The Adwords Email

It's the most talked about piece of email . . . that I ever recall. From now on, we'll just call it "The Adwords Email".

Rumors have flown for some time that Adwords was considering a big change that would have a tremendous impact on affiliate marketers using Adwords to promote products. Especially those doing "bid slinging" - placing ads that direct the searcher directly to the merchant website.

That was long touted by ebooks like Google Cash as the way anyone can write simple ads and make big money. Naturally, the clutter and the quality plummeted - but people were make money.

And now Google Adwords has ruined everything. They've even cut off their nose to spite themselves. Or some are saying. (Hey, by now we should know one thing about Google. The people pushing the buttons are brilliant and it's highly unlikely they'd make any move that lacks long-term vision).

What I think . . .

I'm doing a little jig in my head. Why? The competition just took a near-term nose-dive. It's like turning back the clock. It puts the game in the hands of real marketers again; the advantage is awarded, in a single email, to those who are building businesses - not hit and miss money-makers.

Yes, I do feel a sense of sadness for the people who are making some extra money using Adwords. But, the more you put things in the hands of others, the more susceptible you become.

What to do . . .

You have two courses of action.

1. You can shoot for that combination of "best ad" plus "highest bid" and attain the top listing. I suspect competition for that top spot my become even more intense. Why the top spot? The top spot can use any domain they want - including the merchant URL. Clearly, since the merchant should be operating at the highest level of profit margin that puts them in control in most places. IE, they can spend more for top placement - if they want. Personally, I'd leave that to the affiliates in most cases.

2. You start building mini-sites - even landing pages for the product. And while you're at it, you start doing what smart marketers do - you pre-sell, you offer an opt-in opportunity, you add value to the process while building YOUR business.

My focus in this blog is Adwords and that's true of the Adwords Income site, but it's important to stress that Adwords is about 50% of my business income - or less. I don't advise put all of your eggs in any one basket - not matter how good is was, or is, because the one thing guaranteed on the Internet is change.

Google's "Adwords Email" has done many of us a big favor. Change is painful if you resist it. But I have a hunch the smart marketers are shifting gears quickly to capitalize on the opportunities created by these new changes.

Just in case you haven't seen "the email", it's below. I've highlighted the key points.

Best wishes, John


What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent com`1Qpanies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance). For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it. Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization Tips page for more information. By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have a better search experience, which will help you reach more potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user experience and help increase the performance of your ads. We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective advertising available.