There is much consternation over Google’s latest changes to their algorithm with many affiliates and merchants alike complaining as much as they complained in the Florida update of 2004!
I’ve had quite a few emails and chats requesting my views on the topics, so without further ado, here it is!
I’m going to cut to the chase here and shoot from the hip – and if I offend anyone – well, I guess you just need to face hard facts!
Who is being affected by the latest changes?
1. Merchants who have an affiliate strategy of having affiliates use multiple display URL’s with single page landing pages, designed to take up extra ads on a designated set of keywords.
2. Affiliates using these landing pages with thin content on their site.
3. Click arbitrage sites (buying Adwords clicks and landing them on Adsense Pages).
4. Merchants who are using close minded, uninformed, poorly equipped internal SEM teams and/or external SEM companies who insist that affiliates should not bid on display URL’s.
5. Advertisers which use poor quality landing pages, which are not relevant to the keywords, to buy thousands of clicks at low CPC’s.
Probably some others there that I haven’t even though of! So who is not being affected?
1. Companies that focus on relevancy.
2. Paid Search Affiliates who drive traffic directly, using direct links from Google.
3. Merchants who understand search and consider Paid Search Affiliates as part of the search channel.
4. Affiliates who are not reliant on thin sites & low quality landing pages.
5. Search marketers who are able to manage large portfolios of keywords and deep link within sites.
I’m currently in San Jose, having just returned from Affiliate Summit & CJ UK. What struck me the most out of the conferences was that the market is slowly shifting back to letting high performance search marketers who are capable of managing far more keywords than any traditional new media or search agency (1m+) on a risk basis, receive the same status as the search agency in terms of payout, trademark usage & display URL usage. It’s pretty well known that when Google released the affiliate display URL policy, the market took a knee-jerk reaction and blocked the usage of the display URL from affiliates – however the smart companies that did not, like eBay, Amazon, RealNetworks, etc, benefited tremendously from their paid search affiliate programs over the past 18 months – to the detriment of their competitors. The market is moving to PERFORMANCE SEARCH MARKETING!
Every time I meet with an online merchant – I practically always hear complaints about their Search Agency not marketing the tail adequately and just relying on brand bidding. I’m halfway through the book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson and I’ll post a review shortly, but the crux is that traditional search marketers which focus on less than 10,000 keywords, tend to under-deliver the potential of search marketing for their clientss.
Google’s recent changes around rebates in foreign markets (Europe, AU), will see a number of search agencies go under, in my opinion, as the loss of this important source of revenue for them will lead to them having to bill the client even more. This really pushes the search marketing affiliates into the game, as they offer a far better value proposition – no risk for the client and a will to succeed because it’s their own money at risk.
It’s time that people take a step back and observe. Google is making changes in the best interest of the user. They want one ad per page per merchant – not a lot of jump pages leading back to the same merchant. Rather use a few trusted high powered search affiliates and/or an agency and try to get to #1 on every keyword, than trying to dupe Google to get more landscape – you will always lose in the end if you try!
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