Another Adwords Disadvantage For Affiliates

• Posted by Brent on March 6, 2008 18:35
• Comments (0)

Google continues to roll out changes to their quality score that put affiliates at a disadvantage. I don't think they are purposefully trying to push affiliates out of Adwords. Affiliates make them a ton of money. But as always their #1 focus is on customer experience. 

 The latest post on the Official Adwords blog indicates page load time is a soon-to-come factor in their Quality Score algo. This is a fairly significant disadvantage for affililates. Most affiliate links have to be pushed through several different URL's so the click can be tracked by all parties before the final page is loaded .  Here is what it looks like for some of my clicks:

 1. Click on google.com

2. User is sent to my server so I can record the click and replace the keyword with my keword ID -> redirect to affiliate link (let's say to Commission Junction)

3. Commission Junction's page loads, records the necessary data and sends the request on to the merchant

4. The request finally hits the merchant site, but they too have a url to record the click. They record their data and finally ..

5. The true landing page loads.

 That's a lot of redirects (5 different URL's on 4 domains in one click)! That's a slow loading page no matter how many dual-cores you have pushing clicks. Crap this sucks. Profit margins for affiliates are getting tighter and tighter on Adwords.