Google Policies
Taken from Google AdWords Content Policy:
Advertising is not permitted for online casinos, sports books, bingo, and affiliates with the primary purpose of driving traffic to online gambling sites.
And taken from Google AdWords Editorial Guidelines:
Your Display URL must accurately reflect the URL of your website. If your actual Destination URL link is too long for your ad, use a shortened version (such as your homepage) that meets the character limit for this field.
Fair enough. So why is it that I am sitting here on a Saturday afternoon and just searched for the term “bingo” on Google and here are the results:
Before I go on its worth explaining that it is allowed to advertise “free bingo” sites on Google AdWords. I.e. sites where players can play bingo online without paying any money. There are other ways to promote bingo, such as sending visitors to a landing page where you collect the users email address. Advertisers can then legitimately email their users bingo offers and the like.
However, the 2 Google ads above (King.com) and (Mecca Games) are blatantly breaking the rules. A quick visit to King.com shows a site where players can deposit money and gamble online. Clearly against the Google rules. Whats more interesting is that this ad appears in the blue bar at the top of the search results. Now normally an ad has to have been manually approved by a human before they can appear in the blue bar. Hmmm.
The second ad violating the Google rules is the one advertising mecca-games.com. This breaks the rules twice. First for sending visitors to an online gambling site and secondly as the display URL is different to the destination URL. A further look shows that this is a Buy.at affiliate link.
To be honest you can find these sort of examples all over the place with Google and its my biggest issue with them. I wouldn’t mind so much if they created a policy and applied it to everybody, but at the moment it’s not a level playing field and the advertisers who stick to the rules are being penalised.
Needless to say I’ve emailed my account manager at Google for an explanation, I’ll keep you all up to date with the response.
What I’m listening to right now: Danity Kane - “Show Stopper”
Affiliate Marketing - Bingo - Google Adwords
Saturday, November 18th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Google AdWords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
November 18th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
For as long as I’ve used adwords they have never made all advertisers abide by the same rules. I’ve always seen discrepancies.
November 19th, 2006 at 12:19 am
I think you might find that those advertising positions at the top of the screen aren’t available through adwords. Google also have a premium program which gives you access to
Take a look at http://www.google.com/ads/overview.html
November 19th, 2006 at 12:21 am
Ted those ads are available through AdWords, I have many, many ads myself in the blue bar at the top of the screen. I’m also part of the premium program, but you don’t need to be to get in the blue bar. As long as your ad has a good CTR and a competitive CPC then anyone can get there.
November 19th, 2006 at 1:53 am
It is sad that some are allowed to break the rules while others have ads and/or accounts suspended. There definitely needs to be consistency with rules.
November 19th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Stuff like this has been going on for ages. I monitored some ads not so long ago breaking rules. They seemed to regularly disappear and then re-appear slightly differently. I assumed they were being disabled by google for the violation and then the advertiser was just changing something to get them re-activated.
It’s frustrating. At the moment it seems if you break the rules you will profit. Google need to crack down on it.
BTW Kieron, How has the latest quality score stuff affected you? I was expecting a blog post about it
Or haven’t you really noticed much difference?
November 20th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Kieron
I totally agree - I think Google should implement a way for the general public to tell them about things like this. Like right by the ad something that says “report”.
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:45 pm
I hate Google’s double standards. It happens frequently in my experience.
G
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:46 pm
It would be so easy for Google to enforce the display URL policy with a client or server side script. If you submitted an Ad that didn’t adhere to the policy it would automcatically be rejected.
The fact that they don’t do this speaks volumes.
November 29th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
I have been on ppc for ages now and this has become an accepted part of the process, along with fraudulent clicks, but given the power of the advertising it was acceptable. However, with costs increasing and where affiliate ads are concerned it isn’t workable, I spend so much of my time sorting out the mess.
I play by the rules and get ads pulled for the most minor (or no valid) reason, others blatantly flaunt them and seem to stay forever and a day.
By the way I love the logo on the ukoffer site, did you use logo creation software to create it, if so which?