Google Has Declared War On Affiliate Marketing

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Google Has Declared War On Affiliate Marketing

And they did it in a most unassuming manner.

Google has not formally announced its big news, but it now plans to offer to split commissions with Publishers making affiliates obsolete.

Why would publishers continue the additional work required when dealing with 1000 affiliates who are themselves promoting the publisher’s products on GOOGLE – when they can get one giant affiliate like GOOGLE instead?

And once again the rich get richer and the poor affiliates scratching out a living down here in the trenches will be left scrambling for the crumbs.

We are quite used to scrambling and jumping over each other to get the few crumbs that fall from the table of the big dogs – but now the situation will become much, much worse.

The program is called Conversion Optimizing. It is a pay-per-action model. GOOGLE is using all of the behavioral data they have collected on the web surfing population to target people based on their previous surfing habits.

It is also a cost-per-action model. If you tell GOOGLE, I will give you $ .50 per opt-in, they will target those most likely to want your product or service and shower them with your offers wherever they go online.

With each of the above models you must have 50 sales/opt-ins within a 3 day period before you can turn on Conversion Optimizing. And it can be turned on right in your Adwords acount.

The worse part is that using this affiliate-genocide plan the publisher can offer GOOGLE YOUR affiliate commission and get more guaranteed sales/optins on a regular basis. And since there is no love lost between publishers and affiliates – why wouldn’t they?

It works like this:

If you (the advertiser) specify a relatively low target Cost-Per-Conversion, the tool will place conservative bids on only those keywords that Google thinks are a sure-thing in terms of their probability to convert for you – the result will likely be cheaper conversions, yet fewer of them – essentially, it will only go after the “low hanging fruit”.

Conversely by specifying a relatively higher target Cost-Per-Conversion, the Conversion Optimizer will have the ability to bid more aggressively, and will compete for higher ad positions on a broader keyword terms, likely resulting in a greater number of conversions, but at a higher cost.

However, new keyword management and keyword analytics solutions can help fundamentally alter this Cost-Per-Conversion vs. Volume of Conversion trade-off – by focusing on relevancy and Quality Score, advertisers can potentially realize both more conversions at lower costs.

In order to be eligible to use Google Conversion Optimizer, you must be using Google Conversion Tracking, and you must have accrued a minimum of 30 conversions in the last month so that Google can use that conversion history to help optimize your bids.

As you can see, this is an excellent idea – for everyone except the affiliate.

Things are about to get really, really rough if you have been relying on affiliate marketing as your sole source of income. The bottom line is that you must have a product or you are out of business.

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