Affiliate landing pages and brand bidding using closed groups. Good or bad?
A couple of weeks ago I blogged on how to build landing pages/sites that will pass all of Google’s quality score guidelines.
Well, I got to thinking on the reasons why Google have implemented these changes and basically alienated a lot of Affiliate Marketeers whilst doing so. To be honest there are a lot of landing pages or bridge pages that deserved to be kicked off Google. I’m talking about the type of pages that consist of a paragraph or two of text, some banners and maybe some Adsense ads for good luck. These are just crap, take a look on forums like Digitalpoint for examples of these - just look for the posts where people moan about being “Google Slapped” as the people complaining the loudest are usually the ones with the worst landing pages. Somehow they just don’t see it that way though and spent all their energy hating Google instead of working with them.
Anyway, despite using landing pages/sites myself I had to ask myself if they honestly offer value and a good user experience to my visitors. I have two answers to that question:
Yes they offer a good experience if the landing page/site compares specific products or services in a market. For example my credit card site that shows at a glance the benefits associated with various credit cards and what interest rates or rewards the user can expect when signing up. These type of sites are useful and offer a real value to the end user. They are trafficked via generic PPC terms such as “credit card” or “compare credit cards” etc.
No if the landing page/site is built purely for brand bidding purposes. For anyone not sure what brand bidding is, its when affiliates target specific keywords relevant to a particular brand or service - then send users to a landing page selling that product or service. Its called “brand bidding” as the affiliates are bidding on the intellectual property of a brand, and not a generic word or phrase used everyday in the English language. Usually the brand name is trademarked, some examples could be terms like “T-Mobile”, “iPod” and “American Express”.
OK real-life example time to illustrate my point. In the UK there is a Digital TV provider called Sky, their site is at www.sky.com. Its a reasonable safe bet to assume that anyone searching for the term “sky” on Google will be looking for information on the aforementioned company.
So, if the user searches for Sky do you think that presenting them the following page will result in a good user experience?
As you can see the number 1 sponsored position is the official site for Sky.com. Sponsored results 2 to 7 are all affiliate sites who have built landing pages/sites to capture users looking for Sky products and services and then send them off to the official Sky.com site via an affiliate link.
So, using this example, here are the Pros and Cons as I see them for brand bidding.
Cons:
1. As a Google user I would be very confused if I was offered these search results. I mean all I want to do is find the official Sky site. So what are all these other sites with the word “sky” in the address?
2. The merchant in question has clearly trademarked the name “Sky” which is why only pre-approved affiliates are allowed to bid on the term “Sky”. However this begs the question, why not just ban all affiliates, collect all the traffic from your one sponsored ad and not pay out any affiliate commissions on sales through brand name search? Your competitors can’t display any ads as your trademark is protected, so there is no need to block out the competition as Google will do that for you as long as you prove you are the trademark owner.
3. Again as a merchant or an affiliate network you have to constantly monitor and police this “closed group” of affiliates to ensure that they are representing your brand correctly, keeping the sites up to date and staying in the position allocated. All time and manpower which you could free up and use elsewhere by simply not allowing them to bid on your trademark.
4. Because of Google’s ever tightening landing page guidelines these affiliates now have to offer some sort of comparisons or at the very least links to competitors related to your service. So if a user visits one of the affiliate sites above they “may” be tempted to wander off through a competitors link, never to be seen again. Hello leakage, goodbye sales.
5. If you have a group of 6 affiliates all bidding underneath you then chances are you aren’t paying the lowest possible CPC prices you could for your official ads. However if yours is the only ad displayed then chances are you will pay the lowest possible CPC.
Pros:
1. By allowing 6 affiliates or so to bid on your brand name then you are giving the user 7 chances to click on a link that will lead to your product or service. If you didn’t allow any affiliates then there will be only 1 sponsored ad (yours) and therefore it won’t be as visible. Maybe your competitors have targeted your keywords in the natural listings and are displaying somewhere below yours. If there are less ads for you then the chances are higher that the users will click on a competitors ad.
2. Maybe you haven’t got your name trademarked, then by allowing a group of affiliates to bid on your name then you can “lock out” competitors who may be triggering their ads with your brand keywords.
