Does google pose a serious threat to affiliates

[rm94531]

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- Affiliates develope their own search engine & market themselves? I hear affiliates are quite good at this thing called marketing

- Affiliates start having web search on their sites to keep users within site.

- Affiliates in different niches combine content or different verticals for one super site

- Affiliates start planting the seed to users of other search engines apart from Google

A fantastic wisdom of crowds suggestion !

Affiliates must :

1. Get big fast.

2. Innovate or die !

[rm94531]

A fantastic Wisdom of Crowds suggestion.

Afiliates must :

1. Get big fast.

2. Innovate or die.

[Mogga]

The only way to combat it would be to ban google from using your site. without the sites with content on it'd just be a shop.

And how would shops feel if google didn't include them? They'd want to stop people using google at all costs then.

It amused me how they critise msn and yahoo possibly getting together because it'd make them a bigger online entity, but don't critise google for extending its reach into all things.

[tbp]

To me, the latest change to PPC does come as a threat.

My revenue has dropped by a lot since Google stopped my PPC campaign.

Everyone says don't rely on PPC, and concentrate on SEO as well. My problem is that my sites are at number 1 already, I can't go any higher.

And even though they are at number 1, PPC brought in much more traffic / sales than natural search for the same keyword terms.

My PPC is gone, and I have nothing to replace it with. I`m at number 1 in google already, so can't do any better there. I`ve tried PPC on MSN, but had 35 impressions and 5 clicks in just over 2 weeks. My total MSN PPC bill since I started has been 35p, compared to what would have been about £50 on google.

I`m not giving up, its forcing me to build many new sites and just go for sheer numbers to get my revenue.

What really pisses me off with Google is the way they do business. Dropping thousands of campaigns out of the blue, instead of making an announcement saying we are changing the way things work. If you want to continue with us, you need to improve the quality of your site to make things better for our searchers, things we are looking for are this, this and this. Saying that though, there is very little I can add to my site now. It annoys me, because the people who count, the public, did like my site which is why it had an extremely high conversion rate of 50 - 60%.

There are things I can try, like changing domain and setting up a new account, but im not going to bother. I`m not wasting my time when its likely that they`ll do the same a week or a month down the line, and i`m not in rush now to hand over my money to them.

[stu-art]

Say we did get a 'proper' competitor to Google. Unless they were sufficiently different to google we would still be in the same boat. You can bet they would be just as greedy and have their eyes on our spoils. We could end up with two googles and find ourselves between a rock and a hard place...who knows. I get the feeling the key is to build numerous content rich sites and spread your income sources far and wide; lots of constant work, but if Google is going to hit us it will be the easy money doors which close first methinks.


Talking about shopping carts, I've put a basket on one of my sites (google checkout) and plan to do the same thing on other sites to see if it offers any 'protection', at least it makes the ads stand out in adwords! Maybe we need sites which are part shop and part affiliate.

[leveldisc]

I can't believe this thread.

Google cannot stop AM. How can it ?

Sure, they can affect the way that affiliates or merchants use adwords, but this notion that google is going to be some big super affiliate, squeezing all others out of the market is absurd.

What merchant is going to deal with that sort of entity ?

[Brendon]

I doubt Google will get too far into AM too quickly, it's too much of a manpower intensive business. The one HUGE weakness G have is that they are utterly rubbish at anything requiring more than the slightest human-to-human contact. AdWords provides around 50% of their revenue, and for those of you who use it, how much personal attention do you get? A handful of massive spenders may have reps, but unless you are (literally) chucking millions a year at them, they really aren't all that interested.

They are playing around the edges with their CPA product, and G Checkout will almost certainly be part of it eventually, but in essence what they do now is about all they can do without massively, irrevocably altering the entire structure and ethos of the company. I just don't see them needing or wanting to take that risk in the short - medium term. In, say, 10 years time, when their annual year-on-year growth is down to single digits, they may see that it's time to try something new, but for the moment they are doing well doing what they do.

Also, in the nicest possible way, I think a lot of affiliates are going to have to SERIOUSLY look at the way they do things. Neither Google nor any other SE "hate" affiliates, or in fact have any sort of opinion about them, really. When I see affs having issues with search engines, it almost always turns out that they have done something silly, SEO-wise. This is not a judgement at all, merely an observation. SEO is a very highly specialised discipline, and it's perfectly possible to trash your SE rankings for what you might think are perfectly good reasons, or with perfectly innocent actions. There's no paticular reason that most affs should have the deep SEO knowledge that would be required to avoid all the potential pitfalls, but that makes it feel no better when the mighty Google strips you of the bulk of your traffic.

Long term, I think AM is going to be forced onto a more "professional" footing - the era of the one man / hobbyist affiliate being able to do everything themselves is coming to a close, and affs are going to have to specialise more, and work in larger groups to provide the total skillsets required, whether by informal association, partnerships or direct employment

[chrisuk]

I haven't used google ppc seriously since summer 2006 and I run everything from ppc affiliate revshare sites to cpa offers, just the sort of stuff that Google seems to hate. Funnily enough I never got QS'd out of the picture, maybe because of having old accounts, who knows. I have quite happily ticked over since by using other search engines and much cheaper sources of traffic.

