Google Rebrands Performics into Google Affiliate Network
Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, Google Affiliate Network, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Performics | Comments Off
Google has just announced that it is integrating the Performics affiliate network and rebranding it as the “Google Affiliate Network“.
Google describes it thus:
Google acquired the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate operations in March 2008. Together, we’re creating new opportunities for monetization, expansion, and innovation in affiliate marketing.
Performics was founded as the first full-service affiliate network in 1998 and was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Today Performics Affiliate operates as Google Affiliate Network and remains committed to delivering affiliate channel growth for advertisers and publishers.
Google has been attempting to enter the affiliate marketing industry since early 2007. At the time Google launched its Referral Program within the Adsense network. This program offered lackluster results, and Google announced it will be closing the Adsense Referrals program soon.
Publishers have the option to replace the referral ad placements with traditional Adsense ads. Google is encouraging them to sign up for the new Google Affiliate Network.
It will be interesting to see how the Google search and Adwords platforms respond to the new Google Affiliate Network link technology. It is common knowledge in the affiliate marketing industry that Google penalizes naked affiliate links.
Uncloaked affiliate links will prevent affiliate pages from ranking well in the SERP’s. Google has been penalizing affiliate links, because it has stated that “thin affiliates” offer little value other than a “doorway page” to another site.
It is ironic that Google is now pushing a network of publishers who will be doing just that.
Google Adwords has also penalized affiliate landing pages with uncloaked affiliate links with its infamous “Quality Score” known to affiliate marketers as the Google Slap. This results in immediate bid requirements of $5 to $10 per click. The end result makes Adwords advertising impossible without using link cloaking and other methods.
 I will be watching and probably experimenting with whether Google will be applying their search and Adwords penalty to publishers using their own affiliate network. I ask all my readers the following important question.
Will Google’s enthusiasm for their new Affiliate Network skew their standard penalty against affiliates?
Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this question.
Adwords Wants to Help!? – Unless You’re an Affiliate
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
I just got an email that confirms what I have been saying for a long, long time. Most affiliates know by now that Adwords hates affiliates. They do not like affiliate so-called “doorway pages”. They do not like the fact that affiliate marketing is a lucrative internet business that they do not control. They do not like affiliates…..period.Â
After Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick/Performics we have all been waiting to see how Google will deal with affiliates that are working “for them” and their advertisers. I digress…..now let’s take a look at the email.
Here is the exact email (don’t miss the bolded section):
Dear AdWords Advertiser,
We’d like to help you get the most out of your AdWords campaigns. We’re offering Google’s team of specialists to help with your AdWords account at no cost to you.
Tell us about your AdWords campaign and how you’d like it improved, and one of our specialists will create a detailed campaign proposal designed to meet your goals. This type of campaign optimization can include ideas for your keywords, ad text, campaign structure, bids, targeting settings, and more.
The goal of our optimization service is to improve your campaign performance and help you meet your advertising goals. You’ll stay in full control of your account and can accept or decline the campaign options we provide.
If you’re interested, all you have to do is request a campaign optimization. (Please note that this offer is not available for affiliate advertisers.)
Learn more about Google’s optimization service. You can also check out our optimization tips page at http://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
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I do have to point out that Google is now offering this feature about 18 months later than Yahoo. Yahoo has been offering to help me with my campaigns for over a year and believe it or not they don’t care that I am an affiliate. My money is as green as the next guy’s at Yahoo, but not at Google.
Affiliates should make it a point to support Yahoo and their recent affiliate friendly initiatives. At least one major player is showing respect to a method of marketing that predates Google itself…
Microsoft Offers $45 Billion for Yahoo!
Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, MSN, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo Publisher Network, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
In a surprise unsolicited bid this morning, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion for the purchase of Yahoo! Inc. This comes out to just over $31 a share, and it seems that Microsoft is attempting to take advantage of the soft stock market. As the news hit, Yahoo! stocks were immediately up almost 50%, but what does this all mean to the affiliate marketer?
Let’s take a closer look at the deal being offered first. Microsoft’s press release states:
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.
   “We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry
partners.”   “Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been
progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our
own.”
Let’s discuss how this all affects affiliate marketers. If this deal goes through it could decrease the competition within the search market, which is generally a bad thing in my mind. This means that the impact of one company’s change in policy could more severely damage affiliate marketers, as Google did with Google Slap #1 and Google Slap #2. No one knows if there will continue to be further slaps from Google.
That said, I would much rather see Microsoft purchasing Yahoo! Inc. than Google. At least there would still be 2 very large players in the search market. Microsoft would be able create a balance to the power of Google. Yahoo’s Publisher Network would enhance Microsoft’s attempts to expand it’s content network and technology.
One question that comes up on the practical side of things is whether Microsoft would attempt to consolidate it’s own search under the Yahoo brand or vice versa. Since Yahoo has a much larger market share than Microsoft, I imagine that would be the case. This makes less work for affiliate marketers who spend a good deal of time modifying campaigns for three separate search engines at present. The downside to this is increased competition within the PPC sphere driving costs up.
