Adwords to Ban Affiliate Links
Google finally made the much talked about (and feared by many) change in their policy regarding adwords and affiliate links. Here's an excerpt from their email:
In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.
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What is changing:
With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).
For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.
How this will affect you:
If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.
Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.
This new policy is pretty much what I was expecting, and I'm sure it will have a lot of affiliate marketers in an uproar. I don't agree with the change, but it just means you have to actually have a page on your site instead of linking directly to an affiliate link. I don't really understand the reasoning behind this type of policy. I think they should have left things as they were. I'm not convinced it was broken...if it aint broke...but I have a limited view of what's oing on inside Google. As long as this wasn't driven by the outcrys of a vocal minority (of advertisers) they may have had valid business reasons to make this change.
My only guess as to why they would make this change would be to provide a variety of results in cases where on advertiser has a ton of affiliates showing up in most of the ads for certain keywords. I don't think the affiliate marketers are the only ones affected by this change. What about the advertiser who currently has all his affiliates bidding on his proprietary keywords, now he will have all his competitors showing up instead. Perhaps that's a good thing, but I don't think the advertiser will think so.
I still think they should have left it as it was and let the free market regulate which ads were shown. This seems like a bad decision by Google, but at the end of the day Adwords is still a lot more affiliate-friendly than Overture and affiliates will just have to adapt like they always have. They won't be happy about it, but they'll adapt.
In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is changing:
With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).
For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.
How this will affect you:
If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.
Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.
This new policy is pretty much what I was expecting, and I'm sure it will have a lot of affiliate marketers in an uproar. I don't agree with the change, but it just means you have to actually have a page on your site instead of linking directly to an affiliate link. I don't really understand the reasoning behind this type of policy. I think they should have left things as they were. I'm not convinced it was broken...if it aint broke...but I have a limited view of what's oing on inside Google. As long as this wasn't driven by the outcrys of a vocal minority (of advertisers) they may have had valid business reasons to make this change.
My only guess as to why they would make this change would be to provide a variety of results in cases where on advertiser has a ton of affiliates showing up in most of the ads for certain keywords. I don't think the affiliate marketers are the only ones affected by this change. What about the advertiser who currently has all his affiliates bidding on his proprietary keywords, now he will have all his competitors showing up instead. Perhaps that's a good thing, but I don't think the advertiser will think so.
I still think they should have left it as it was and let the free market regulate which ads were shown. This seems like a bad decision by Google, but at the end of the day Adwords is still a lot more affiliate-friendly than Overture and affiliates will just have to adapt like they always have. They won't be happy about it, but they'll adapt.
posted by Dave @ 9:46 AM
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