The Return of Direct Linking Search Affiliates

On Goyami, I posted an article last week about the benefits of allowing your affiliates to direct link to your affiliate program via their paid search ads. Along similar lines, Vinny posted what I consider a “must read article” here on ReveNews about search agencies and search affiliates and how they can both benefit your company’s bottom line.

There seems to have been this trend in some affiliate programs to stop allowing search affiliates to link directly to their sites, yet at the conferences when I talk to some of the top search affiliates who have upwards of 20-50 million keywords under management, many of them are still using direct linking as their primary source of driving traffic to their top programs.

Clearly, as Vinny’s numbers suggest in his post, these affiliates are getting more sophisticated and covering a lot more “keyword ground” then their merchants internal programs in house or through an agency.

Were these “no using our display url” policies just a misunderstood knee jerk reaction to Google’s policy of just showing one ad per url at a time or do you think there is a more logical business reason behind some of the decisions to intact these type of policies.

Should companies that have created these policies revisit them at this time and test the results?

What are your thoughts?