Update on the Adsense Affiliate Program

Posted on January 23, 2008 
Filed Under Affiliate Management, Affiliate Programs, NZ Affiliate Market

Google have already back-tracked a bit on the removal of the Adsense Affiliate Program. It looks like they only removed it for certain areas and just assumed that if an affiliate was in a certain location then they were only referring users from that location. Now that’s a pretty basic mistake for any affiliate program to make. In my experience it’s pretty rare that affiliates are only targeting their own local population unless it’s a non-English language site.

From the email;

Since announcing the changes, we’ve received a number of responses about the program being dependent on the location of the referring publisher rather than the referred user. After carefully considering this feedback, we have decided to modify our planned changes.

You can usually read that type of language from any affiliate program as marketing speak for “Half of our affiliates vehemently complained, we admit we screwed up and now we’ve been forced into changing the policy” :)

That might be a little harsh, Google are doing well to keep the communication lines open to affiliates.

The changes they’ve put forward are;

Specifically, you will have the option to add a referral unit for AdSense within your account when you target any referral unit to Japan and/or any countries in North America and Latin America. To ensure payment for valid conversions, we recommend that you check the targeting settings on your current AdSense referral units.

So, one would assume that in countries where they have an overwhelming market share and everyone uses them as the first option for online marketing (this is pretty much how it works in New Zealand with their 95% share) then they’re dropping the affiliate program completely.

Sounds like a pretty solid business decision.

Labels:

DoubleClick purchase

Posted on April 20, 2007 
Filed Under General Internet, NZ Affiliate Market

It’s reasonably hard to have missed the news over the last week that Google has agreed to buy DoubleClick for USD3.1 billion (NZD 4.1 billion).

The question is now what does this do to the global advertising industry and more importantly (for here anyway), how is this going to affect affiliates through-out the world and New Zealand?

Google has been experimenting with graphical and now video adverts on its content advertising network through Adsense for some time. Reports from advertisers that I have seen have been mixed compared to the main textual search based results from Adsense.

Now Google have bought one of the largest advertising networks worldwide, who happen to have a speciality of working with graphical, media rich content across many different networks. One of the issues here has been that DoubleClick are focused on very large portal sites. The small affiliate based publishers in the advertising market online have not been a focus for them.

We can hope that one of the affects of this purchase will be the ability for smaller affiliate style advertisers to be allowed access through Adsense to this wider media-rich network of adverts.

With the resources of Google and the usual rate of integration they work on hopefully smaller portals will start to see the benefits of this by the end of 2007.

Labels:

Comments