Protecting your brand online is crucial. We specialize in helping merchants protect their
brands from those that would unethically or illegally profit from them. We are experts at
detecting domain squatters, fraudulent affiliates, questionable sites or companies profiting
from your brand, and many other activities, and helping you take the necessary action to
both preventing these activities to begin with as well as stopping them when they occur.
Traffikoo offers a premium brand protection service which recognizes the enormous expense brand infringment could mean for your company. We employ the latest tools and technology to detect brand infringers. However we also employ highly skilled professionals who go beyond what any automated tool can do. We creatively think of ways brand infringers may be operating for any specific client to greatly expand the "search zone" where any such infringers may be operating. Once we do find an infringer we will help you and work with you (or your company's legal department if applicable) to shut them down or curtail their operations.
Some things we can do (the below is not an exhaustive list):
Domain squatting (cybersquatting) is a common practice where a party registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. Common modes of operations for domain squatters are to register a domain similar to an existing well known brand's domain and to use it to promote competing products through advertising networks, or even the brand-owner's own products through the brand's own affiliate program if they have one. In these examples the domain squatters would make money from advertising revenue they are not entitled to, whilst the brand owner would have their competitors strengthened or be on the hook for affiliate commissions they should not be paying. We have seen entire elaborate websites built up on infringing domains of famous brands. Traffikoo can help with both detecting infringing domains and taking the necessary steps to shut down the infringers.
We can help you with making sure that internet properties which should belong to your brand are in fact in your portfolio. Protecting variations of your brand by registering and maintaining internet domain names of these variations is one aspect of this service. We can also help with registering and maintaining presences in other areas such as social media (e.g. Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages) on an ongoing basis as these increasingly important other areas evolve and grow. As your brand expands its product lines and spheres of operation, our service will scale with it to make sure your protection scales accordingly to keep up. Protecting your brand in advance can avoid more difficult proceedings later on if an infringer does in fact get hold of an infringing property which your brand should own.
The internet is a big place. There are all kinds of websites, blogs, forums, and social media venues talking about companies like yours all the time. You have an interest in knowing what is being said about you. We can help with bringing to your attention any negative mentions of your brand so you can take the necessary action to try to follow up with the responsible party if appropriate, or otherwise correct the situation. We can both search to root out any existing / historical mentions of your brand, as well as monitor websites, blogs, news, etc. on an ongoing basis to actively detect such mentions as soon as possible after they occur.
The internet is a great tool and resource for detecting entire companies or operations built upon infringing the brand name of others. We can use all our available research expertise and tools to detect such companies across the world, including countries you may not yet have a presence in, and bring them to your attention. Knowledge is power. In most cases you will want to take the necessary legal steps to either shut down these companies, curtail their operations, or get them to change their operating methods (particularly the use of your brand names). In a few cases constructive partnership might be a better option. The first and most important step in all cases is to detect these companies and understand their activities so you can decide on the proper course of action.
If you have an affiliate program you probably know about the problem of fraudulent affiliates employing your brand name in undesirable ways. For example they may be bidding on your brand name or variations of it in search engines or content networks in violation of your affiliate program rules, or they may be promoting it on undesirable websites which damage your brand name, or misleading consumers to think their own websites are in fact operated by your brand or endorsed by it. All these undesirable activities damage your brand in different ways, from paying commissions on sales you would have made anyway, to actual customer dissatisfaction and confusion. Traffikoo can help you with detecting such affiliates so that you can take the necessary disciplinary and preventive action against them.