An AFFront to good marketing

I spent two and a half years educating the world why paid search was relevant. It was a tough battle. I even made a trip to Google. We wanted Google to place GoTo (now Overture) paid listings on its search results pages. The answer was simple: NO WAY! Can you imagine that we would suggest corrupting the purity of search with paid results?!? We must have convinced Google of something because a year later AdWords was launched.

As we all know now, paid search is a huge advertising channel and has supplanted the then-dominant CPM banner advertising as the main advertising vehicle on the Internet.

In my current role, as an advertiser, I have found Overture’s Editorial Guidelines to be overly restrictive. We needed GoTo’s Editorial Guidelines to be strict early on to prove relevance, especially since we were originally selling the entire set of search results instead of just the top 3 to 5 above the nature search results.

On the other hand, Google has taken a different view of paid search. Google does not seem to place any restrictions on AdWords. There are two guidelines that stick (along with a few against certain content). While one may make some sense, the other is just plain bizarre.

The first is that advertisers are forbidden to use superlatives in any way — so much for a good marketing tool. However, if the titles and descriptions contain only superlatives, what’s a poor user to think.

The other relates to affiliate marketing. Affiliates must identify themselves in the title or description with one of the following: aff, affil, or affiliate. Most affiliate advertisers opt for aff or AFF which means using only 4 (including a space before aff) to use as few characters of the extremely limited title and description in AdWords.

This must be for transparency so the user understands that this is an ad placed by someone who is an affiliate of another site. Knowing this and knowing that Google Labs strives for the best user experience, I set out to verify with typical users (not those of us who work in affiliate marketing) that they were able to fairly judge an ad and the resultant site by seeing AFF in the description.

DL (pointing to screen with Google search results): What do you think “AFF” means in the ad.
Friend: [Blank stare]
DL: OK, I’ll give you a hint. It is an abbreviation for affiliate. Now you know what it means, right?
Friend: [Blank stare]
DL: This isn’t rocket science.
Friend: I am a rocket scientist. I don’t get this marketing [expletive deleted] that you work with.

I asked my parents. They had no idea what it meant. I asked parents at my kids’ school. No one could answer. I asked my doctor. He told me that I should consider Prozac. A waitress asked me if I needed anything else so I asked her. She had no idea. The list goes on. All of these people use Google and none of them had any idea.

So if it about transparency and the users don’t know it means, why is it still there? Google must have usability labs. They must ask users about these things.

I’m not asking Google to force us to add more to the listing. I don’t think that there is a way to explain this concept in 70 characters.

Google doesn’t seem to require middlemen (yes, and middlewomen) in other businesses to add any attribution of their status. Why this one area? I can go on but I think that this requirement is dAFFy, it AFFects all of us in AFFiliate marketing and it seems that Google is using it as a gAFF.