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What the Hell is Google up to?
By ShowMeTheMoney | July 22, 2006
The changes at Adwords I commented on last week have had much more wide ranging effects than anyone could have predicted. If you frequent any of the Internet marketing forums you will see that this has probably cause the biggest uproar in the affiliate marketing world for many years. Has Google finally flipped?
Its hard to judge exactly what is going on over at AdWords. They are literally turning away some affiliates who spent upwards of $10,000 a month in advertising. Its not just people who were running arbitrage, but campaigns directed to landing pages and more content rich sites have also been terminated. In most cases people havent actually been ejected from the system but basically the price of clicks has gone to $5 and upwards effectively killing campaigns. This has happened all the way from campaigns and sites owned by the gurus down to those who just dabble. It doesnt make much sense, everyone acknowledges that they must be losing a huge amount of revenue but no one is quite sure what their game plan is. I do know that there a lot of very, very angry AdWords users.
One theory is that Google is not that happy with landing pages that focus on collecting opt-ins because this is an area Google wants to move in on itself with its new CPA offering. However I dont think this explains all the weirdness we are seeing. There are not that many companys who can afford to turn money and customers away, but Google appears to be one of them, at least for the moment. I can only suggest we sit tight and see what happens before we start to radically change all our campaigns. In my opinion, whatever their motive, as a customer relations exercise it can only be judged as a complete disaster! There are some very upset customers just looking to move their advertsing to Yahoo and MSN, and frankly who can blame them?
Personally I havent been that badly affected. Its a few months since I was heavily advertising on AdWords. I diversified out to Yahoo and MSN sometime ago. Frankly AdWords had just got to greedy for my liking and I had found it quite difficult to make any sort of sensible return on investment with them in the markets I sell products to. I know a lot of people have been badly hit by these changes but maybe at least it teaches us not to have all our eggs in one basket! You should try to get traffic from as many diverse sources as possible and theres no guarantee this wont happen again some time down the road.
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