I have a friend who runs a website that has about 100 pages of unique content. The website ranks high for it's primary and secondary keywords.
The website sells affiliate products and runs Google adsense.
My friend would like to run a Google PPC campaign to point traffic to the website to increase earnings.
How does Google look at these types of campaigns, since he is running both Google Adsense and affiliate products?
He does have good content, but the website is setup to sell as well (via affiliate banners and links)
If his advertising and infrastructure outweigh his content - then he'd probably better work on his content first.
an affiliate site that offers the shopper real value (not a click to arrive on a site that just presents more ads to then click on) isn't arbitrage, though some people do still use that term whenever it's an affiliate site. if you look up the term's definition, you'll see there are several reasons why your friends site, if it had no ads, can't be considered arbitrage. some ads, when they're secondary in nature, also avoid arbitrage as being the primary activity.
and it's likely someone here who has already made up their mind and uses this terminology will say something like "all affiliate sites are arbitrage"... when you look at arbitrage as any activity that sells something for more than you paid for it, then merchants like Amazon are also arbitrageurs as well.
if your friend's site is built mainly to exploit adsense, and s/he uses adwords to drive traffic to it, it is abritrage, and more importantly, an engagement that G has said is a poor consumer experience - so disregard the semantic discussion and know that any site that's Made For Adsense (an MFA site), is VERY likely going to get very low quality scores, and in short order, be removed from the AdWords PPC auction process.
so it all depends on how adsense heavy things are... if there's real content that shapes a good consumer experience, s/he will be fine using adwords... if the consumer clicks on an ad, lands, and is mainly looking at more ads, it won't work at all.
[edited by: RhinoFish at 3:01 pm (utc) on Oct. 30, 2008]
In fact, the site does contain good content, I've looked over it myself. The page that this person is running the campaign to is matched exactly to the product that he affiliates for.
For example, the page is called widget-x, and talks about widget-x and why it is what it is, and the PPC campaign would be targeted at that page talking about widget-x.
The Adsense from that page may even be removed to prevent any issues with Google since the affiliate sale is more important.
Try to be objective about the site - are the affiliate products and ads there to augment/assist the content, or is the content there to augment/assist the affiliate product sales and ads? It will probably have a better chance in AdWords if it's more the former than the latter (or at least appears that way).
Affiliate sites that exist just for the sake of selling affiliate products don't seem to do as well in AdWords anymore (at least from what I hear - I've never run one myself) But sites that have a lot of content PLUS some affiliate ads seem to do better. I have a couple of those myself, and I have been using AdWords (in season) with no problems or QS issues.
It's a fine distinction, but I think it must be an important one.
The site appears to have been developed around content. There are about 100 unique articles from what I gather.
However, the specific page for the product is quite obviously about that product, and talks about it in good light. That page has a small top left affiliate banner, and has a link to the product site at the bottom. Other than that, it is basically a product review.
However, there are lots of other pages on the website that appear to offer good info about the topic itself.
On the page that my buddy wants to advertise PPC to, he has removed the Google adsense ad itself so as to not conflict with conversions.
I am not sure if he intends on advertising the whole website in Adwords, but from what I gather he will not - he will only advertise the page for the product he sells. Otherwise he gets sales from other pages as there are banners there as well.
I believe he also mentioned the possibility of partnering with the product provider so that the webcart process is on his own website, but to date this isnt the case.
you can have a site dedicated mainly to selling products, but it has to be compelling and special and provide a worthwhile experience to the consumer. doing this, is rare. too often, affiliate sites are just splattered merchant displays with some peripheral insignificant content.
my point is, and it's slightly different than netmeg's, is that it isn't the amount of non-product / non-sales content that will make the difference in the quality score, it's more esoteric than that... if people find outstanding utility in using the site or have other compelling reasons why an average consumer would find their shopping experience on that affiliate site, as superior to visiting a store directly, then you have a chance to get a decent quality score.
it's about value and the experience the shopper has - it needs to be excellent.
think of it this way, two sites:
1) jewelry merchant site - consumer can buy directly there, get support, call, return items, better business listing, arbitrate, cart safety, etc
2) aff site made from that merchant's datafeed - what is the aff site offering that the merchant doesn't already have (plus the merchant has all of the extra things mentioned above)?
so G would say this affiliate site is an inferior, duplicate experience and kill it's quality score...
although compelling, valuable affiliate sites make up a only a small portion of the total affiliate site population, those "good" affilite sites do quite well in seo, ppc and more.
