"Adwords Policy Change - Only 1 Ad Per URL"

By Arun Agrawal

Google today announced a major change in their Adwords policy which is going to impact the affiliate advertisers in a big way.

An email just received from them states that “we’ll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL". So if multiple people are advertising on Adwords as affiliates of the same product and they are referring the prospect to the merchant’s URL directly, only one of these ads will be shown. Google states further - “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). “

What does it mean for you as an advertiser?

First, if you are taking the prospect to a special landing page on your site, pre-selling him with your content and then referring to the merchant, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Since the number of ads displayed for the merchant’s direct URL will be reduced to 1, you can really climb up on the ad position without increasing your bid amount.

In any case, you stand a higher chance of converting the prospect to a customer because you have pre-sold him and not just sent him directly to the merchant’s site to face the sales pitch there. This excellent tutorial on pre-selling with content can give you all the nitty-gritty details of pre-selling. Highly recommended!

Google has removed the restrictive clause of identifying yourself as the affiliate by inserting “aff.” or “affil” or some such text in the text ad, because there is going to be only 1 ad per URL. Now you can really go ahead and remove this ugly looking (and may be click-killing) text from your ads.

I feel that because the competition and hence CPC, for the most obvious keywords will increase tremendously, the value of good keyword research will go up. If you can discover obscure keywords which are related in some way but are not used by others, you can advertise on those keywords without any competition. Check out a lot of useful keyword research tools.

What about Adsense publishers?

If you are an Adsense publisher, you should not have much to worry. While it may appear that the earnings may go down because there will be fewer ads, two things work for you.

A.The cost per click will go up for competitive keywords and hence you gain.
B. There will a bigger variety of ads and landing pages, so the readers may be more apt to check these out.

So it’s time to have a quick look at your Adwords campaigns and make the suitable changes sothat the affiliate checks can keep flowing