MarkMonitor: Scammers are outbidding legitimate brands
Counterfeit apparel retailers are believed to sell more than one million ‘suspicious’ sports jerseys online; researchers believe more than 56 million consumers click through to these counterfeit sites annually. Some consumers know what they are doing, some land on counterfeit sites by accident – because they clicked a link that appeared to be legitimate.
“Online fraudsters see a tremendous opportunity in the passion and loyalty of millions of sports fans, taking advantage of both brands and fans online,” said Frederick Felman, CMO of MarkMonitor. “These scammers compete with legitimate online advertisers and e-commerce sites, driving up costs for the brands and confusing fans.”
These counterfeiters are using search marketing to push website traffic to their sites. During the study, MarkMonitor found that many of these scammers are operating out of Asia. From nearly 480,000 paid search ads and 280 keyword combinations analyzed for the report, about 28% of clicks were promoting suspicious goods.
According to Hitwise, the top retail search terms (week ending January 22, 2011) included ‘cheap mens snow boots’, ‘converse sneakers’, ‘polo snow boots’ and ‘steelers apparel’. Consumers were also searching for tax information.
MarkMonitor’s suggestion? Brands need to be better with their trademarked items. With roughly 20% of searches conducted for trademarked terms (via comScore and Yahoo), it makes sense for brands to invest heavily in trademarked keywords to drive traffic.
