PPC-Advice.com

Will the Adwords Algo Change Kill Affiliates?

As we all know by now, Adwords advertisers were notified wednesday morning of an impending Google Adwords algorithm modification that would essentially favor quality score plus maximum CPC to determine position, rather than quality score and the bids of your lesser competitors. This will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the average cost per click for larger organizations, however the ones it could hurt the most are affiliates.

Affiliate marketers have made a nice niche for themselves jockeying for position with their vendor partners and competitors within Adwords and other pay-per-click services. Some affiliate marketers I know certainly make a fine living for themselves through publishing review sites, blogs (yes, even hosting of this blog is funded partially through affiliate programs), and even forum posts (less prominent these days).

They know how to work the affiliate game so that their pay-per-click advertising spend, hosting costs, and other overhead is cleared month over month through referrals and commissions. We’re not talking the nickels and dimes that are generated through Adsense either, we’re talking serious commissions from affiliate networks such as Commission Junction, Share a Sale, and the endless in-house home-brew rewards schemes.

I’m sure many are watching Adwords closely after the announcement of this fundamental algorithm change because it has the ability to skew the delicate revenue and expense balance sharply into the red. Several of us in search marketing work for large corporations and have worked hand-in-hand with affiliate managers to strike a happy balance of direct and commissioned sales.

Then again, several large organizations I have worked with would love nothing better than to satiate stockholders and leverage deep marketing budgets and venture capital to recapture the affiliate Adwords real estate for their own.

Here’s hoping that the Adwords algo change is not going to be a monumental shift, after all, PPC-advice.com is an affiliate that has to pay bills just like everyone else.

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