Second Brain

The Affiliate Stealing Their Own Traffic

The Story

At around $6K MRR, Yannick noticed something suspicious in Google Analytics. Starting around April 20th, there was an unusual traffic spike in branded search. Someone was sending a bunch of traffic to Hypefury’s website through paid ads.

It was one of their own affiliates.

The affiliate was running Google Ads targeting the keyword “Hypefury.” The cost: pennies per click. The trick: intercepting people who were already searching for Hypefury by name. These people would have come to the site organically and signed up for free. Instead, they clicked the affiliate’s ad, and the affiliate collected a commission for “referring” customers who were already going to sign up anyway.

The affiliate wasn’t bringing new customers. They were leeching off existing traffic.

The fix: Yannick filed the Hypefury trademark as a word (not an image), obtained the trademark number, and applied for brand name protection with Google. This prevents any non-Hypefury party from using “Hypefury” in their ad copy.

Lesson for Creators

If you run an affiliate or referral program, explicitly prohibit affiliates from bidding on your brand name (plus common misspellings) in PPC campaigns. These affiliates aren’t bringing new customers. They’re intercepting your existing ones and charging you for it. File your trademark and use Google’s brand protection tools. The $50M in ad spend Yannick managed for Fortune 500 companies is what gave him the instinct to catch this.

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