Brand Bidding Policies for Forex and Casino Affiliate Programmes

Every forex broker, crypto exchange and casino operator with a recognisable name eventually finds an affiliate’s ad sitting on top of its own brand search results. Sometimes the affiliate genuinely believes it is allowed. Sometimes it knows it is not and is betting nobody checks. Either way, the operator ends up paying commission on customers who were already typing its name into Google — and, in regulated markets, carrying the compliance risk for ads it never approved.

A brand bidding policy is the part of your affiliate terms that decides who may bid on your brand in paid search, what those ads can say, and what happens when someone breaks the rules. This guide covers why the policy has to live in your contract rather than in the ad platforms, how to write one that affiliates can actually follow, how to monitor it, and how to enforce it without destroying relationships with partners who are sending you real, incremental customers.

Why brand bidding is a contract problem, not a platform problem

Many operators assume Google will stop affiliates from bidding on their trademark. It generally will not. Google’s own Trademarks policy states that, when it reviews a trademark owner’s complaint, it will not restrict the use of trademarks as keywords. What a complaint can restrict is the use of the trademark in the ad text itself, for example when the ad comes from a direct competitor or uses the mark in a confusing or misleading way. The policy also states that the trademark must appear in the ad, not only on the landing page, for a restriction to apply.

In practice that means:

• An affiliate can usually bid on “YourBrand login” or “YourBrand bonus” as a keyword without Google stopping it.
• A trademark complaint may limit how your name appears in the affiliate’s ad copy, but it does not remove the affiliate from the auction.
• The only reliable lever you have is your affiliate agreement: the right to refuse commission, withhold payment and terminate if the rules are broken.

So the policy has to be written into the contract, communicated at onboarding, and enforced by your affiliate team. The ad platforms are a monitoring tool, not a policeman.

Why it matters more in regulated verticals

In ordinary e-commerce, brand bidding is mostly a cost problem: you pay an affiliate for a customer who would have found you anyway. In gambling and financial services it is also a compliance problem, because the ad is promoting a regulated product under your name.

For operators licensed in Great Britain, the Gambling Commission’s Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice make this explicit. Social responsibility code provision 1.1.2 (Responsibility for third parties – all licences) states that licensees are responsible for the actions of third parties they contract with for any aspect of the business related to the licensed activities. It requires the contract terms to:

• require the third party to behave, when acting on the licensee’s behalf, as if it were bound by the same licence conditions and codes of practice;
• oblige the third party to provide the information the licensee reasonably needs to meet its own reporting obligations; and
• let the licensee terminate promptly if the third party breaches the contract or acts inconsistently with the licensing objectives, “including for affiliates where they have breached a relevant advertising code of practice.”

An affiliate running unapproved search ads with unapproved bonus claims under your brand is precisely the sort of third-party conduct that provision is about. Your brand bidding clause is one of the places where you show that your contracts actually give you the control 1.1.2 requires.

The platforms add their own layer. Google’s Gambling and games policy only allows online gambling and gambling-promoting content in listed countries where certification criteria are met, and requires ads and destinations to target approved countries only, show responsible gambling information on the landing page and never target minors. Affiliate and comparison sites fall under “gambling-promoting content” and must not themselves offer gambling services or link to gambling services they own. For forex, CFDs and crypto, Google’s Financial products and services policy sets out disclosure requirements and location-specific verification. An affiliate that is not certified or verified where it needs to be, but is bidding on your brand anyway, is a risk to you as well as to its own account.

The three policy models

Most programmes land on one of three positions. None is universally right; choose based on how strong your own brand search campaigns are and how much you trust your affiliate base.

1. Full prohibition

No affiliate may bid on the brand, misspellings or brand-plus-modifier terms in any search engine, and the brand may not appear in any affiliate ad copy or display URL. This is the simplest to explain and to monitor. It suits operators who already run their own brand campaigns and see affiliates on brand terms as pure cost.

2. Prohibition with negative keywords required

Same as full prohibition, but affiliates running broader generic campaigns (“best forex broker”, “online casino UK”) must also add your brand terms as negative keywords. Without that, broad and phrase matching can still show their ads on your brand searches even though they never bid on your name directly. Requiring the negatives, and asking for a screenshot of the negative list at onboarding, closes that loophole.

3. Controlled permission

Named affiliates are allowed to bid on specified brand terms, under written conditions: approved ad copy only, specified geographies, a bid cap or “never above the operator” rule, the operator’s own final URL, and a lower commission rate for brand-search traffic. This can make sense in markets where you do not run brand campaigns yourself, or for a trusted comparison partner. It must be the exception, granted in writing, and revocable at any time.

