It might confuse some network employees, merchants & agencies who don't understand broadmatch on generic words or hybrid phrases, with all kinds of cease & desist or mistakenly emails going to & fro. And some taking the foolish route of trying to force negative keywords on all affiliate paid search activity no matter what they do. I think they have had their work made easier in the past with Google's Assistance, now some parties may actually have to do some work after having it done for them.
It will certainly make it more competitive with non affiliated competitors occupying the space and perhaps could make merchants / agencies rethink & open eyes about affiliates occupying the space as against non affiliated competitors by adjusting commission levels if it's perceived a low hanging fruit. Once again brand bidding should maybe perceived a litmus test on the conversion rate & EPC of a merchant, many are poor at this which doesn't inspire confidence. I see more competitor merchants bidding on competitor brands than I do affiliates.
As mentioned in another thread, what's the difference between
seo & paid search apart from immediacy. Each has elements of cost. Each can be controlled by the affiliate. Difference is maybe one to several ads on paid search & hundreds maybe thousands of references on
seo. Yet many are so anal about paid search.
Perhaps merchants / agencies should focus more on delivering content units, decent reviews, decent product feeds, solus emails, more "hybrid commission structures", white labels & top selling products ( not surplus stock they are trying to shift) than reams of legal jargon in their T&C's. An affiliate doesn't have to be signed up to a merchants affiliate program to make money from that merchant. In a lot, maybe most, instances an affiliate could probably earn more by not being part of the program via arbitrage
or feeds from price comparison companies.
Curious to know a networks stand point, if it would make much more additional work for them & whether the onus should be on them initially anyhow.
What's interesting though is how some parties automatically assume it's affiliates who are not compliant or it's the affiliate industry at risk, when yellow bellied merchants & agencies won't say boo to ask.com or ebay uk or competitor merchants.
Unless affiliates defend themselves, soon
seo restrictions will be accepted as the norm and any reference to a merchant will have to be an image or javascript, that's how it's happening down petty lane. Soon merchants will restrict any form of paid search activity on generic terms going to an affiliates own site, oh hang on isn't that already happening. Slowly stiffer T&C's are creeping in without too much collective objection, that some have been mistakenly passed by networks in order to secure a client.
Some networks are maybe looking more towards strategic relationships with potential affiliates away from paid search, not your average affiliate but more the larger media portals, though closed bidding groups will still be their bread & butter for the short term at least.
On the whole it might be a good thing, why should the paid search engine police the brands? Though I feel there might be compelling reasons why they should. Then again why should networks, unless it's part of the service they offer & they act as the buffer.
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Very True .. atm MSN does convert better, and once advertisers realise, then they might improve their market share.
My intreptation also seems to be that it mainly won't administer closed groups, ie where a few affiliate / resellers can appear for a brand thus their ads will appear & others won't, if the landing page for the ad is relevant, then nowt may happen permission or not.
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