It still remains to be seen whether Yahoo! Inc. will take the unsolicited offer made by Microsoft, but they sure did try to make the deal pretty sweet! – a 62% premium on the current stock price will be a hard offer to decline. We will just have to wait and see.
Affiliate Radar Review
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, MSN, Reviews, Yahoo Search Marketing, adCenter | Comments Off
When I first heard about Affiliate Radar what intrigued me was the ability to manage reporting and convert Adwords campaigns easily into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter’s bulk upload formats. I have been outsourcing the conversion of campaigns from Adwords into Yahoo and MSN formats for a long time. ‘If there was something that would automate this process that would be great’ I thought to myself. Well that was late in the summer of 2007. I just recently subscribed to affiliate radar and I am going to share some of my thoughts.
Conversion of Campaigns to Other Formats
This is probably the best feature of Affiliate Radar to date. There has long been a need for a script that would automatically convert a CSV from the Adwords Editor format into YSM and MSN bulk uploading formats. The only problem is that both Yahoo and MSN have known this for a long time, and now they are both offering to convert them for you. Well, they claim to do it for you, but it doesn’t always work.
Yahoo’s conversion script certainly leaves the user wanting. In my experience the Yahoo conversion does not really work without assisting it with a lot of manual edits, thus making it useless. So there is a niche here for Affiliate Radar, which actually does a good job of converting CSV’s from Adwords into YSM and MSN formats.
MSN on the other hand just released this option and I haven’t had the chance to test it yet. It may be just like Yahoo’s or it may actually work.
I have tested this feature in Affiliate Radar and it works nicely. The upload into MSN adCenter went without a hitch, but you still have to set the campaign targeting and activate the ad groups manually, but that is not Affiliate Radar’s fault, it is MSN’s.
Apparently the most recent Adcenter update makes this possible in bulk. Meaning you can select all the new adgroups and activate them all at once, rather than one at a time. That in itself would be a huge improvement in the Adcenter platform, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Reporting
The report functionality inside of Affiliate Radar was quite lacking for anyone running a significant amount of PPC campaigns. I thought someone had finally figured out a great way to track campaigns at the keyword level without requiring a vast installation of scripts on a server. It turns out that is doesn’t do all it claims to do, at least not yet.
The automatic generation of subid tracking for all of the major PPC engines is a great idea. This eliminates the need to generate unique tracking codes for each and every adgroup or for those meticulous people for each and every keyword.
Most affiliate marketers track on the adgroup level and not the keyword level, because it can become unmanageable to track every keyword. I bid on close to a million keywords. How am I supposed to track every single one? This is where Affiliate Radar is supposed to come in, and they largely do.
Once you upload a report from the affiliate network, AR quickly compiles a keyword report showing which keywords are converting and which ones are not. Awesome! I thought to myself until I looked for a place to upload my PPC report from Adwords. There was none. That is where my critique comes in.
It is nearly impossible to track and bid based on data that is generated purely from an affiliate network. The affiliate network data has to be reconciled with PPC network data. This is because there is always a discrepancy between the number of clicks an affiliate network will show in its reports and the number a clicks that are actually paid for.
Sometimes the affiliate network will report more clicks; sometimes they will report less clicks. This depends on which network you are talking about. But there is always a discrepancy, and if I am going to bid on EPC data that is reported it is the PPC network clicks that should be counted. This is for the very simple reason that: THESE ARE THE CLICKS YOU ACTUALLY PAID FOR!
You aren’t going to bid based on clicks that may or may not have actually happened. Most PPC networks filter clicks for fraud, and you usually pay for less clicks than you actually get. But in the game of PPC affiliate marketing it is the paid clicks that you want to account for. These are the clicks that you need an accurate EPC on. Not the clicks reported by the affiliate network.
So until Affiliate Radar adds the ability to reconcile reports from both ends: cost and commission; they will just be a nice way to convert Adwords files into YSM and MSN formats, which I have to admit, is probably worth the $97 per month, at least for the time being.
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Google Adwords Changes Top Position Formula
Filed Under Google, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click, Performics, Quality Score, Search Engine Marketing | Comments Off
Google announced this morning to Adwords advertisers that they are going to change the formula used to determine whether your ad is placed in the top positions above the search results. Up until now, this has been determined by “Quality Score and your actual CPC, which is determined in part by the bids of advertisers below you.”
Ads that are placed above the search results generate a much higher volume of clicks when compared to those placed on the right side of the search page. The clickthrough rate is also much higher if your ad takes the top position, but the conversion rate is not always as good. Top positions generate a lot of impulse clicks that are less likely to convert into a sale. Is Google planning on moving more people into the top positions? They describe the change as follows:
With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.
Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay. And you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC bid. [read more]
The mention of “minimum price” says it all. Google is going to start setting a baseline max CPC for all ads that get listed in top positions. This is possibly as a result of the new information that Google now has access to with it’s recent purchase of DoubleClick/Performics. Many fear that as Google is able to follow each search all the way to the checkout process they will want to raise prices to compensate for those earning an extraordinary ROI. Could this be happening already?
It is not likely that they have already integrated conversion and ROI data into what they demand for click prices, but that situation might not be too far off. Click prices are going to continue to rise as they have for the last several years.