Programme News

PPC Straight to Merchant - Good or Bad?

A number of merchants allow affiliate PPC campaigns to link straight to their site. Affiliates tend to love it, but is it good and is it right?

Googles rules say:

• Your Display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website that you are advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users know to which site they will be taken to when they click your ad.
• If your actual Destination URL link is too long to use as your Display URL, use a shortened version (such as your home page) that meets the character limit for this field.
• The Display URL field cannot be used as another line of ad text.
• Your Display URL must include the domain extension, for example: .co.uk, .net or .org.

This means that the the display URL of a paid ad should be the page which the ad will click through to. So why not just put the Merchants URL as your display URL?

Well Google has this covered too…

We do not allow data entry affiliates to use AdWords advertising, but all other affiliates may participate in the AdWords program. However, we monitor and do not allow the following:

• Redirect URLs: Ads that contain URLs that automatically redirect to the parent company.
• Bridge Pages: Ads for web pages that act as an intermediary, whose sole purpose is to link or redirect traffic to the parent company.
• Framing: Ads for web pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site. Your site should not mirror (be similar or nearly identical in appearance to) your parent company’s or any other advertiser’s site.

If you are an affiliate and are paid to send traffic to another site or a distributor, the company you are promoting may also require you to comply with their own terms and conditions.

Please note that we will display only one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. Learn more about when affiliate ads show.

So how can this kind of affiliate linking work? I know the returns are good, but Google actually forbids the use of the wrong display URL linking to a different site through a redirect. It’s in the rules.

This raises a few questions. Should this be the case that, that you should not be allowed to do this and that affiliates should be forced to use landing pages and forfeit their high conversion rates? Or should the rules be different? Should merchants be allowed to opt out of these rules to allow other display URLs to direct to their site?

Just a thought.

If you want to find out about any of our programmes, some of which allow direct linking from PPC, then please let me know.