Today, while preparing an study about 'online travel agencies in Spain' and which strategies are they using in SEO and PPC, I found something amazing. When one company use an affiliate strategy, usually they ask to their affiliates don't buy their company name in PPC programs, or if they do allow them, they have to put sometihng like 'Afill' in the text ad. But I found one spanish company (Terminal A) which has a really agressive strategy, if you look in Google for keywords like 'terminala' or 'termina a' you can find up to 6 ads which looks almost the same, and as they are affiliates the URL destinations is the same. In the way I see it, they are abussing of AdWords system and nobody does anything about them, because they are affiliates, even they look for the same webpage. I am simple shock of how Google allows people to do that.
I would be more wondering why would the Terminal A company allow such a strategy (maybe it helps them to prevent competitors from bidding on their name? IMHO not that much effective...) - for example Amazon specifically prohibits that (including misspellings). Why they shall be abusing the adwords system? Such ads are perfectly relevant and OK, IMHO. And putting Affil. into the ad is in most cases because of Google requirements, not particular company requirements (though they might mention that as well in their rules).
Besides, Google will disable any of those ads that don't get enough clicks. If regular users find it spammy and ignore the ads, they will go away. Perfectly within the rules.
Thanks for your suggestions, I believe Google must consider relevant all those ads appearing from an specific query; even more if we are looking for this company name. But even relevancy, even some of them will dissapear because they won't get enough relevance, I am still thinking that seven ads which are linking to the same page must be considered like an abuse.
Nope, and in fact if the relevancy gets them kicked, they can get right back on with a new adgroup or by throwing " " 's around the terms.
Well, Suddenly, this morning I receive the typicall AdWords newsletter, announcing a change in their affiliates policy (which make me extremelly happy). Basically it says, that for an specific URL it can appear only one ad (if there are many, they will appear in consideration to relevancy and ranking), which will help the user to indentify proper and relevant ads. Also it has a new feature wich allows affiliates to create normal ads, without being to identify themselves. More or less, this make me happy, and I can see that Google is going in the right way as I ask for few days before.