AdWords Restriction Of 1 Affiliate Per Merchant Announced

[telNform]

There is a new thread over at Webmaster World that states:

"Just heard from "informed sources" that the formerly discussed change http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum81/3940.htm that was brought up by Shak will be officially announced tomorrow."

Interestingly, our AM met with CJ this afternoon and has confirmed that there will be a change announced this week. This will have an impact on arbitrage bidding and possible impacts as affiliates scramble to build pages that have real content.

... any thoughts on this?

[dannysullivan]

We've had past discussion and confirmation this would come over in One Customer Per Landing Page in December, so everyone should also see that thread for further background. See also our November thread, Google & Affiliates - Rumor?. I've now closed both threads, so discussion can start anew here with actual details that may come out.

[SearchGuyNYC]

Here's the situation as I understand it.

If any keyword on Google (trademarked term or not) triggers multiple advertisers with the same DISPLAY URL then only the top bidder (within the subest of advertisers with the same URL) will show up. The other advertisers will not. They will remain active in the KW auction (In case rankings change) but they will not be presented to the user.

So, if you are a direct advertiser or merchant competing with your affiliates on a given keyword, and they are using the same display URL that you are, you need to win the auction outright because if you come up 2nd in the auction, then you will not show up at all.

This will certainly hurt affiliates as the "official" advertiser usually can benefit from a superior CTR and therefore bid less aggressively to remain the auction winner.

Hope that helps

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I think something like this was very much needed to keep this ad format at a decent quality level. Remember, one of the main reasons for AdWords popularity (also with users) is based on higher quality/less noise. I think we can all agree that since the launch of PPC the noise level has been increasing - in the past 6-12 month, dramatically.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

We need to see exactly how the rules will be AFTER Google officially announces. This rumor has been spreading for weeks and the actual rules could be different than the speculation.

If the rules ARE as rumored, then affiliates will just need to send AdWords traffic to a landing page on their own site before it goes to the merchant. Actually if you take the time to do some nice pre-sell on your landing page and add some testimonials, it could end up improving your conversion rate even though it will create another click for the user.

[ckilmer]

I've heard conflicting report as to when the announcment will come.

Will, the change take place on the day of the announcement. Or will the announcement say that on such and such a day --the change will go into effect.

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by ckilmer

I've heard conflicting report as to when the announcment will come.

Will, the change take place on the day of the announcement. Or will the announcement say that on such and such a day --the change will go into effect.

The announcement is tomorrow or possibly even later tonight (West Coast being late to the rest of the world)... however it is only the announcement... they are supposed to be giving a few days grace to everyone - possibly to amp up the bids to determine who gets to hold the spot initially (IMO).
The actual rollout will not be until next week - was told from inside source the 11th or 12th have been bandied about.

[dannysullivan]

Got word from Google they're now telling affiliates of the new policy and posted a summary up on the blog: Google To Restrict Affiliate Ads.

[OptimizeOnline]

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.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we will 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.

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.co.uk 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 will display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you are 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 optimise your ads as needed to ensure that they are bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimisation Tips page for more information.

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

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

[AussieWebmaster]

So basically the sponsors/vendors need to create FPAs (Full Page Ads) that can be hosted on the affiliates' sites (now bandwidth issues will arise).... this is going to be a machine checked system so the work arounds initially are not going to be too tough.... I guess auto-redirects have not been covered yet for the Destination URLs though I am sure they will be shortly.

[AussieWebmaster]

The other part of the Google release that was not included above was:

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).

[Manny2]

This is bad for some merchants, although it will stop people from making hundreds of adwords accounts from affiliate programs.
Manny~

Any idea re. the implementation date of the new policy?

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Ititial rumors were the 12th, but G did not give a specific date. Looks like it may already be happening with some big players, but not consistantly thoughout yet.

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 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. Will be adding quite a few new articles later this afternoon.

Google New Affiliate Policies - Links and Blogs

Linda