SSWT Internet Marketing Forum

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization Tips page for more information.

By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have a better search experience, which will help you reach more potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user experience and help increase the performance of your ads.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

I am still seeing a lot of duplicate URL's on the Ads that are running. Anyone know when this takes effect, exactly - or if it already has?

Lynn nailed it: "Use Landing Pages"

However, back in the days before I knew all the adwords rules I ran a campaign where the ad linked directly to my affiliate page selling the product. The page had a pop-up. I didn't know at the time that I couldn't link to a page with a pop-up.

So...the ad ran for three days, then was discontinued because of the pop-up.

But why is this relevant?

Because...

For those three days I had an amazing 20% conversion rate. Meaning every 5 clicks resulted in a sale, and a $25 commission. Well worth my time and money.

After the ad was discontinued for linking to a page with a pop-up I used the same ad, linking it to a landing page instead of the sales page, and...

Never made another sale again...

The moral of the story, find out what elements make a successful landing page.

Maybe you can give us some pointers.

I think people summed up my landing page for what it was and clicked off because it didn't do anything of value to the visitor so they went elsewhere.

So here's the main question...

What makes a successful landing page?
What information, resources, etc should the landing page provide to the visitor to motivate them to action, and what action should you motivate them to?

Clicking another link...
Signing up to a free report or a newsletter...
read reviews of different products...
read an article about a topic then offer the reader a solition to a problem they may have related to that topic...

There are several different ways to construct a landing page...

what works for you, or do you have several different kinds of landing pages depending on the product you are trying to promote?

It's important to anticipate what your visitors want, (information, or a product) when they click on your page. If one technique doesn't work it's possible to test the same landing page with a different ad, and reversely, test the same ad with a different type of landing page until you find what gets the greatest ROI.

Anyway, I'm hoping we can discuss different types of landing pages here and what works, what elements you use on landing pages, and what you found that didn't work.

Sounds to me like:

1. Pay per click will increase so adsense revenue should increase accordingly.

2. Affiliates will need to pre-sell more, collect email addresses and then forward them to the vendor's "ordering" page.

3. Users won't be confused with so many ads for the same product on
the same ad column, if I understand the announcement correctly.

Overall, this sounds like a good thing. Having the AFF out of the picture is a great thing and not too many ads for the same product by several affiliates. I think ranking is going to be more challenging and bidders will have to pay more per click than before? What do you think?

I agree, Jennie - and it should make for an interesting discussion. Obviously, the best thing that we can do is: track, test, tweak.

I had a landing page on one of my campaigns that I thought was pretty lame - but it was one of the few I could use with a direct affiliate link. Interestingly, it converted VERY well. I changed it this week to one I felt was MUCH better - for a number of reasons - and so far, it isnt converting at all Go figure!

Proof that I should go by the stats, not by my own feelings - LOL.

I believe that the factors that make a 'good landing page' vary by topic & industry. What works for selling ebooks won't work for selling barbie dolls, etc. With so many variables, it would be best to conduct your own testing, and tweak your landing pages to achieve the best possible results.

That said, there are some basic elements that every landing page should contain, starting with copywriting and pre-selling. I look forward to hearing input from others on this topic - I'm sure there are many that have more experience creating successful landing pages. Let us know what has worked for you!

Regarding landing pages, it is important to understand some "psychology" of the potential buyers. As Lynn mentioned, one type of landing page that converts for one consumer market may do poorly in a different market.

Study the sites that work and learn from them. The key is to know which sites are actually successful and that's not so easy to do. This new Google Adwords will force serious affiliates to really take time to learn "direct response marketing", i.e. getting your website visitors to "raise their hands" and carry out the action you want them to take.

Learn some website design. Learn copywriting. You can outsource, but if you want to do things fast, learn how to do it for yourself.

From the point of view of product owners who use affiliates to sell, I think it will reduce their sales for the short term. Under the current rules, if a Clickbank product has 5 out of the 8 ads on a page, there's a larger likelyhood of a visitor clicking through to the sales page. I haven't seen much discussion from this perspective.

Anyone selling through Clickbank want to comment?

-Hock