So someone from google ACTUALLY responded to one of my support emails... finally. I have seen many other people posting about problems getting adwords ads to show at all do to low quality scores, landing pages etc. I researched the topic for days and days and was led to believe that affiliate products were perfectly acceptable to promote as long as they were legitimate, did not auto rebill, and were generally of the less/non shady nature. Well after getting a Final Warning from google about shutting down my account due to ads pointing to poor landing pages, I wrote back to them and someone answered. I had previously written to them several times inquiring about how to stay within the guidelines and asking if it was ok to promote affiliate products. Basically when I finally got a response, the answer was a straight up "you were almost banned because you promoted an affiliate product." No second guessing, this was their reply. It was not that my page was of actual low quality, it was unique, useful content concerning the product, but it was 100% because the landing page was for an affiliate product. Is anyone having success promoting through adwords anymore? I would have to guess if you are, you are engaging in some kind of IP masking... another interesting thing I have recently discovered and had not seen posted on here, google ads quality reviewers... can be ANYONE and they work from home. There is no way of truly masking your content from google.
I'm absolutely tired of Google Adwords. I have no idea why they don't like affiliate marketing, because it makes them a ton of money. Forget ppc
yahoo gets no where near the type of traffic as google ive had no problems using ppc with sports affiliaye websites infact have had 1o on the quality scores
I had not heard of many people having success with Facebook and poor conversion rates. Are you having success with Facebook? I would be very interested in checking it out... what categories of products are seeing some success there, other than the obvious facebook game guides and such
Wow, that is interesting thomas, but I'm sure it doesn't say anywhere that they don't like affiliate marketing. I have a bunch of ads running but I'm not happy about how many impressions they get even when the quality score is good. And i have one add where they don't like some of my keywords even though they match the name of the product! Have also tried fb ads but the CTR on those is not good at all - maybe I had the wrong product. Parth, you are right, adwords must make huge bucks out of Am so they really would be cutting off their nose to spite their face if they banned it.
@Azure11 well I would like to say that they did not say it but here is a quote from the email: Considering there was no Adsense on the pages and only affiliate offers... there was NO arbitrage involved. Hotbodysite.com actually is forwarded and masked directly to the affiliate offer. So that leaves only the fact that it was an affiliate offer on the page. I just find it curious as they have to be leaving a ton of money on the table by doing this
its probably the forwarding and masking they don't like. if you set up a blog with good content that isn't overly promotional, they'll be fine with it. on the other hand. Facebook can work very well, but you have to treat it differently. people don't go to Facebook to buy, they go there to get away, or cure boredom, NOT to buy anything. You'll have a hard time converting direct linking to a Clickbank product. CPA works fairly well. But here's the secret sauce for success on Facebook; link to your squeeze page, capture their email, market to them in the future, get them when they're ready to buy. also, don't do CPC on Facebook, you'll more than likely lose your head...try CPM, you'll get way more clicks. For example, my last campaign I got around 450 clicks to my site. Now i only paid $10 to get all that traffic and build my list. If I did CPC, it would have been over $100.
@eikliw Thanks for the good info. The hotbodysite.com ad I only showed for about 2 days... the fitbodyzone.com is the one that really did me in, and it IS setup as a full blog, with 3 or 4 legitimate articles, and the article about the affiliate product. I will look into CPM on facebook, sounds interesting!
@thomas, sorry, didn't mean to sound like i doubted you Will have to be extra careful I think in my PPC campaigns...
@Azure, I didn't think you doubted me This whole thing just frustrates me, I really tried to do things according to guidelines, I stated a clear call to action, posted a full disclosure on the site that money was being made off offers, posted a privacy policy, and wrote a unique content landing page and still was punished for the page being an "affiliate offer" It seems no matter how hard you try to abide by the rules, at this point, affiliate marketing through adwords may just not work well or is risky at this point. I wanted to use it as one of my main forms of driving traffic as I have found I am a pretty good ad-writer and can get a decent click through even being listed below other ads. I guess it just isn't meant to be for me and adwords
I have tried Google Adwords with Clickbank products and have not made a dime. I am no Adword expert, but I stay away from Clickbank products with Adwords.
I'm promoting three CB products with 3 different domain/landing pages. All my keywords/ads have a QS of 6-7 and I have made sales. I don't know if this helped but at first I made sure I added nofollow to the hoplinks. Now I just use a redirect page.
FB is alright if you put the work into it. You have to really laser target your ads and it only works for a few products. I'm finding free trial offer types work better but they have a strict policy on landing pages.
I thought you said you don't use it. How can you not like it? Adwords is great if you use it properly...and if you know how to use use it properly