As a consultant to merchants, I have seen that the majority of DTM PPC is either fraudulent, rule breaking or of very low value. The policing efforts required to squeeze any good value from it are rarely worth it. As merchants decide to kill this activity off in their programs, I hope my peer affiliates see that tolerating scum in our sector is the root cause of many of these decisions.
Chat with the Amazon folks and you'll see they had no shortage of poachers bidding on their name (which was already against their rules) and tons of affiliates just grabbing their feed and doing mechanical algorithmic ppc bidding that did little of value and served to further drive up the bids / cost of Amazon's own internal search efforts.
I'm really curious as to the WHY behind Amazon's decison, outside of their generic statement of a look at how they are investing their advertisement dollars.
I have a feeling there is more to the decision as well. I'll not speculate though and wait to see what Jango as to say on it. :) A couple of possibilites come to my mind though.
Pat's points are valid as well though & extend well beyond just Amazon's program. I know some affiliates who do DTM PPC Search and do bring value to the table for merchant's. But there is also a lot of crap out there as well. I've always thought though that DTM Search needed more solid justification to merchants for ti being in the affiliate channel vs the merchant's search channel. I'm talking about when it's done right & not all the shennigans.
I do think it's possible some merchat's may follow Amazon's policy, regardless of what Amazon's reasons may or may not be...just from the fact that Amazon has done it. There are always some who will make decsions for their own program based on what a big name merchant does. It's the "If BigBoyMerchantX is doing it, then it must be a good policy" mentalitly I've seen so many times in other areas of the biz.
I do think these are the types of issues that an industry organization can help to educate merchants on best practice policies. The key there IMO will be if best practices policies can be formulated in such as way as to remove built-in biases to those policies (eg best practices statements from networks aren't always really 'best practices' but rather marketing for the network for practices that ultimately benefit them).
From the consulting I've done for merchants, I conclude that most would be well served to follow Amazon's lead here. But I do defintely agree with Scott that finding trusted partners is a step above killing it off - lots of communication, relationship building, common goals, respect for each other's contributions - there's some really powerful synergies and opportunities in there, especially for small and medium sized merchants. Finding performance-paid search partners can be very rewarding for the merchant. Consultants who can produce real incremental results also find performance pay is the most rewarding path as well. Admittedly, merchants and consultants who can sustain these types of relationships are in somewhat short supply.
And Scott, I think you mean... this Amazon decision is "partly" for a different reason... the impetus for other changes isn't completely devoid of the schtuff I mentioned.
"what kind of reaction will this cause in the Affiliate space?" speaking for myself, i'll have to adjust and live with it. like google algo updates.
"Will a number of other merchants take this as a sign that they should do the same without a thorough analysis?" i think they will consider it. they can easily cull thru the kw data and identify converting kw's. then remove competitive aff's who are driving up their CPCs. at the same time they are reigning in brand image (poorly written ads...etc...). just my thoughts...
and speaking of best practices. i was so annoyed when i got an email from a CJ rep telling me to negative match all brands and related terms for banana republic on all my campaigns, when none of my campaigns were bidding on any of their terms nor using them in my ad copy. my ad happened to come up when they did a broad match search that included one of their trademarks and my ad appeared. WTH is up with that?
We received an email from Amazon today, April 27, stating that we are in violation of Amazon's new policy (though it doesn't take effect until May 1). We also received the warning sent to all Associates about two weeks ago.
We have never used paid search though we have been highly ranked for search terms for years (site is over 12 years old). We run two aStores and slso link directly to a few Amazon products using our Amazon ID.
We've written to customer service but have not received a reply and there is no other simple way to reach a "live" person.
How does Amazon determine we use paid search? Since we do not use it, there seems to be something wrong with their method.
"do you know If this is real does it apply to people with amazon stores on their websites"
No. The text says that it applies "to Associates who send users to
http://www.amazon.com,
http://www.amazon.ca, or
http://www.endless.com". So they're only forbidding DTM (direct-to-merchant) PPC. You can, however, run paid search campaigns that send traffic to your own website (where you have the Amazon store).
After I posted my comment above I went out to Associates Central and looked through the forum there -- dozens of topics, some with over 50 posts in one topic -- about others receiving the same warning email. Several people managed to reach Amazon by phone and reported that Amazon said the second email was a mistake. The accusatory email was sent to many associates like myself who do NOT use paid search. We will have to wait and see if Amazon officially apologizes publicly or whether they simply ignore their error.
It reminds me of Google chopping our page rank because they decided links on our site were "paid links". Since the links went to sites that were related to the topic on the page, how did they determine whether they were paid or not?
Received this today:
Hello,
The email notification you received was intended to be a reminder that as of May 1, 2009, we will no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to
http://www.amazon.com,
http://www.amazon.ca, or
http://www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and their extended search networks. We sincerely apologize if you received this message and aren't engaging in paid search advertising activities of this kind.
We want to reassure you that this change only affects traffic generated when Associates purchase advertising on search engines and use an Amazon URL as the destination URL. You will continue to receive payment for all qualifying sales you refer to Amazon as long as those sales are not generated through paid search advertising of this sort.
We appreciate your understanding.
Sincerely,
Amazon.com Associates Program
Please note: This e-mail was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message.
It seems no-one wonders why Amazon worry about this. Even if they use PPC themselves, the affiliate army do so a lot more. To amazon it's all traffic and sales.
Unless there's a lot of dubious methods going on that Amazon are keen to stop - but no affiliate worth their salt would actively waste money on PPC. Any money spent there is targeted at buyers for whatever product they're promoting.
Strange.
© 2012 http://www.jangro.com/
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This morning, Amazon notified their affiliates that they will no longer be allowing paid search traffic to be directed to Amazon through their Associates program.
This goes into effect on May 1st, 2009.
While I'm certain that the people at Amazon have done a very thorough analysis that makes this the right decision for them, what kind of reaction will this cause in the Affiliate space? Will a number of other merchants take this as a sign that they should do the same without a thorough analysis?
Is this is an example of where an industry organization can help define best practices and help define when it is better for merchants to allow paid search bidding or not in their own program? We hope that merchants participate in industry forums and conferences, but I think the industry could do more to get together and define best practices.
Read the FAQ at Amazon for more details on the impact this has on your affiliate activity in their program. There are important impacts to access to product datafeeds.