Affiliate Programs Crack Down on PPC Domainers

Amazon takes a stand: No more non-stop links from affiliates’ paid search terms

By Mary Wagner via Internet Retailer
When Amazon.com Inc. in April announced it would stop paying commission fees for traffic sent directly to Amazon from paid search ads that affiliates purchased, a practice called direct-linking, it was the latest round in a long-standing industry debate over the role of so-called “paid search affiliates” in merchants’ affiliate programs. But it was the first time the Internet’s largest retailer had stuck a flag in the sand over this particular issue.

Here’s an example of what Amazon doesn’t pay affiliates for under the new policy: An affiliate buys an ad with the header “low-cost blender” and a few lines of text describing electric blenders. The ad displays a URL for searchers to click on, supposedly to go to the site selling blenders—say, “Cheapblenders.com.” But when the shopper clicks on the ad, a redirect that the affiliate places in the ad sends the shopper to an Amazon product page offering blenders, though Amazon’s name appears nowhere in the search ad.

One stop required

While this might still work for affiliates on another pay-per-click search engine, Google doesn’t allow redirects. On Google, a search ad’s display URL must match the domain name of the destination URL. That means on Google, affiliates must direct traffic from any search ad they’ve purchased first to a page on their own site. They can then direct traffic to a retailer’s site via links to the retailer on that page. Basically, Amazon’s and Google’s policies on redirects just add another stop between the search ad and the merchant.

Sounds simple, but Amazon’s policy change has big cost implications for its own larger pay-per-click efforts. Here’s why: An affiliate can buy the keyword term “Amazon blender” on Google and play by the rules, sending anyone who clicks on the ad to a landing page on its own site that contains a link to an Amazon category page on blenders. But Amazon itself is probably also bidding on the term “Amazon blender.” MUCH MORE...