For most companies who run affiliate campaigns for their product or service, the aim is to get the most traffic / exposure possible. They do this by allowing other Webmasters to promote their offer via their own websites, via search engine marketing or via PPC (pay per click). This is fine, for the most part, as the Webmasters are simply paid a commission percentage of whatever they sell on your behalf - relatively risk free right? Wrong. The issue comes when the Affiliates / Webmasters start advertising or promoting using your brand name. For example, if someone knows your company name, knows about your product or service, you don’t need the affiliate, you just need to get them to your site. What happens is, they enter your brand in Google, with a view of finding your site but in turn, they get presented with a site from one of your affiliates that is highly optimised for your brand name. This is obviously wrong, why should your affiliate get paid for people searching for your own company name? It is because of this that companies often ban the use of their trademark or company name in their affiliates ads. Of course, keeping track of who is doing what is a nightmare, which is why most companies opt to use brand protection software to monitor who is bidding on what phrases and stealing their traffic. Paid search brand protection software is the only real way of monitoring who is doing what, short of manually checking the results every hour!