3. A lot of super affiliates have years of experience in paid search and tens of millions of pounds worth of budget at their disposal. Put simply they are better at PPC than you or your agency, so its entirely wise to get them on board, especially as they will be working on a results based basis.
4. The best PPC affiliates will also add real value to supplement your existing PPC campaigns by seeking out and bidding on generic terms as well as the brand terms you are allowing them to bid on.
5. If your agency PPC budget runs out halfway throughout the month then you have a resource of PPC affiliates at hand who will immediately step in and take up the slack. Ensuring no loss of continuity for your ads being displayed.
So there you are, 5 reasons why brand bidding is good and 5 why it isn’t. There are more arguments on both side of the fence but what do you think? Are you for brand bidding in closed groups? Has it made you a rich affiliate? Or as a search engine user do you think it just makes your experience unnecessarily complicated? Please let me know your thoughts below.
What I’m listening to right now: Fantasia - “Fantasia”
Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 12:58 am 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.
July 9th, 2007 at 3:17 am
Number 4 of the con discussion mentions a consumer / visitor clicking an offsite link to a competitor - you mentioned sky. Aren’t affiliates now building like you have done with your credit card site, say still on the topic of sky - Sky, Virgin Media ect.. comparison sites directing visitors to either one through an affiliate link meaning no loss in visitor conversion - it may even increase although it depends on the payout per user from these companies whether your income will increase or decrease.
Can sky stop people bidding on this? - i mean it’s a generic term although it’s obviously related to the company.
July 9th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Yes, the affiliate will earn commission from offsite links to other related companies such as Virgin Media. However, if you were Sky and you had set up a controlled group of ppc affiliates allowed to bid on your name, would you be happy? So as an affiliate its not a con but as a merchant I would say it is.
Sky have stopped people bidding on their term. Take a look in Google, the only ads showing are for approved Sky affiliates. Generic term or not, they have it trademarked and protected well.
July 11th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Sky have stopped people bidding on their term. Take a look in Google, the only ads showing are for approved Sky affiliates.
Yes.
July 12th, 2007 at 9:40 am
The frustating thing about the specific example you’ve used is that affiliates are squeezing the market preventing all competition/merchants of Sky services being able to advertise. No merchants (i being one of the most well known) are able to brand bid anymore, and Sky have recently prevented all merchants selling Sky products to use the term ’sky’ on their websites, in an excuse they use of “avoiding confusion for visitors”. Ultimately Sky will only allow brand bidding on those they feel give them the biggest business…such as the super affiliates you mentioned. Can’t blame them but its difficult from a merchant point of view. Come August though in accordance with buy.at’s communications, all brand bidding on ‘Sky’ must be removed by affiliates, so i’m not so convinced its super affiliates but actually those hanging on til the last minute. Most trademark companies have now gone down the route of not allowing any use of the key term, so ultimately a search for Sky will bring back no PPC results, and just their website at the top! I have two merchant sites, both sitting within the top 20 for this term organically, but was at one point 2nd, unfortunetly Sky’s ‘breaking up’ of their site into seperate sub-domains has resulted in them dominating the first page, regardless of PPC or not, they own that first page!!!
July 12th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Yo Yo, I know that only Sky approved affiliates ads are showing, that was the whole point of my post. Did you read it?
July 12th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Ian, I see your point. Its a bit bizarre that you can’t use the term “Sky” on your website though? How the hell are you supposed to sell Sky services then?
July 12th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Kieron, in a word, with generic terms only. Sky have put their foot down with all suppliers recently. There is reasons behind it but they are a little ‘legally-sensitive’ and wouldn’t want to post on your site for obvious reasons. The other annoying thing of it is that Sky are clamping down on payouts, which is why some/most affiliates are not gaining the conversation rates from Sky they’d expect/hope for. Worst of all they announced at the end of June that they will no longer pay suppliers commission for subscriptions, yet at the same time announced massive bonuses to affiliates for sending customers there way! Frustrating! Will be interested to see what happens in August when ‘all’ PPC campaigns using ’sky’ should be stopped. If it doesn’t happen, i’ll be considering action
October 20th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
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