What a workable brand bidding clause includes

Vague wording like “affiliates may not use our brand in paid search” invites argument. A clause affiliates can follow — and that you can enforce — spells out:

• Protected terms. A written list: the brand name, product names, common misspellings, the domain, and combinations with modifiers such as login, app, bonus, promo code, review, withdrawal and sign up. Keep the list as a schedule you can update by notice rather than rewriting the contract.
• Channels covered. All search engines, not just Google — plus app store search ads and any social or marketplace platform that sells keyword targeting.
• Match types and negatives. Whether affiliates must add protected terms as negative keywords on generic campaigns.
• Ad copy and display URL. A ban on using the brand in headlines, descriptions, sitelinks and display paths unless expressly permitted.
• Direct linking. Whether affiliates may send paid traffic straight to your site rather than through their own content. Direct linking on brand terms is usually the clearest sign of commission harvesting.
• Approved offers only. Any bonus, promotion or pricing claim in an ad must match the current approved offer and its significant terms. Out-of-date bonus claims are a common way affiliates put the operator in breach of advertising codes.
• Geography and licensing. Ads may only target markets where the operator is licensed and the affiliate holds any required platform certification.
• Consequences. What happens on breach: forfeiture of commission on affected traffic, withholding of payments pending investigation, and termination. State how you will identify affected traffic (by tracking parameter, sub-ID or date range) so the forfeiture is calculable.
• Information rights. The affiliate must provide account-level evidence on request — keyword lists, search terms reports, negative keyword lists — within a set number of days. This mirrors the information obligation 1.1.2 expects your third-party contracts to contain.

For how this clause fits alongside the rest of the agreement — qualifying events, clawbacks, audit rights and termination — see our guide to lead generation contracts in regulated verticals.

How to monitor compliance

A policy nobody checks is a suggestion. A practical monitoring routine combines four sources:

1. Your own auction insights. If you run brand campaigns, the auction insights report shows which other domains appear in the same auctions. An unfamiliar domain with a high overlap rate on brand terms deserves a look.
2. Manual and automated searches. Search your protected terms in each priority market, on mobile and desktop, at different times of day. Affiliates breaking the rules often schedule ads outside office hours or geo-target away from your head office. Dedicated brand-monitoring tools do this at scale; if you use one, make sure it checks the markets and devices that matter to you.
3. Tracking data. Look for affiliates whose traffic has an unusually high conversion rate, very short time from click to registration, or referrers from search engines where the affiliate has no organic presence. If you pass keyword or sub-ID parameters through your tracking, brand terms may show up directly. Clean click-level tracking makes this far easier — see our guide to S2S postback tracking.

Record every finding with a timestamp, the search term, the market, the device and a screenshot showing the ad and its display URL. Click the ad only from a controlled test environment so you can capture the redirect path and any affiliate identifiers without generating fake commissions.

Enforcing the policy fairly

Enforcement is where programmes either earn affiliates’ respect or lose their best partners. A proportionate process might look like this:

• First, confirm it is really the affiliate. Sub-affiliates, cookie stuffers and outright impersonators sometimes run brand ads using another affiliate’s link. The redirect path and tracking IDs you captured matter here.
• Notify in writing with evidence. Send the screenshot, date, market and term, and set a short deadline for removal and for the account evidence your contract entitles you to.
• Quarantine the affected traffic. Hold commission on traffic from the identified period and sub-IDs rather than freezing the whole account, unless the breach is deliberate or repeated.
• Escalate on repeat or concealment. Ads scheduled to avoid detection, cloaked display URLs or false statements in response to your notice justify forfeiture and termination.
• Where the ad breached advertising rules, act quickly. For UK-licensed gambling operators, 1.1.2 expects your contracts to allow prompt termination of affiliates who breach a relevant advertising code. Document what you did and when.

Consistency matters. If a large affiliate gets a warning for something a small one was terminated for, word spreads and the policy loses its force. Our casino affiliate programme management guide covers the wider compliance-oversight routine this fits into.

Onboarding checklist

• Brand bidding clause and protected-terms schedule signed before the first tracking link is issued.
• Affiliate declares all paid channels it will use, per market.
• Screenshot of brand negative keywords on any generic search campaigns.
• Evidence of any required platform certification or verification for the markets targeted.
• Approved offer and significant terms supplied, with a named contact for updates.
• Tracking set up with sub-IDs so paid search traffic can be separated from content traffic.
• Monitoring schedule agreed internally: which markets, which terms, how often, who reviews.