1. What factors are in what I will pay to beat the current contender?
Is it his bid price, or bid price and CTR combo?
2. Say I have to bid .40 to beat him. Will that price go down as my CTR increases? Does the other widgets.com guy affect the price I pay, (I know it affects my max bid). Or does my price get affected in the normal way, the guy advertising below me.
It confusing and I have found no documentation. It appears that google is not penalizing direct to affiliate clicks, since the parent company has a "quality site". But I have no idea how the one affiliate per page thing affects what you pay per click if anything (other than the max bid).
In fact, communications directly from Google reps that people have reported on this forum and others have advised affiliates to do exactly this, link directly to the merchant site using the merchant's own URL as Display URL, as one of only 3 options they have to get re-established after hyperinflation of bids (the other two are the vague "create a substantial amount of original content" and "create a site with competing offers from several different companies").
I'm curious if Google may not want people to know exactly how to outdo established direct-to-merchant affiliate ads as it would encourage a marketplace that changes very rapidly and does not allow humans (not algos) much time to check on high-ranking ads for relevance and "quality", when they'd get shifted to new hands constantly.
On the other hand, intense bid wars on popular affiliate-loved keywords might do a lot to increase Google's profit.
I've worked on cracking this code for a few of these keywords myself for my non-landing page direct-to-merchant campaigns, and I have never been able to displace the affiliates whose ads sit on the first page. Looking at affiliate codes, it looks like a lot of these guys are pretty stable in the results. I've even tried bidding insanely high CPCs to see if I can at least temporarily knock the squatters out, but have never had any success. I don't have the budget to keep it going for days, though. Not with the risk of the skies opening up and people starting to click on my horribly expensive blue box top spot ads that I might not catch quickly. It might be the products/merchants I promote, but interestingly on many of the popular keywords I bid on, the blue box area of Google paid ads has an affiliate direct-to-merchant ad hanging out that's been there for a long time. I always wonder how affiliates can maintain the blue area ad spots and still make a profit on their measly affiliate commission (compared of course to the merchants themselves who get the whole profit from the purchase).
It seems the keyword history reigns supreme in this case, in my experience. How can you even get a history at all if you share the same Display URL as someone already established there? If simply bidding an insane amount doesn't work because of the complex formula of CTR x relevance x CPC x etc, then it seems as if the affiliate on the first page has a stranglehold on the keyword(s) until such time as he or she either quits advertising or get whacked by a QS landing page update. Doesn't give the competition much hope if they do direct-to-merchant ads.
Does anyone have experience (or knowledge of the workings of) displacing affiliates in the direct-to-merchant site game using the same display URL as the squatters? Obviously people may not want to spill their secrets, but if someone can comment from experience that it even IS possible to do?
AWA, if you care to comment on this... feel free. :)
If your merchant themselves is doing adwords ads then you are out of luck to begin with.
It still seems to me that the third option that Google's AdWords reps give, of displaying the merchant's URL and thus trying to outbid whomever is already using it for that keyword (whether it's the actual merchant or another affiliate) is pretty much fruitless. Does anyone have evidence to the contrary?
So an ad with a huge CTR (because it's on a trademark term) is removed when a new affiliate bids on it. It seems crazy.
Most of our affiliates use direct to merchant linking but just vary the display URL from .co.uk to .com or .net - so on some of our products we have affiliates and our own campaign covering the page, great news for us, bad news for our competitors.
I didn't think Google allows a variation on a merchant's domain name in your display url. If my merchant is widgets.com, what would Google accept for my display url? It has to match the destination url, so it can't be fake.
If your merchant themselves is doing adwords ads then you are out of luck to begin with. That is, they can afford to pay a lot more than their own affiliate, given that they are making a lot more on the sale than the affiliate is. And they probabaly won't tolerate an affiliate competing with them either. Your only option here is to find keywords that your merchant store is NOT bidding on. But if they are sharp, they've got most of them covered.
There are all kinds of things that cann affect the performance of a merchants campaigns and make it possible for affiliates to be in the premium spots and make money. Bid management systems can make really bad decisions, the merchants keyword selection can be not so great and the creative may not be very good which both make it possible to get higher CTRs. In order to get the ads to show you generally have to bleed some cash to get the ads to show. Account history may play a part (been running for 4+ years). Better landing page selection can help improve conversion rate and if their are tiered payouts in an affiliate program this can also make it possible to spend more. It may not be possible to make money at the lower tiers but if you can ramp up and send massive volume, an extra 10% or 20% payout can make campaigns profitable.
