What is ad hijacking?

Ad hijacking is a specific form of brand bidding where an affiliate creates an ad that looks identical to your official brand ad and runs it on your branded keywords in search engines.

When a user searches for your brand, they see what appears to be your official ad. Same headline, same description, often the same display URL. They click it thinking they are going to your website directly. What actually happens is they pass through an affiliate redirect chain before landing on your site. The affiliate captures attribution credit along the way and earns commission on the sale.

The user never knows anything happened. The brand pays commission on a customer who was already looking for them and would have converted anyway.

How it differs from regular brand bidding

Regular brand bidding is when any third party, whether a competitor, reseller, or affiliate, runs ads on your branded keywords. It is annoying and costly but the ad at least identifies itself as a different entity.

Ad hijacking is always deliberate. The affiliate impersonates your website, not just your ad copy, so the user believes they are clicking your own ad. That impersonation is what separates it from ordinary brand bidding.

Why it is hard to catch manually

Anyone can stumble on a hijacker ad by searching their own brand name. The difficulty is coverage. Hijacker ads rotate across keywords, countries, devices and times of day, so catching them reliably means running millions of searches simultaneously, around the clock. A person, or even a team, cannot do that.

Automated monitoring also removes human error. adment checks the same way every time, it does not miss detections because someone was busy, and it is far cheaper to run than a manual review process.