Affiliate Marketing

Yes, you heard that correct. It is official: Google truly does hate affiliates. Well, at least Google Adwords does. I just got off the phone with an Adwords representative. He said:

Google Adwords may not be the online advertising program for affiliate websites.

The case is settled. Google is apparently trying to weed out affiliate advertisers from their Adwords program in an effort to “increase the quality” of their user experience. This is a legitimate end, but I think they have gone too far. I am certainly not one of those Google haters who endlessly posts complaints about how their site was removed from the index, but to remove thousands of advertisers carte blanche. I really don’t know what they are thinking. Isn’t the affiliate business model a legitimate one? They seem to think it isn’t, and if Google has it’s way, the affiliate model will be a model of the past.

As you probably already know, since Google started evaluating the quality of landing pages in it’s bid calculations, affiliates have seen their bid prices jump from $0.50 to $5.00 a click. This makes it a bad investment for affiliate marketers. There is no ROI when you are bidding $5.00 per click for most programs. It appears this is exactly Google’s intention, as disclosed in the above comment. They do not want affiliate money. They do not want our ads on their results pages. I have a hard time believing that the whole plan is simply to improve “user experience”. I admit that many affiliate sites are not the highest quality, but there are just as many that are of excellent quality and they are facing the same problems.

As a company, we performed our own series of tests to see what might improve our quality score, and we saw minor changes, but on the whole the changes were ineffective. Google Adwords has no advice to offer other than saying your pages are “poor quality pages” without giving any reason why. Actually, they have the gall to tell me that if my review pages were actually a part of the merchant’s website, then it would be a high quality page. That is tantamount to saying, “if you were not an affiliate you would have a quality page.”

I suspect Google has an agenda beyond the improvement of their user experience. There seems to be a concerted effort to weaken the affiliate community, and their efficacy. The way Google has been operating over the past 18 months, I think they are attempting to eliminate competition and to expand exponentially. Google has been buying up just about every net startup they can: JotSpot, MarketingVOX, Keyhole, Android Inc., YouTube, Applied Semantics and more. At the same time they are trying to compete with Paypal through their recently released Google Checkout. Google is no longer just a search engine. They are an enormous corporation pervading just about every corner of the internet. That is not necessarily a bad thing if they bring value and innovation to the public. But this pattern of expansion leads me to conclude that Google has the intention of getting into the affiliate market in one way or another. Affilaite marketing is big business; too big for Google to ignore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is trying to put together a network that will join advertisers and publishers in a relationship similar to the affiliate model. They must be looking to compete with big players like Commission Junction and Linkshare. I would expect Google’s entry into the affiliate market to look something like a CPA network, with pay-per-call integration for local advertisers.

Through the use of Google Analytics, tied in to Adwords conversion tracking, Google must be accumulating the largest database of information on conversion rates in history. What better way to put this information to use? They want a share of everyone’s sales, and the only way to have it is to get into the affiliate business. In some ways it is ingenious, and it may server to bolster the affiliate community in the end, but in the mean time, Google is creating hard times for affiliate marketers. We are forced to seek out new ways of advertising our websites. But affiliate marketers are an adaptable bunch, and we will not be stopped by something like this. Adapt or die? Naturally, we adapt.