Additionally I have branched out into the US market, Google is not nearly as dominant there, overall there is more volume and more choice. Also some of the tier two ppcs are actually very good once you have filtered out the rubbish and they don't have as many restrictive rules. I am now building a new content network for Google organic traffic and will just take whatever freebies come from that.

I see in the Google ppc listings affiliates changing domain every few weeks to navigate around the slap, everyone from arbitrage guys to content affiliates all having to jump through the hoops in a constant repetitive cycle. That ain't no fun, way too cat and mouse for me.

Adwords is aiming to serve the corporate boys and the only affiliates they want are big brand, big spenders. Take uberarbitragers ASK.com, all over adwords like flies. There is nothing wrong with what they are doing, its all been done many times before, except the landing pages won't meet Google's QS guidelines. Yet they are still there, while other smaller sites have no chance, its brand and spend. Just the way its going with Google unless the affiliate community can impact any kind of leverage over time.

[leveldisc]

I don't believe for a moment adwords is only after big clients. It makes no sense.

For example, what's the local search functionality for ?

Also, underneath the top 5 bids say, for any keyword are loads of bids from smaller players that push up the cost of the top bids. Why would google want to remove this competition ?

[golles]

As Kieron put Google are after crap sites and are not afraid to bite the hand that feeds them to do it. But what is a crap site? Value is subjective...

Reading stories like this:
JayWeintraub.com - Internet Advertising Analysis and Commentary: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

....the potential for use of analytics data, coupled with quality scores/slaps/etc just smacks that things will get worse for affiliates before they get better - especially PPC affiliates.

We have a moderate spend (lowish xx,xxx per month not xxx,xxx) with Google and I am worried (we drive at least 85% of traffic via PPC).

I would love to hear the views of some of the bigger players (in addition to Kieron) like Econversions or Traffic Broker or UK Web Media.

it would be good to get their take on using PPC to drive most of your revenue and how they see the future panning out.

[tbp]

Neither Google nor any other SE "hate" affiliates, or in fact have any sort of opinion about them, really

I would have agreed, however how do explain the fact that for many search results the only adwords ad's that were allowed to continue were for merchants?

If you look at the reply I got from google in the adwords slap thread it does place restrictions on affiliate sites specifically.

I don't know why they have a problem with affiliates, apart from tarring us all with the same brush as the affiliates who stick up loads of low quality spammy sites, which don't help the searcher at all.

[jonsp]

I don't know why they have a problem with affiliates, apart from tarring us all with the same brush as the affiliates who stick up loads of low quality spammy sites, which don't help the searcher at all.

I think that depends how you define affiliates. There's 2 possibilities
1/ I'm an affiliate - I want to make my % and f*** anyone that tries to stop me
2/ I'm an affiliate - I deliver value to the user and because of my value I earn a %

If you're in the first category Google is going to make life harder and harder. Say a user has made up his mind to buy some blue widgets, he knows he wants them he just needs to find where to buy them. He searches and clicks an ad offering what seems to be a good deal. This site has the requisite articles full of unique content to keep Google happy but the landing page just tell hims to click here to visit the merchant. In the best case the user has to make an extra click, in the worst case he hits back because he doesn't want to click again.

Now consider the same search where the user sees ads from say 5 competing blue widget merchants and an affiliate. The user clicks the aff ad and sees a nice table giving a side by side comparision of all these 5 merchants and their prices, some prices are cheaper by the dozen, some offer free delivery, some can offer next day delivery etc etc. We don't know what this guy needs but he has all options covered. This information is useful to the user he reviews the table and clicks thru to the merchant that suits him best. He's very happy to be able to complete his purchase quickly.

The alternative is he clicks all the 5 merchant ads in turn, compares the offers himself and chooses the best for him. Of course he gets the same deal either way but he's not too happy that he's had to review 5 sites when he just wants to get a good deal on blue widgets and go on with his life. As a user which ad do you think would be best for you - the 5 merchant ads or the 1 affiliate ad? Now here's the key - which do you think Google would rather the user do? Click the one affiliate ad, make 1 CPC for Google, and go away with a positive experience of Google or click all 5 merchant ads, make 5 CPCs for Google but not be so happy.

I think the answer to that question determines whether Google has it in for affiliates :-)

[getvisible]

Isn't Google a network NOW?

I get emails from Double Click Affili network (I don't read them) of new campaigns. And didn't Google's takeover of Doubleclick get approved this week?

[Brendon]

>> I don't know why they have a problem with affiliates

They don't have a problem with affiliates, per se. They DO have problems with sites that (from their POV) reduce the quality of the experience of THEIR users. Sadly, many affiliate sites fit that profile

[tbp]

They DO have problems with sites that (from their POV) reduce the quality of the experience of THEIR users. Sadly, many affiliate sites fit that profile

I do understand that but they should treat affiliates on the merits of their sites, not just lumping all affiliates in together.

My sites do add value which is why I get such a high conversion rate.

Its the disparity that annoys me. How can Google say my site is the most relevant in its field by giving me a number 1 search result on both UK and Worldwide searches, yet say the same site is poor quality for the same keyword on Adwords?