Does Google want to get rid of us affiliates?
It’s long been speculated here in Cyberspace and the Blogosphere that Google is doing its best to weed out those who use AdWords to send people to a landing page that presells the user on a product or service that the publisher has an affiliate relationship with.
The first sign of this was last year when Google decided that only one advertiser could bid on any one URL, effectively making all of the affiliates of any merchant bid for the same spot.
Earlier this month Google took another swipe at affiliate marketers by trying to price them out of AdWords.
Apparently Google’s position is that affiliate marketers are expendable. Scott Jangro points this out in ReveNews:
I’ve felt for a long time that to Google, affiliate marketers are completely dispensable. Their money is nice, but as replacment sites, revenue, etc., fills in from other sources, see ya later.
The most recent is not so much a policy change, but more of a “Hey, can you take a hint? You’re not welcome in these parts.” For some advertisers Google has jacked up their minimum bid prices in some cases upwards of 1000%. Advertisers who were previously paying $0.10-$0.20 per click, even tail terms that get very few searches, find themselves with inactive keywords and a price tag of $10/click to get things going again.
Two questions: How are they doing this and Why?
First the how. Google employs what it calls a quality score to the landing page and site that contains the page. While Google has employed a quality score as part of its editorial guidelines for quite a while, apparently it tweaked the formula a bit early this month.
In fact, Google even announced what it planned to do last August:
A new addition to the Quality Score
In August, we introduced the Quality Score along with the launch of quality-based minimum bids, letting you know that we evaluate many factors, such as your ad text and clickthrough rate (CTR) to determine the minimum bid for your keyword. Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score — the landing page — which will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads.
Why are we doing this? Simply stated, we always aim to improve our users’ experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads. Have you ever searched on a keyword, found an ad that seemed to be exactly what you wanted, and then clicked on it only to find a site that had little to do with what you were searching for? It’s not a great experience.
Incorporating landing page assessment into the Quality Score will help us improve the overall advertising experience for users, advertisers and partners by increasing the quality of the sites we present in our ad results.
Advertisers who are providing robust and relevant content will see little change. However, for those who are providing a less positive user experience, the Quality Score may decrease and in turn increase the minimum bid required for the keyword to run. To help define site quality, we’ve created a general set of website design tips and guidelines that should help you evaluate and optimize your site.
There’s a terrific ongoing discussion (a long) discussion on this over at WebMasterWorld. The above quote is from that post.
Apparently some webmasters have seen a 1000% increase in their bid price (from 10 cents to 10 dollars), and very few people on the thread were buying Google’s assertion that quality score was the reason.
Google stresses that they are using the landing page (the specific page that is the URL for your AdWords campaign) to calculate your quality score. There are many webmasters on WebMasterWorld who can attest to the fact that Google actually uses the home page not the landing page to calculate the quality score, and it is automated rather than manual.
As April wore on, many of the bids settled down a bit (sometimes to 500% rather than 1000% increases), and some actually returned to normal.
It turns out that Google made a pretty substantial mistake in their algorithm changes:
Update: I finally got a response from my rep. After reviewing my campaign with technicians they have found no errors in their system and goes on to explain in, what seems like 10 pages, about the quality score and relevancy of ads, that their action is to protect the integrity of their system to provide users with useful experience, yadi, yadi, yadi…
… a few hours later everything went back to normal as if nothing happened.
Why won’t they just admit a mistake was made and that in a few hours everything will be back to normal?
That covers the how, but what about the why?
The minimum bid for many of my keywords has dropped from $5 or $10, but not back to the original levels, and about 40% are still $5 or $10. For example, a set of keywords that are running in the 20 cent range now need a 50 cent bid. It’s still too high.
I’ve been changing all my ads over to direct to merchant, and outbidding other affiliates (many of them running crappy, cheap ads). My sales are returning to normal that way, albeit with a smaller profit margin, but it’s still profit. Google thinks their visitors are better served going direct to the merchant, yet I know I have more information on my pages and better comparisons of products. Google just doesn’t think there’s any value in that.
First off, I hope this isn’t the case. My review of a product is going to be much more impartial, informative and less fantastical then a ClickBank landing page about the same product.
Is this what all of this is about? Is Google trying to disintermediate the affiliates and get the clicks to the merchants, are they just trying to make a few more dollars, or are they trying to position themselves to be the big Super Affiliate? Or is it a little from Column A, a little from Column B, etc.?
Just wanted to add my 2 cents for what its worth as a publisher, on the adsense side since this was first reported we are seeing a large increase of 40% ctr across every property we own, is would translate to me after watching our stats closely for 3 years almost as a increase in the quality of the ads now showing on our properties and being much more related to what users are looking for.
We are seeing no increase in payout however epc wise but a large increase in ctr on a large volume of traffic so perhaps it is a tweak to improve accuracy as Google is stating and not a wild theory of them trying to cash in etc. Just my 2 cents.
This would be great if it’s true, but it looks like some of the decent sites are getting broomed with the bad ones.
The same thing happened to me. After a day on the phone with the arrogant Google representatives, I discovered that it was at least partially about duplicate content.
My site is an affiliate site that uses descriptions from a merchant datafeed [Emphasis added]. I knew this would hurt me in the SERPS but the site was created with PPC in mind.
I removed the descriptions that were not my own content and within a few hours my keywords were back online.
Watch those datafeeds. They create duplicate content and they aren’t necessarily relevant. I’m not thrilled with them, and apparently neither is Google.
People, you really need to think. It wasn’t a glitch. It’s a polite way of saying that you are not welcome. They know you can’t afford $10 or $5 or $1. They want you to leave. This happened back in November too.
G now has enough of a base that tossing out what they deem as “undesirables” from a paying program is something they feel they can afford to do.
That is how big G is now. They don’t care about you or your money. They get enough money from nice looking sites from good neighborhoods. (aka ebay, shopzilla, dealtime, etc)
Another interesting theory, and sometimes part of the natural progression of an evolving market — the smaller guys are getting pushed out. That may be part of it, but I don’t think that’s the case here.
I give Google the benefit of the doubt. I think they were sincerely trying to improve the quality of the search results while increasing bid prices so they could make more money (that’s that they’re in business to do).
I do think there’s an element of we deserve more money from affiliates at the GooglePlex that is scary. Someone also suggested that data from Google Analytics was being used to determine which keywords Google could squeeze advertisers on. That’s as cynical as it is brilliant.
Most importantly I think this underscores that you can’t rely on a single vendor for your promotional plan. Google is on top, but the other two (MSN and Yahoo!) will get closer as time marches on. I have noticed that it is becoming more difficult to get the information you seek when you search on Google. Monday I looked for a copy of the Federal Tax tables. The first two Google results were pages of AdSense ads with no tables. It’s aggravating, and maybe this was Google’s attempt to fix the problem, though they apparently did a pretty lousy job.
Get accounts with Yahoo!/Overture and MSN when you can. Deposit a nominal amount of money like $25 and try them out. Google’s system is superior, but you need to have a backup. Also, sharpen your Viral Marketing pencil and come up with some other sources of promotion. Mayybe invest in some ads directly on other sites using AdBrite or one of the other vendors.
In short: Don’t rely on Google to protect your interests, because they’re only protecting their own.
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