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Google Affiliate Rumors Become Reality…and Confusing

As I wrote about last month, Google has officially modified their policy on affiliates’ use of PPC advertising on Adsense.

Here’s the change as described in their email:

With this new affiliate policy, we’ll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad’s maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we’ll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

What I don’t quite understand is what they mean by ” affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL”. Do they really mean URL, as in the specific page that the ad points to?

First of all, most affiliates doing click arbitrage via Adsense put their affiliate link in the ad. Therefore, each link is unique by virtue of it having the affiliate tracking ID in it. So, Google must at least be looking at the final destination of the click in determining the “URL” of the ad.

But if they mean the full URL, as in the page that it lands on, that would allow more than one ad linking to the same merchant to appear as long as the URL of the page is different. This would also allow the merchant to play tricks and give each of their adwords using affiliates a different URL to use as a landing page.

I’d be surprised if Google left this open like this. They cannot be that dumb.

I think they probably just worded the email poorly, as Beth Kirsch points out:

The rumor circulating tonight is that Google made a mistake and meant to write domain, not URL.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what all this means in practice.

This is news…there will be lots of chatter about this one. Industry luninaries are already blogging:
Beth Kirsch, Wayne Porter, Adam Viener, and Shawn Collins have all written about this.

Information is also already flowing from merchants. Just received this in an email:

I am sure many of you are aware that Google AdWords has incorporated a new affiliate advertising policy, which will allow only one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same url. This means [merchant].com will now need to send AdWords clicks to their own websites, rather than directly to [merchant].com. The good news is that we have some excellent free tools for affiliates that can help create great landing pages….

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