Google Adwords Policy Changes PDF Print E-mail
Monday, 31 July 2006
Google does it again... The biggest search engine on the planet has changed its adwords policies, largely affecting the affiliate marketing industry...
 

Things are changing at Google: we recently reported that Google is currently experimenting with CPA deals and shifting away, at least partially from the CPC cost model.

There is more though: Google recently changed its adwords policies and has (intentionally?) struck the affiliate marketing industry: the company has decided to start analysing the landing pages of adwords ads and to ban or at least 'punish' ads that don't have suitable landing pages for these ads...

It's clear that both affiliates and merchants will be impacted by this decision...

1. There are affiliates out there that implement lead generating forms on their site. Google considers to be a bad user experience and will decrease your quality score for ads that promote this type of landing pages. Also merchants that link directly to a lead form, will be affected by this change in policy.

2. Increased deactivation of keyword lists: it seems that Google is becoming strict in the keywords that are used to promote services: if keywords of your ads don't largely match the landing page, Google will deactivate them. You will either have to perform SEO on each landing page (or at least groups of them) or you will just have to decrease ads, obviously affecting traffic. It seems that merchants will also have to cope with this evolution.

3. One page sales speeches, will likely be impacted as well as sites that make their money from Google Arbitrage (which is actually a good thing that these pages will be banned).

Why is Google doing this?

One can speculate a lot about the reasons for this change. Is Google trying to take over affiliate marketing and does it want to be the primary source for leads? If this is the case, we believe that Google is making a big mistake as they will plummet their own adwords revenue: it's likely that over 30% to 40% of the bought adwords ads, come from affiliates. If Google continues like this, they will only push affiliates to Yahoo & Microsoft keyword buying options.

As long as these companies welcome affiliate advertisers, Google just helps its competitors to grow further. It's likely that also publishers will move camps along with the advertisers, which would mean double trouble for Google...

Comments
Written by toasty on 2006-08-31 10:02:12
 
This information is very helpful and confirms what I've been noticing, as Google has been deactivating many of the keyword ads in my AdWords accounts. 
 
My AdWords campaigns comprise hundreds of keywords that lead users to landing pages, which contain all 3 points you mention: lead generation forms, keywords in ad not showing up on the landing page, and content limited to one page.  
 
I am trying to determine the best approach to maintaining a high Quality Score despite these limitations. Following are some strategies that I’m considering - Can anyone offer suggestions on how these strategies or suggest better alternatives?  
 
First, because of the huge number of keywords we are targeting, often, the keywords in the ad do not appear in the content of our landing pages. One way around this might be to pull keywords contained in the URL from the ad (the URLs in our ads all contain the keywords), then dynamically insert these keywords into the landing page's content. We could categorize our keywords so that they logically fit into the content of the page. Can anyone recommend this strategy or point to a discussion on this rather technical issue? 
 
Second, our landing pages lack depth, so would it be sufficient to simply ad more content to the page rather than linking to other pages? Adding links to other pages is not a favored approach, as this will likely distract the user from taking the desired action on the page. 
 
Third, almost all landing pages contain a lead form and there is generally no way off the page except to fill in the form. I'm not sure I understand Google’s restriction here, as users who are looking for more information about a service are asked to fill out a lead form. Why should this be penalized? How serious of a concern is this?  
 
So, these are the 3 main limitations of my landing pages and I wonder if anyone has any suggestions that could help. Your feedback is much appreciated! 

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