It didn't make sense to me either so I wrote and asked for clarification. This was the information I received back:
Quote:
Guidelines for Virgin Wines Affiliates on PPC advertising and SEO.
Many of our affiliates use PPC advertising as a successful means of driving traffic to Virgin Wines, generating sales for us, and of course commission for you. We are happy for affiliates to do this as it generates a lot of exposure for Virgin Wines.
We have prepared the following guidelines to avoid any conflict between Virgin Wines ppc programme and our affiliates. If you have specific queries which are not answered in this document please refer these to our contact at Affiliate Window, to forward to us.
General Guidelines - References to Virgin Wines
We are happy for affiliates to mention Virgin Wines in the title or in the body of adverts.
e.g '£20 voucher for new Virgin Wines customers' - 'Click Here to claim a voucher to use at Virgin Wines'.
However we do not permit affiliates to masquerade as Virgin Wines by using Virgin Wines url as the domain name.. The domain name must show clearly as the affiliate in both organic and ppc adverts. Affiliates must also ensure they link to the correct page. Ie A £20 voucher advert links to our voucher page and not the homepage.
Virgin Wines rules regarding bidding on our domain name equally apply to Virgin Wines, Virgin Wine, www.virginwines.com, www.virginwines.co.uk , Virgin Wines Online, Virgin Wine Online and any other version of our company name. We will immediately be forced to suspend any affiliates who do not follow our rules and we will refuse to pay comissions so please work with us on this.
It may be necessary to request you to remove PPC adverts at short notice if we receive a complaint from a customers who is unable to find the advertised promotion. We would appreciate your cooperation in resolving any link errors or copy inaccuracies on your site as soon as possible.
|
I think that's fairly clear even though I don't understand their logic! I do wonder if they just don't 'get' how it works and understand that the URL does link straight through to their site, or that all affiliate ads work in this way. I wrote back to tell them they're about the only merchant I've come across who won't permit linking to the merchant site in the usual manner from Adwords ads. No response yet..