Google has sent Internet marketers - especially affiliates - into a uproar with their latest AdWords “summer cleaning.”
Over the past week, advertisers have literally been getting booted out of Google Adwords. That includes advertisers who spend more than 5 figures a month on AdWords. I’ve spoken with multiple super affiliates, and they are all in an uproar over what appears to be yet another “affiliate-unfriendly” move by Google.
I can’t say Google never warned us. They announced new algorithm changes in December of last year. But when advertisers started getting kicked out starting a week or so ago, it hit hard - like it came out of nowhere
An anonymous Affiliate Classroom contributor and PPC affiliates complains…
“I had an ad doing 6.7% CTR and have spent well over $150,000 on Google Adwords in the last 2 years – now they’re telling me that I need to increase my minimum bid for 300%! No way!”
So what is Google really up to? Have they gone the way of pure evil? Or is is this part of a larger and more complex agenda?
Well, “I” firmly believe that they are up to something. Very recently our own, Eder Callejas posted that Google is testing the CPA revenue model. Given their latest changes and the sites that have been impacted the most, it seems that Google may be getting ready to do more than just “test” a CPA model.
The first of the landing pages that got the boot were lead generation pages – the sites that are just a small box with an opt-in box on them. Interesting…could it be that Google themselves wants to collect those leads and then sell the leads to us rather than let us just pay per click?
So the 4 main kinds of sites that seem impacted the most are:
1) Squeeze pages (landing pages whose sole purpose is to gather an email address in exchange for a free report)
2) One page sales letter websites
3) Adsense sites (particularly Adsense arbitrage sites)
4) Affiliate sites
More information on their landing page guidelines - https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html
Bottom line is, since Google constantly says it’s trying to make the search experience better for their users, it must believe that landing pages provide a bad user experience. But is that true?
Maybe, maybe not. I think it all depends on the user’s intention. A shopper has a different search intention than a researcher. It all depends on the intent of the query. Why punish advertisers for not being able to read people’s minds?
Since affiliates bear much of the cost of lead acquisition, Google’s not just punishing affiliates with this latest update - it’s punishing some of the biggest web-driven businesses in the world.
Of course, as marketers, we’ll find how to get around this. And when we do, I’ll be sure to post it!