1. If your brand is not widely known, you will get better keyword and brand coverage by allowing select affiliates to bid on your brand.  When search engine marketing companies approach a company about taking on their account, they typically ask companies to limit any outside bidding. The reason for this is that the brand keywords need to carry the rest of the campaigns and balance the spend on the rest of the account. Brand bidding has to be profitable enough to allow you to lose money on broad, highly competitive keyword terms.  If your brand is not big enough or widely known,  you will never be able to support the cost of the broad keyword terms. And what search agencies don’t tell you is that they’re making most of their money on your brand, too. Challenge them to make money only on non-branded terms and they will struggle.

2. Hand pick a few top search affiliates with excellent reputations.  Taking brand search bidding in-house is often less  successful in terms of conversion than the affiliate bidding. The reason is that some of the best search affiliates have excellent account histories and high reputation scores in Google. Creating a quality reputation within a search account can take longer, and your ads may not show. When search affiliates apply to your affiliate program, check their earnings and schedule a call before accepting them into your program. Most quality search affiliates will be happy to speak with you and learn more about your brand.

3. High-quality search affiliates have experience writing high-converting advertisements that have good click-throughs and conversion. Learning what works is a skill that takes time. Why not use someone who has the experience and pay only for success?

4. They’ve got the tools. If you’re going to try to manage your search marketing in-house, you will have to spend money on tools to help you manage the bidding, control costs and measure the ROI.  It also requires a time-commitment, and unless you want to hire on a specialist, it may make more sense to let your affiliate act as your off-site specialist.

If your company has a well-known brand, a large budget and unlimited human resources, it makes sense to hire on a search vendor or bring in an specialist. But for most smaller brands, the affiliates will get you the same results with payment required only when they make the sale.