Why does Google Hate Lead Generators and Affiliates?

The hot topic in the affiliate marketing industry today is the new policies put in place by Google Adwords. They are now evaluating all landing pages that are being marketed in the Adwords program.

If Google doesn’t like your landing page they will not give you inventory or make you pay through the roof for your keywords effectively telling you to go away.

This is one of the biggest changes in PPC marketing since its inception and a huge threat to many affiliate marketers out there

If you’re an affiliate or have affiliates promoting your program you could see as much as 30-40% of your PPC inventory disappear in the next 2-3 months. Would that have an effect on your bottom line?

So what’s really going on? The problem is that Google never really says anything. And they don’t tell their client services people either. I talked to some Adword reps and they acknowledged that “they don’t tell us much either”.

By looking at actual results from our campaigns as well as reading through actual responses from the Google “Landing Page Quality Team” the following five scenarios will get your quality score go low:

1. Landing pages created by affiliates: If you’re linking to another company as an affiliate and not actually provide the service yourself Google think that’s a bad user experience. Google wants you to be able to purchase or get the service right on the same domain that is being promoted in the ad.

2. Landing pages that are designed to capture a lead. If you have a simple lead page with a form, just forget about it.

3. Large keyword lists: If you run large keyword lists you will see lots of keywords being deactivated for non-relevancy. Basically you would have to SEO almost every individual landing page or at least lots of clusters.

4. Focused landing pages: If you have a one-page sales letter page then you’re also hurt.

5. Adsense arbitrage pages.

I can agree with Google that weeding out Adsense arbitrage pages is a good thing for the end user experience.
But Google is also throwing out a LOT of marketers with good quality offers that deserve to get their ads displayed, especially lead generators.

And from a marketers perspective it is quite irritating to have your marketing collateral evaluated by an engineer (read the Google landing page crawler) and junior client services reps at Google. In most other media scenarios the publisher would go bankrupt with these policies.

While Google never tell the advertising community anything of value it is clear by the actions this month that they:

1. Hate lead generation marketers.
2. Hate affiliate marketers.

Why is this? They claim that these type of marketers provide a bad user experience. I don’t buy that. If the end user didn’t like the lead generation pages that Google deems evil, the advertisers wouldn’t run them in the first place.

Google would be much better off sticking to creating great organic search results than telling their advertisers what is good advertising.

So what is a marketer supposed to do? If you’re shuffling arbitrage traffic with Adwords those days are just gone.

You obviously need to redo your landing pages specifically for Adwords.
Check out the Google landing page quality guidelines for the little information Google is willing to share.

I would think in terms of above and below the fold.
Put your high converting stuff above the fold and add more content below the fold.

Ideas for you to test (it will vary depending on product, keywords and your actual page):

- Add content below the fold
- Add navigation below the fold to other areas of your site
- Make very clear why you want users to register
- Consider adding a blog feed below the fold.
- SEO the page with your top high value keywords in the title, headline, alt tags and copy.

Your conversion will likely drop but hopefully you can make it work. Make sure you monitor your stats really good. And I would not try to short cut this. You could end up having to appeal to the landing page review dept (google is hiring a lot of new members in this dept) and if it goes that way do expect the worst.

All the best.

-Ola

There are also two other companies called Microsoft and Yahoo that will take your money and not make your life miserable. If you haven’t done much with them lately they’re worth a 2nd look.

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