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'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.
I'm an affiliate advertiser on Google and I'm in favor of the policy change. It's cool we don't have to use the "Afill." designation on posts anymore and this should eliminate Adwords results that are all pointing to the same site with differente affiliate ids.
This will probably put a dent in the traffic those subscribing to the "Google Cash" system of advertising affilaite programs using Adwords. One way I see people can profit from this change is to build one page mini-sites reviewing sites/products that include your affiliate link, and advertise that page in Adwords.
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testing 1..2..3... is this thing on?
The part about dropping "aff" (Which is all we really had to use) is great, don't get me wrong. I know that every word and letter counts in AdWords.
However, this "change" really doesn't do too much good, as, because as you pointed out, all it takes is a change to linking to a page that is nothing but the same thing the user would see if they went straight to the program site.
I could just change all my under top 1 links to point to a cgi feed of amazon at http://www.publicdock.com/feed.cgi for example. Or more of a specialized site, for example http://www.benemptor.com . It doesn't really help the consumer, merely further cloaks the real source of the good being sold.
I have seen a drop in clicks the past 4 days (As I'm changing over to new type/formats of linked pages), but my conversion ratio is slightly up, but I attribute that partly to our getting further away from Xmas.
Anyhow, I'm not sold on it, and think it just makes more room (Incentive?) for abuse.
-Allan
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