It’s been in the works for a long while, but the news is now out – Google is taking moves to restrict how affiliates use AdWords. SEW has commentary here.
With the change, Google will allow only one ad to lead to a particular web page per query, whether that ad be from an affiliate of the web site or the web site owner.
“We’ve seen and heard from users that there are many cases where we are showing the same creative with the same visible URL linking to the same page,” said Salar Kamangar, director of product management at Google, explaining users don’t like this. “Just like with search where we have duplicate removal, we want to make sure we aren’t showing duplicated ads.”
ClickZ coverage here.
This new policy clearly states that “If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we will display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.”
Doesn’t this mean that some merchants may have their ads trumped by affiliates? What problems are likely to arise from this. More changes in affiliate marketing policies? More legal problems?
I don’t seem to be reading about these issues from a merchant standpoint in any of the commentary.
I don’t think their affiliates would be linking back to the same website.
It’s extremely common for affiliates to link to the same website. Most affiliates are just using variables appended to the same URL that identify them. For example:
Advertiser URL
http://www.widgets.com/plasma_tvs.asp
Affiliate URL
http://www.widgets.com/plasma_tvs.asp?id=1
That’s the same landing page.