Affiliate ads policy changes

Traffick

Andrew Goodman writes about his own experiences with promoting affiliate programs using adwords and he concludes that: "For those affiliates who actually build their own websites, this policy change does not affect them at all. It's mostly aimed at the types of advertisers who are playing the 'Google Cash' game of sending searchers directly from an AdWords listing right to a parent site, with an affiliate code on the URL."

He also blogs about enforcing policies across the board, reckoning that about 0.25% of all breaches will go undetected and unresolved. Take this figure alongside his estimate of 95% of sites that comply versus 5% that knowingly violate policies to gain unfair advantage and it is still a large risk to break policies. For sites aiming at long term success it is just not worth it. If on the other hand the business is willing to continually pay to rebuild, change domains and urls the % advantage is probably worth it.

Google is the gorilla of search and search ads policies both explicit and implicit and it is questionable whether they can ever detect most policy violations, even to 90% either purely via algorithms or with human input. The frustations of seemingly successful spam techniques is not likely to dissappear soon.