Google Hits Affiliates Hard
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 11:34 am by Anik Singal
Google has sent Internet marketers - especially affiliates - into a uproar with their latest AdWords “summer cleaning.”
Over the past week, advertisers have literally been getting booted out of Google Adwords. That includes advertisers who spend more than 5 figures a month on AdWords. I’ve spoken with multiple super affiliates, and they are all in an uproar over what appears to be yet another “affiliate-unfriendly” move by Google.
I can’t say Google never warned us. They announced new algorithm changes in December of last year. But when advertisers started getting kicked out starting a week or so ago, it hit hard - like it came out of nowhere
An anonymous Affiliate Classroom contributor and PPC affiliates complains…
“I had an ad doing 6.7% CTR and have spent well over $150,000 on Google Adwords in the last 2 years – now they’re telling me that I need to increase my minimum bid for 300%! No way!”
So what is Google really up to? Have they gone the way of pure evil? Or is is this part of a larger and more complex agenda?
Well, “I” firmly believe that they are up to something. Very recently our own, Eder Callejas posted that Google is testing the CPA revenue model. Given their latest changes and the sites that have been impacted the most, it seems that Google may be getting ready to do more than just “test” a CPA model.
The first of the landing pages that got the boot were lead generation pages – the sites that are just a small box with an opt-in box on them. Interesting…could it be that Google themselves wants to collect those leads and then sell the leads to us rather than let us just pay per click?
So the 4 main kinds of sites that seem impacted the most are:
1) Squeeze pages (landing pages whose sole purpose is to gather an email address in exchange for a free report)
2) One page sales letter websites
3) Adsense sites (particularly Adsense arbitrage sites)
4) Affiliate sites
More information on their landing page guidelines - https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html
Bottom line is, since Google constantly says it’s trying to make the search experience better for their users, it must believe that landing pages provide a bad user experience. But is that true?
Maybe, maybe not. I think it all depends on the user’s intention. A shopper has a different search intention than a researcher. It all depends on the intent of the query. Why punish advertisers for not being able to read people’s minds?
Since affiliates bear much of the cost of lead acquisition, Google’s not just punishing affiliates with this latest update - it’s punishing some of the biggest web-driven businesses in the world.
Of course, as marketers, we’ll find how to get around this. And when we do, I’ll be sure to post it!
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i found an interesting article on tamingthebeast.com. it seems to suggest that some of the problem may be that many of the affected “landing” pages were obviously just a front for anothre compnay. it provides a couple of suggestions such as.
a) No dedicated privacy policy page (easy to do)
b) A lack of content on the site
c) No outbound links to other quality sites
d) No contact page (easy to do)
this sort of makes a little bit of sense. little bit being the keyword. but i can understand google not wanting to just link to pages that provide little content and seem to be trying to “hide” somewhat instead of being more upfront and helpful to visitors.
i don’t agree with all their changes, but i can sort of see where when the dust settles, it will probably be the good upstanding affiliate left standing that “DO” provide good content and have good business practices.
So in the short term it bad, and i do think it is going to be a little hard to create a good landing page, but that is good for those of us who don’t mind a little work, and who hate all the bot created pages spamming the web.
just my 2 cents.
thanks
vincent churton