Navigating Paid Search in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has grown significantly with the help of paid search, making paid search marketing an important channel for affiliate marketers. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw PPC marketers and organic search engine marketers have a significant impact on affiliate marketing. During that time, major search engines had looser rules and policies, making it easier and less costly to run a paid search campaign or get ranked under generic terms. As a result, there were more opportunities to generate high sales.

One notable example was Google AdWords allowing advertisers to run multiple ads listing the same display URL and destination URL on the SERP of certain keywords. This policy meant bidders who bought multiple ads could direct all of them to the same place, and users looking at the SERP would be taken there no matter which ad they clicked. This allowed affiliates to send traffic from Google AdWords to the Affiliate Retailer website with a redirect link, without even having their own website. As a result, SERPs were filled with identical ad copies, and affiliates focused on obtaining higher commission rates from retailers to bid higher on trademark terms to grab more clicks from a search campaign.

However, Google rolled out massive changes to their ad policy in 2005, allowing only one ad per URL, per search term. Another early PPC compliance policy was that affiliates could not use the term “Official” in their ad copy, as users often relied on this label to differentiate between similar ads and determine which belonged to the retailer. Nevertheless, PPC marketers then generated greater value for retailers than they do today, as low CPC rates and lesser competition allowed them to bid on branded, generic, and competitor terms, and send traffic directly to retailers' pages.

Today’s affiliate marketers should consider what type of value they should expect from PPC search affiliates and what ideal PPC policies they should implement. It’s better to find the right way to work with affiliates than to lose an important marketing channel because of conflict with them. A brand that understands what’s going on behind the scenes and has the appropriate tools and applications to support their decision-making can make choices beneficial to growing their affiliate program.

In the next chapters, we will delve into the details of PPC channels and how to work with search affiliates to drive value-added traffic to your business. Your strategy needs to be customized based on various factors, such as the size of your brand, your promotional marketing strategy, and your competitors' bidding on generic and trademark terms. We will evaluate these strategies case by case and provide you with different strategies to work with search affiliates.