Guest post from Rob Berrisford

The following is a guest post from Rob Berrisford as I'm in hospital at the moment: Reading recently about how EU MP’s are considering tighter controls for online marketing with particular interest on behavioural targeting, I considered how this will affect affiliate marketing. One of the catalysts for this threat of increased regulation is the merger between Google and DoubleClick. With this acquisition Google now has access to even more information than before, meaning they have some pretty interesting information on a huge chunk of the population. They can track the content of your emails with gmail, the things you search for on Google and now with double click the sites you visit and to a certain extent the things you buy. So how will this affect Affiliate Marketing? Well to a certain extent it already does, Google change the search rankings that a user sees depending on their past searches. From an affiliate point of view it just makes things a little more annoying because you can no longer see where you ad is on the screen unless you use the ad preview tool. This can also cause arguments between affiliates and clients if the terms and conditions of a program state that you can not outbid the client and the affiliate and client have different positions on their screen. If MP’s rule out behavioural targeting will this have to stop? Will this compromise Google’s algorithm?