I'd like to propose a change of perspective. What if you're not "competing" with your affiliates? What if you're "collaborating" with them to benefit you both? If your affiliate payments are properly structured don't you benefit whether they get the clicks and make the sales or you do?
Have you calculated whether a conversion from your PPC ads costs more or less than what you pay your affiliate for a conversion they generated? For many advertisers it costs less to pay the affiliate commission than it costs to pay for the PPC ads.
Your affiliates can also "pre-sell" your prospects. Those that are good at what they do will benefit you further by providing a higher conversion rate because of this pre-selling.
Have you looked at your PPC generated conversion rate and compared it to the conversion rate generated by that affiliate? Even if what you pay that affiliate per sale is more than you spend to generate a sale, if they generate MORE sales you're still better off paying them.
Good affiliates will also be using other methods of generating traffic. They will be continually improving their pre-selling techniques and sites. They may correspond with potential buyers or speak with them on the phone to increase your sales. They may educate them on your product(s), saving you time and overhead costs.
You could do as many sellers do and prohibit your affiliates from using PPC ads or only prohibit them from bidding on particular words. Two things to consider before deciding to do that:
1. Better affiliates may stop promoting you altogether and you'll lose the benefit of their other activities.
2. Instead of affiliate's ads showing up on the searches you'll probably see more competitor's ads. Some sellers prefer to see all the ads be for their affiliates instead of their competition.
It you still want your ad to show up above theirs here are some ideas:
1. Test different ads, especially titles. You could try putting "Official Site" or something to that affect in your ads. If their ads are above yours even though you have your bid set to $100 it is likely that their CTR is much higher than yours. See if you can change that.
2. Look at their site and see if you can determine what their landing page may have that yours doesn't. The one thing I have noticed most frequently is sites with proper title tags seem to be preferred.
3. Create a separate ad group specifically for your most important keyword phrase. Be sure to put that phrase in the title, have it in the title on your landing page, and be certain the landing page is about that phrase and nothing else.
4. If you're using position preference try turning it off and see if that makes any difference. I have noticed that setting it to 4-10+ seems to affect total traffic which doesn't make any sense so having it on may affect something unexpected in Google's algorithms.
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