The Get Paid Site

Google has added a new policy regarding Display URLS on their Adwords ads that will be effective April 1. The new policy basically states that your ad display URL has to match your landing page URL. Before, you could basically put any display URL that you wanted regardless of the actual URL that you were brought to after you clicked.

So what does this mean to Affiliate Advertisers? Well, this news basically puts the definitive nail in the “direct-link-to-advertiser” coffin. Since Google will only show 1 unique display URL per keyword, it means that only 1 person will be able to use the same url as the landing page - and that’s the advertiser themselves.

For example, lets say we are promoting a clickbank virus software program. Lets say the advertisers’ website is “www.AntiVirusKing.com.” (I’m totally making that up, not sure if it really does exist). Now, if you wanted to direct link to their site, you would write your ad, put in your affiliate hop-link in the destination URL and then use a made-up domain name, lets say www.DestroyVirusesNOW.com. Up until April 1, this would have been a legit adwords ad even though when you click on the ad you will be brought to www.antivirusking.com instead of www.destroyvirusnow.com. This would allow many affiliates promoting the same virus software product by direct linking to the site with their unique hop links but with different display URLS.

So everyone should be getting ready to register their own domains and create their own landing pages! Which means more careful consideration must be taken when choosing a domain name for the product you want to promote. I guess google wanted to police their ads a bit better so that people aren’t thinknig they are going to one URL and landing on another. Sounds fair enough, but just means a bit more work for us affiliates!

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Filed under: Search Marketing on March 27th, 2008