Give Affiliates Landing Pages on an Alternative Domain
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Brand Name Bidding, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter
Affiliates and affiliate managers have been distraught by the problems caused by the display URL policy Google implemented, what seems like ages ago by now, in January of 2005. Google stated:
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).
The rest is history as they say. Many PPC affiliates lost their bread and butter virtually overnight. Ever since, affiliate managers have had to closely guard the use of their domain as a display URL, because if they didn’t their affiliates would outcompete them for the one PPC spot available for each search.
Some affiliate programs have just prohibited the use of the keywords that the in-house search engine marketing team uses. Under this model, the affiliates are allowed to use the remaining keywords and variations. But that has caused trouble with broad matching, and it requires using the prohibited words as negative keywords. Unfortunately, many affiliates are unaware of how to do this. So, affiliates get a bad name for bidding on keywords they are not supposed to be bidding on. Affiliate managers get frustrated and the search engine marketing team is livid.
Now if we fast forward to the most recent “slap” Google has given to affiliate marketers, we have to talk about landing page quality score. Now Google is not only interested in the CTR, ad copy, trademark use and display URL; they are also interested in the content of the landing page. Many believe, and I have to agree with them, this goes beyond just the landing page. Google Adwords now evaluates your entire site and gives it a quality score based on the relevancy of the content to the keywords you are trying to buy. The end result was that affiliates who were enterprising enough to develop landing pages so their display URL would be different from the merchant they are promoting, again lost a majority of their PPC traffic overnight. Google called affiliate landing pages “doorway pages” and expressed the opinion that they brought down their overall user experience.
The simplest solution I see to this problem is for affiliate programs to start buying a single domain to host landing pages specifically for use by affiliates for PPC marketing. The landing page would not be considered a “doorway page” by Google if it was owned & operated by the merchant and it did not have any affiliate links on it.
Now affiliates would have to compete for that one display URL but it would not interfere with any in-house search engine marketing by the merchant. This method would also help eliminate competitors from the results by preserving top spots on the search results pages for in-house and affiliate efforts.
Let me know what you think.
