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?
Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:40 am and is filed under Google AdWords, SEO. 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.
January 28th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Rob, I think you make a good point but I’m not worried .. yet. I think that’s my point, on the one hand, in a free world we can’t stop Google from buying related companies (unless they breach monopoly rules of course) and having them understand my behaviour is good if it delivers more accurate results, isn’t it?
On the other hand, as always, its the abuse of such knowledge that concerns me.