Google Still Hates Affiliates

This is old news. We’ve all received a slap or two from Google. But does that make it hurt any less? If you prick us, do we not bleed? It had been a little while for me, and this last week I got another middle finger from Google. Must be on the right path with that campaign, just need to try other traffic sources.  But it brings it all back around for me. I’m still aghast at how Google treats Affiliate Marketers.

I don’t think it’s possible to figure out how much money Affiliates spend (or at least would spend if they were allowed) on Google Adwords. It’s definitely in the seven-to-eight-figures-per-month range.  With all of that revenue floating around, why would Google (and Facebook for that matter) just decide to turn it away?

Google, like Facebook, likes to chalk it up to something they call the “User Experience”. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good that Google cares about the results that people are finding on its Search Engine. You don’t want people to be searching for “skateboards” and getting pages selling wedding dresses. But what really burns me is how Google has outlawed “bridge pages”.  They define a bridge page as any page that leads to another website without adding any value.

In its very nature, Affiliate Marketing is taking a user and sending them through your affiliate link and to an advertiser’s page. In almost all cases, your affiliate link is going to be found on a website that you own. It could be a blog, website, or landing page. The problem is that Google won’t allow you to advertise these so-called bridge pages on Adwords. So if your website sends traffic to another website, you are the enemy to Google. Now it’s up to them to decide whether or not your landing page adds any value to the product or sales process.

Shouldn’t it be up to the customer to decide whether or not my landing page added any value? If they bought from me, to me that says I provided a valuable page to them. Too bad Google doesn’t agree.

The Curve Ball

In the affiliate marketing game, you get thrown some major curve balls.  Usually these only happen once or twice a year, sometimes more in a really bad year.  It’s when the status quo gets shaken up.  Things that you took for granted are either gone or severely changed, and suddenly your income is taking a major hit.  Usually the curve ball happens when a traffic source dries up or gets wise to the ways that you have been exploiting it.

Google loves to throw curve balls in the form of “quality score updates” that destroy your campaigns and take up a bunch of your time.  The latest one was thrown by Facebook after the Techcrunch Scamville Post (sorry Arrington, no link love here) and the follow ups that have been the talk of the industry this entire month.  It’s one thing to hear about it on a blog, and it’s another thing entirely to have it affect your business in a very real way.  As a network owner, the Facebook shakeup certainly put a large dent in our bottom line.

But that’s where my favorite part of the affiliate marketing business comes in: adapting to change. The people in this industry have an uncanny ability to adapt and update their business models to deal with the ever-changing online landscape, and this is no different.  Sure things will be slow for a while, but unlike your Average Joe in a 9 to 5 job, we have power to do something about it.  When Average Joe gets sent a curve ball, like getting laid off for example, it is devastating.  Suddenly his income is gone and he is completely at the mercy of somebody else to get it back.  He has to find another company to hire him and demonstrate to them that he is worth the risk.  All affiliates have to do is reach inside themselves, grab the motivation it takes to get things going again, and get back to work.

That’s why I love this business.  Sometimes it takes a curve ball to realize that there is a whole new opportunity right around the corner, or an income stream that you may have overlooked when your steady campaign was rolling.  At the end of the day, you are in control.  It’s your business and you are the boss.  Even if you are working 80 hours a week for yourself, that’s better than working 40 for someone else.  Next time you are thrown a curve ball, remember the alternative.

New changes to Google AdWords Quality Score

Google is doing it again.  Although they are sure to be controversial (they always are), these changes could benefit Affiliate Marketers a lot more than the last few rounds of changes.

Here are the changes:

  • Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query
  • Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’
  • ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account

The first point on the list is huge.  Instead of using a broad Quality Score to determine the placement of your ads, Google will be calculating the Quality Score on the fly based on a number of factors.  These factors include Keywords and Geographical Location.  In my opinion, it’s about time Google implemented an automatic Geo-Targeting method for ads, and it’s finally here.  How nice would it be to never have to worry about paying for clicks that get sent to a “country-specific redirect”.  There have been controls to specify what countries your ad gets placed in for years, but nevertheless it still happens.

The second change involves keywords no longer being labeled ‘Inactive for Search’.  This won’t necessarily be a huge boon to search marketers, but it does increase the overall pool of terms & keywords that can be targeted, even if they are extremely longtail.  More keywords equals more clicks and revenue for affiliate marketers.

Possibly the biggest change is the new ‘First Page Bid’ listing.  It has long been a guessing game to figure out the sweet spot between paying too much for clicks, and having your ads show up on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th page of results.  Some might say that this will cause an upward trend in keyword bid prices, because inexperienced marketers will now know how much they need to bid to get on the first page.  I don’t see this being a long term issue, because they will either run out of money or decide it’s not worth it to bid with the big boys because they can’t get the traffic to back out for them.

My feeling is, the more transparency that Google has, the better.  It’s no fun trying to guess what you need to do to be successful as a search marketer.  The more information we have about how the system works, the better that we will be able to use it and optimize our campaigns to be as profitable as possible.  It doesn’t matter how complicated the system is, the cream will rise to the top.  If you are a full time affiliate marketer, you should take these changes and run with them to gain a lead on the competition as quickly as possible.

If you want to read the changes for yourself, checkout the official post on the AdWords Blog.