Merchants with a huge set of keywords are also unlikely to be able to cover everything in the most effective manner and maintian it. When there are daily or monthly budget constraints and the merchants budget runs out, having affiliates bid on keywords helps to ensure the merchant gets 100% delivery.
But almost all merchants will not be happy with an affiliate trying to compete with them and will let you know it. It's not worth angering your merchant. Better to find products and/or merchants that just do not do AdWords. Then you only have to compete with all the other afiliates who are all now desperately trying to direct to merchant.
Also, trying to sneak in a second display url for the same merchant will eventually be weeded out by Google. It's clear now they ony want one ad per merchant. Any fix or workaround you come up with will only be temporary until Google catches on and cracks down again.
Does anyone have experience (or knowledge of the workings of) displacing affiliates in the direct-to-merchant site game using the same display URL as the squatters?
Try bidding the ten bucks G's been asking many of us for. I reckon that will get you primo position on a s*#tload of kwords. Seriously though, why do you refer to these affiliates as squatters? After all it is their position you desire. The reality is, they probably have a long history of high performance, thanks in part to concise well targetted ad-groups and ad-copy that has been tested again, again and again. This stuff takes time and effort.
Broad match with good use of negative kwords and longtail advertising are two methods affiliates can use when the best kwords are way to competitive. Yes sometimes we just can't afford them. :P
Most of our affiliates use direct to merchant linking but just vary the display URL from .co.uk to .com or .net
Sweetpete are these domain extensions linked to (owned by) the merchant website. If not they will be red flagged.
Does raise some interesting questions though relating to merchants registering multiple domains for affiliates or offering co-branded options.
Which converts better, your own page that links to affiliate, or direct to affiliate?
Vphoner, I guess this would differ from case to case, though in my personal experience pre-sell landing pages (particularly ones offering a selection of merchants) have resulted in significantly greater conversions.
An example of this; one of my long standing merchants (and at the time, biggest earner) banned affiliates from direct linking when the single domain policy came in. I built a comparison type landing page where I reviewed the merchant and two other competitors. The results were excellent and ROI tripled. One of the merchants called and praised my pre-sell and the 10-14% conversions (industry average approx. 1-2%) I was achieving with his site. My site experienced very low drop-out and did a good job (if I say so myself) of directing users to good quality merchants. Unfortunately Google didn't think it offered a good user experience. C’est la vie, back to the drawing board.
It baffles me as to how they can do it, been going on for the two years i've been working with our affiliates. As I said above it's great for us but I do expect G to clamp down on it sooner or later
Since the algo change we've seen a lot of affiliates who once used landing pages to display a number of merchants just linking straight to us (because we convert better than our competitors). In terms of whether a 'pre-page' converts better than the site itself then some affiliates do claim that but as always it's about managing the whole process from keywords, bids, CTR, product display, conversion levels, information on distressed stock that is low priced etc. etc. A landing page that converts one day may not the next, so the question is if you want to maintain it or just take that workload out by linking direct to merchant and possible take a conversion hit?
Your only option here is to find keywords that your merchant store is NOT bidding on. But if they are sharp, they've got most of them covered.
Not sure it's quite that clear cut in the UK market. How many small-to-medium businesses have a full time PPC person? In my experience over here, many affiliates are far more skilled at PPC than the merchants. Some merchants have resorted to clauses in the affiliate T+Cs about 'not bidding more than X pounds on brandnames'.
[edited by: QualityNonsense at 9:08 am (utc) on Aug. 4, 2006]
If so, it seems as though you could displace an affiliate competitor with long-tail phrases. (longer phrase keywords)
I presume you are trying to displace "the squatters" so that you can squat yourself?
Yes, I guess you could say that.
Actually I'm most concerned about NOT displacing my merchant. Don't want to bite the hand that feeds me.
AdWords are paid advertisements. I have as much right to buy an ad for my product as you do. I do not deceive customers. If my ad contains an offer or a creatively written benefit that informs folks that my product offer is better than yours, then they will click on my ad. There is nothing wrong with that.
As an affiliate, I consider myself a traveling salesman for my merchant.
You could complain that I am a duplicate ad. That is a legit complaint. But in the world of paid ads, you can buy as many or as big an ad as you like. You've seen multiple paid ads in magazines and newspapers. One may try one piece of copy. The other may try or test a different angle or approach.
Most affiliates do not deceive and they deliver folks to what they were looking for.
