Ppc And Affiliate Marketing, Will it last? Options

[turbocashuk]

We all know that sight - you type in 'buy widget' and wham up come 4 Ebay affiliates on the right, and maybe 2 of another affiliate, and maybe if you're lucky 2 unaffiliated links.

Surely this is not what google wants? Is it relevant if you type in 'buy TV' and 5 ebay links come up on the right?

I've got a feeling google may ban affiliate advertising using ppc. It's surely not in their interests. They would want to see 8 different sites on the right, not 6 of the same.

[Haystack]

They may be hoping that the market will take care of this. But if that doens't happen, I wouldn't be surprised if they did something about this either.

[turbocashuk]

You mean by the affiliates not being able to bid high enough because their commissions are too low? I would've thought that would easily have happened by now.

The question is, what could google really do? You could easily reroute your link through your own domain and onto an affiliate.

[Haystack]

They could do whatever they want. For example, they could decide that sites need to have at least some original content. However, the other factor is $. While the results seem marginal, they certainly make Google money. That's a tricky trade-off. I'm sure that some of the Ebay and Amazon affiliates are among Google's highest spending advertisers, so cutting them off could be painful for both parties.

[turbocashuk]

Agreed. Affiliate marketing is big business. Guys are making big money without even having a website. And google is making lots of money off them.

But google keep going on about 'relevancy'. They seem to pursue that above anything else. Question is, will they pursue it at the cost of loss of hundreds of millions of dollars?!

[Haystack]

Google probably figures that as long as people keep clicking on the ads, and as long as affiliates can afford to pay, then the ads must be relevant.

However, if they detect a drop-off in PPC click through rates, I'm sure they'll take steps to improve relevancy of ads overall. If people start ignoring the right margin of the page, revenues could drop substantially. I don't see that happening, but if it did, things will definitely get shaken up.

[seoemporium]

I thought for PPC you had to mention that you were an affiliate in the ad somewhere?

[Haystack]

Generally, yes, but that doesn't seem to be a deterrent.

For example, check out how many Overture affiliates are advertising for the term Overture PPC:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en...&q=overture+ppc

[cline]

It depends a lot of how many players there are for a particular term. For terms for which there are fewer than 8 or so direct sellers, then there is efficient inventory for affiliates. There is lots and lots of stuff for which there are fewer than 8 players in the market, especially when many of those players haven't awakened to the power of PPC.

It maximizes Adwords and Overture's revenue to let the affiliates play. Sure, there may be some restrictions placed on how many affiliates may bid on the same thing, but beyond this, I predict they are here to stay.