FYI - AdWords Affiliate Marketing Changes

Google AdWordsâ„¢ Announcement:
Affiliate Policy Change
Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

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.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization Tips page for more information.

By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have a better search experience, which will help you reach more potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user experience and help increase the performance of your ads.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team


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Disclaimer: As a business Google must make decisions regarding the advertising we accept. As stated in our Terms and Conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when reviewing AdWords ads created within the program. This only concerns our advertising and in no way affects the search results we deliver. Google offers broad access to content across the web without censoring results.


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Contact us: If you have any questions, please contact your Google representative or email us at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py.

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important new AdWords features.

© 2005 Google Inc.

 

Yes- without a doubt, Im glad to see it-

 

that is nice if you are in the arbitrage game.

 

Finnaly they tought about it....

 

it appears that it will be necessary to have a "landing page" rather than just a direct link to any affiliate site.

 

This is great news from a non-affiliate's POV. IMO- They were watering down the ads.

Now all Google has to do is hold Ebay to the same standards as it does us non-billion dollar companies.

 

I posted this in the affiliate forum a few days ago, but decided I should also post it here, in case anyone wants additional info and insights on the issue.

Our team of affiliate managers has been doing in-depth research and is coming up with quite a few tools to help affiliates and a long list of very good suggestions. Some are pretty interesting and innovative. I will publish the info here when it is ready.

In the meantime below are some very good blogs and articles I have collected, covering the Google Adwords policy change which include interviews with both Google and CJ. I add news, articles and suggestions about the issue, daily as I find it.

I also have some tips on creating a good pre-sell landing page.

Google New Affiliate Policies - Links and Blogs

Hope this helps and please add any other info you find about the issue that may be helpful to others here.

 

This is definitely an improvement. Serving up multiple affiliate ads for the same company is not a good user experience for Google's real customer: consumers. It's also likely a good move for affiliate marketers since they'll end up with more real estate on pages where they're high or only affiliate advertiser. Basically, it challenges affiliate advertisers to work harder to find additional terms worth advertising on, or increase their max bids. I think the former is more likely.