iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Contact
 |
|
Google May Become The World's Largest Search Affiliate 
By: Dave Davis 2009-11-25 I am rarely one for conspiracy theories or donning tinfoil hats but a word of warning, a lot of this post is conjecture. With that disclaimer out of the way, I would like to discuss a trend... ... that I have noticed with the paid side of Google AdWords. I wrote recently about Google flushing out affiliates that use AdWords. A lot of people didnt agree with me yet Google published an update just days afterward to its website types to avoid document about the exact topic. A lot of commenters made the very valid point that Google owns and operates its very own affiliate network. The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the highest quality affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, its been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next. On Wednesday, November 11th, the Inside AdWords blog announced Product Listing Ads. Product listing ads are image ads that appear along with the normal sponsored listings on a Google search result page except they have images, merchant name and prices associated with the ad. 
While this is still in very limited beta its quite interesting. I was wondering how Google would go about charging merchants the CPA. Im not sure how long this has been a feature in Google Merchant Center, but you can now link your AdWords account to your merchant center account. 
So now Google is allowing merchants to link their product feeds to AdWords and set a price they want to pay for each sale? Isnt that what a PPC affiliate does/Used to do? Only this time, Google being the owner of the search engine can offer what no other affiliate can, images and branding directly in the search results. Could it be that Google flushed out all the affiliates to make room for the merchants that it is promoting on a CPA basis? What if Google were to allow its affiliate network merchants opt in to product listing ads? All their feeds, data, images and prices are already uploaded to the network. Couldnt/Shouldnt Google start displaying product listing ads in the search results for its own merchants and getting a nice juicy CPA for it? Doesnt this make sense? Google has all the data it needs to display the most profitable product ads too. Affiliate marketing is a multi billion dollar industry. Why wouldnt they get on board? Especially if it compliments their existing search results. It appears that others have come to the same conclusion. Google have since announced more AdWords bans and in typical Google fashion, refuse to communicate clearly. Google has just announced a whole slew of new ad formats, is slowly making organic results less visible and now with product listing ads is monetizing the remaining space above the fold. Its also worth noting that this month, Google also released DFA analytics. Its all mounting up.  Dont get me wrong, I think this is great for merchants and I am a firm believer that Google can and should do what they want with their own search engine. I am also not sounding the death knell of affiliate PPC marketing. I do however believe that PPC affiliates are going to be up against a pretty powerful 800 Lb Gorilla in the very near future. Id like to end with a quote over on WMW by the very wise Netmeg (You should follow her on twitter too):
I was wondering why Google was flushing affiliates out of the AdWords system and not so much the organic results. This is, in my opinion, a possible reason why. Google is making room for itself. Time to focus a little more on paid search? What do you think? Comments View All Articles by Dave Davis About the Author: Dave Davis is the managing director and founder of RedFly Marketing, a full service search marketing agency based in Dublin, Ireland. Dave's thoughts on search engine marketing from a European perspective can be found on the Redfly Search Marketing Blog. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SearchNewz
is an iEntry, Inc. ® publication
©
1998-2009
All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Legal - Sitemap - Contact Us - RSS Feeds - Newsletter Signup |
