findings to partners. The problem is coverage. Paid search changes by market, keyword, device, and time, while brand bidders can change domains, targeting, and redirect paths. Keeping up with this manually can become a full-time job in itself, taking affiliate teams away from actually growing the program. Data from adment customers monitored during Q2 2026 shows how affiliate hijacking activity is evolving. The dataset reflects adment’s customer base, not the complete affiliate industry, but indicates how quickly this behavior can shift. The U.S. led all monitored markets, followed by the U.K., Germany, Canada, and India. India entered the top five for the first time, replacing Belgium. This matters because manual monitoring tends to focus on markets teams already consider important. Paid search activity does not always follow those assumptions. Seasonality may also play a role, with Q1 representing a quieter period across many of the programs monitored by adment. Affiliate brand bidding can remain undetected because it often produces strong performance rather than suspicious results. Consider a customer who discovers a company through SEO, paid media, content, or word of mouth. Later, that customer searches specifically for the company. An affiliate ad appears, the customer clicks, reaches the company’s website, and purchases. There can also be a paid search cost. When an affiliate competes with the brand on the same branded keywords, it adds another bidder to the auction and can increase competition for that traffic. This can put upward pressure on CPCs, meaning the brand may pay more to capture demand it already created. The dashboard may show a valid conversion and commission. The problem becomes visible only when someone connects it with what was happening in paid search. The missing evidence often sits in the query, ad, geography, landing page, and path between the click and conversion. In other words, the brand may be competing with its own affiliates for traffic it already created. One sales engagement SaaS company was dealing with affiliates bidding on branded paid search terms and claiming commissions on traffic they had not generated. Investigations were reactive: someone had to notice the activity, reproduce the ad, identify the affiliate, and collect enough evidence to enforce the rules. Once continuous monitoring was introduced, active cases were identified on the same day. Within the first hours, the company found enough fraudulent activity to save more than $8,000 in commissions and platform fees. More than 75 fraudulent affiliates were ultimately removed. Belgium was important because the team would not have prioritized that market for a manual investigation. Detection time therefore has financial value: finding a violation within hours can stop leakage before another commission cycle accumulates. Start with your affiliate agreement and paid search policy. Identify which branded keywords affiliates cannot bid on, whether they can use your brand name in ad copy, and which markets or devices are restricted. Create a list that includes your brand name, product names, high-volume misspellings, and combinations such as “[brand] discount,” “[brand] coupon,” or “[brand] login.” Add the markets, languages, devices, and search engines covered by your policy. Run searches in a clean browser session so personalization does not distort the results. Repeat them at different times because advertisers can limit campaigns by schedule. When a suspicious ad appears, record the keyword, search engine, date, time, location, device, ad copy, advertiser domain, and position. Take screenshots before clicking. Follow the redirect path and look for affiliate tracking links along the way. Copy these URLs separately and inspect the parameters for affiliate identifiers, such as an affiliate ID, partner ID, or other tracking values that can help connect the ad to a specific partner. Compare those identifiers with your affiliate platform records. Then look for conversions and commissions associated with the suspected partner around the times and markets where the ads appeared. Repeated evidence is more useful for enforcement than one observation. Group findings by partner, keyword, market, and policy clause so reviewers can see the pattern. More attribution data does not automatically create transparency. A conversion can be tracked correctly while its source behavior remains invisible. A partner can look effective while bidding on restricted branded searches. Relevant signals exist in search results, advertiser behavior, ad copy, geography, landing pages, and redirect paths. Connecting them with affiliate data gives teams a clearer view of how partners acquire customers. The goal is not to classify every unusual activity as fraud. Monitoring should identify potential violations in the context of each program’s rules. Teams need to know what happened, where it happened, which partner was involved, and why the activity deserves investigation. Manual checks can work when an affiliate program operates in a limited number of markets. The challenge grows with international programs, where the same branded keywords need to be monitored across multiple countries, locations, devices, and search engines at different times.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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