December 20, 2004
Google Adsense Doom for Affiliates?
Does 2005 spell doom for the affiliates doing Pay Per Click arbitrage with Google Adsense links? Rumors say it does.
There are several possiblities:
- Google goes back to enforcing trademark rules
- Google enforces a one-ad per landing page rule
- Google elimiates affiliates bidding altogether
#1 has been tried. #3 would be too much. The only one that seems feasible is #2, and popular opinion is that is the hammer that’ll be coming down.
What will these affiliates do? Many will have to look elsewhere for there revenue. There are several, however, who make too much money to just roll over and die and look to work around the new rules. The obvious solution is to direct the users to their own web page instead of to the merchant and present them with buying options from the merchant. Click arbitrage margins are already razor thin. Adding in the extra step to the process will drop conversion rates below the positive return on the CPC in many cases.
Savvy merchants are already making preparations to help their affiliates get around this problem, offering up content, co-branded, and white-label pages that display their products on an affiliate’s web page for the purpose of being the first destination for the ad.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed
Making money with Google arbitrage is going to be a lot harder now that Google has bots evaluating the Adwords landing pages.
In many cases it’s going to drive up the CPC to a point where it will no longer be profitable.
Especially if your site is an MFA.
[...] Filed under: Affiliate Marketing Search Engines — Scott @ 9:58 am
As I wrote about last month, Google has officially modified their policy on aff [...]