SHOCKING! Google Bans Affiliates from AdWords . . . Except for When Google is the Affiliate!

Many an affiliate has seen their revenue from AdWords marketing disappear, often overnight. Initially, Google decided that an affiliate running an ad alongside the primary merchant was a “double serving” violation, in which case the affiliate was almost always excluded from purchasing the word in question. Then Google added affiliates Web sites to their list of “types of sites that may receive low landing page quality scores”, which meant that even if an affiliate wasn’t buying the same term as the primary merchant, the affiliate could still get kicked off of AdWords.

More recently, affiliates who run “review sites” have also been attacked by AdWords, with Google alleging that these sites were merely “thin affiliates” – sites that were created predominantly to get around Google’s attack on direct-link affiliates.

Indeed, if you read Google’s QS guidelines today, here’s the definition they use:

We do not allow data entry affiliates to use AdWords advertising, but all other affiliates may participate in the AdWords program. However, we monitor and don’t allow the following:

• Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
• Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site.

If you’re an affiliate and are paid to send traffic to another site or a distributor, the company you’re promoting may also require you to comply with their own terms and conditions.

Please note that we’ll display only one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. Learn more about when affiliate ads show.

To make a long story short, it’s virtually impossible to run affiliate marketing through AdWords.

Apparently, that rule doesn’t apply if Google is the affiliate. That’s right, amazingly, Google is now using the Google Affiliate Network to run direct link affiliate ads on AdWords, and the affiliate getting the commission is Google itself.

How does this work? Well, my friend Brian Smith at ComparisonEngines.com has detailed it in all its glory – basically Google takes your Google Merchant feed and – if you are running your affiliate program via Google Affiliate Network – they run your feed in AdWords and get commission from any sale.

They even posted a blog about this on the official AdWords blog. The primary benefit of the program, according to Google, is:

Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.

That is indeed a benefit, but that pretty much sums up the benefit of allowing affiliates to send traffic directly to your site as well, a policy that Google has specifically banned!

I’m shocked by how brazenly Google has entered into affiliate marketing in AdWords, and equally shocked that the affiliate/lead gen space isn’t up in arms over this clear double-standard.

 

Using Amazon.com, How to Send a Two Day Letter for $1.35 – Without Leaving Your Couch

I was in Los Angeles last weekend and wanted to catch up with an old friend that I hadn’t seen in a while. Problem was, I didn’t have her email (she recently left her job and I only had her email address), nor did I have her phone number (I switched to an iPhone and lost all my old phone numbers). All I had was her mailing address, and I had two days to reach her prior to my trip.

So the obvious solution here would be to send her a two-day priority mail letter. The cost is $4.90 (not bad) but the annoying part is that I’d have to drive down to a post office, then wait in a potentially intolerable line. It just sounded like a lot of effort. Fortunately, I came upon a much simpler, cheaper, easier idea. Amazon.com. You see, I’m an Amazon Prime member, which means I can send anything fulfilled by Amazon via two-day delivery for free! So I spent about 15 minutes searching the Amazon site and ended up finding some “doggie gummy snacks” for $1.35 (my friend has a dog). I added in a free gift message – “Hi Jen, I don’t have your phone number and I’m coming to LA this Friday – call me at . . .” and off the package went. $1.35 – sent in two days – from my couch!

Sure enough, that Friday afternoon, Jen called, and we were able to get dinner Saturday night. I saved more than $3 and a lot of time – thanks Amazon!

 

The Aeron Chair: A Better Predictor of Economic Health for Our Nation

I just moved into a new office and I need office furniture. A quick review of Craigslist revealed a decent surplus of Aeron chairs (the chair of start-up culture), usually selling for around 50% of retail. The ready availability of quality office furniture in the Bay Area got me to thinking – could the inventory of used office furniture be a good indicator of US economic health?

To test this theory, I looked at two charts in Google: the first, the Dow Industrial Average (from Google Finance) and the second, what I will call the “Aeron Economic Health Indicator” from Google Insight – this looks at the relative volume of searches for “Aeron Chair” in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2005 to present. I’m not a great graphics guy, so I basically just lined up the two charts together. Here’s the results (and, um, actually, the first chart is the Aeron and the second chart is the Dow, sorry for the confusion):

The data from the Dow is pretty straight-forward – everything was hunky-dory until the end of 2007, when panic set in, resulted in a massive drop until early 2009. The Aeron Index, however, shows two dips – one in the middle of 2005, and the other in early 2007. Since then, the data has straight-lined. Perhaps this suggests that the actions of start-ups in Silicon Valley are the “canary in a coalmine” for the rest of the economy. Once we see an uplift in searches for Aerons, perhaps only then will we really be able to say that we are emerging from this recession?

It bears mentioning, of course, that the Aeron – as a consumer product – is impacted by non-macro-economic factors. In this case, most crucially,  the decline in popularity of a 14 year old chair (and Herman Miller has released newer and arguably better chairs in recent years). So you might be able to argue that the fact that the Aeron is flatlining is in fact an indicator of economic health – one would expect an aging chair to see a decline in searches.

Anyway, it’s a bit of silly post, I know, but I thought it was a neat comparison chart!

 

I Am The 9th Biggest Search Geek, Potentially the 5th Smartest if You Exclude Collusion

The results are in from Marin Software’s Biggest Search Geek contest and look who shows up as the #9 biggest search geek – that’s right David R of Pacifica, CA, yours truly!

Now you might think that I’d be content to revel in my top 10 finish, but if you look at the finishers in positions #5 through #8, there’s something amiss – all four finishers are from CT (three from Norwalk, one from Hartford), and all of them scored pretty much exactly the same (three scored the same, one scored .8 points different). You know what they say about things that look like a duck, talk like a duck, and walk like a duck. Or to use this as an excuse to embed one of my favorite songs: