Adwords For Promoting Affiliate Products

[anand84]

Is using Adwords a good idea for promoting affiliate products? I have been researching quite a bit on Adwords keywords to promote a few affiliate products. One thing is that most of these products are targeted at the US/UK market where ad-spaces are cluttered for all keywords, no matter how niche they are.

Assuming that the average commission is around $15 or so at most of the affiliate networks, it seems like I will have to spend as much, if not more than that to generate a sale.

What are your experiences?

[netmeg]

Pure affiliate marketing with no value added? It's a tough row to hoe. Google (in my experience) doesn't object to affiliate marketing, but they do object to a thousand affiliates running the exact same ads on the exact same keywords going to basically the exact same offer. So unless you can find a way to differentiate yourself, you'll probably have a hard time of it.

[anand84]

Netmeg,

How would you define "value addition"? If Red widget and Green widget are two of the most popular products in the "widget" niche, you can expect a good number of affiliates to pick either one of these products only. Of course, the affiliates will have their own strategy to market the product once a visitor clicks an ad and visits their website.

[netmeg]

Doesn't matter how I define it. Matters how Google defines it.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Here are three pages from the AdWords Help Center, anand84, which may be of use to you - in terms of being an Affiliate advertiser who use AdWords:

What is Google's affiliate auction policy?
[adwords.google.com...]

What should I know as an affiliate advertiser?
[adwords.google.com...]

What types of websites may merit low landing page quality scores?
[adwords.google.com...]

AWA

[anand84]

Thanks a lot, AdwordsAdvisor. Helped me reassure myself that my website does indeed meet Google's quality standards. Moving forward, I shall be selling one of my own products and it will be interesting to see how much traction I can get from Adwords.