Yes, massive amounts of affiliates have been banned from Adwords lately. Yes, it’s becoming harder for affiliate marketers to advertise with Google Adwords.

No affiliate marketing on Adwords is not dead as some ‘gurus’ have been saying lately. If I had a 100 grand for every time I’ve heard that in the last 7 years, I’d retire wealthy. Each time, the industry survived and it will this time too, I promise! I suspect some of the “death of” posts are fear mongering to drum up more readers and/or to help gear up for the next new product launch. (See more of my comments about that below.)

The scariest thing about the round of bans that has been happening over the past couple months is that Google is not just hitting accounts with a low quality score, or banning campaigns, but they are banning accounts for life and not allowing advertisers to set up any new accounts.

For background, I’ll send you to some of the recent “death of” posts, then a “rebirth of” post – then at the end I’ll share some thoughts.

The Death of Affiliate Marketing on Google

Amit has made millions of dollars as an affiliate marketer over the last 4 years and he’s one of the sharpest guys I know. He created “PPC Classroom” to train affiliates, very successfully, and he’s got a lot riding on this.

Nonetheless, yesterday he unflinchingly stated that “recess is over.” Google is slashing and burning affiliate accounts.

Google Adwords Drops The Axe Again

With the above being said, it appears that affiliate marketing on Google Adwords is dying a slow death and pay per click marketers need to start evolving their businesses outside of Google Adwords.

The Rebirth of Affiliate Marketing?

There were other comments made that gave me the impression that Google is or will be banning any and all affiliate marketers from using its advertising service.

Frankly, I think it’s a bit premature to think that Google’s goal is to rid the World of Affiliate Marketers. My observations indicate that Affiliate Marketing still continues to thrive on Google.

I don’t agree with the “death of” posts, but I also don’t agree with the “rebirth of” post either. The “rebirth” post says that the primary type of accounts that were banned were running biz opp offers – it’s much broader than that!

I think what is happening is that Google is cleaning up all the SCAM offers. Rebills that are non compliant, other type of scammy CPA offers, make a million in your underwear biz opps, fake review landing pages, flogs, offers that make unrealistic health claims, many Clickbank offers and everything that provides a bad user experience or violates their TOS. I also think that while Google reps are not enforcers for the FTC, they probably are taking the FTC guidelines into account as they manually review landing pages and offers.

So while I hate to see affiliates have their Adwords accounts banned and I’m sure some decent affiliates got caught up in the bans that shouldn’t have, in general I think this is a good thing for the industry. I think honest affiliate marketers, running honest campaigns can still use Adwords, but of course it will take a lot more than just throwing up a quick landing page that says click here.

I’d like to refer to a quote by an Adwords employee on the Adwords help forum.

AdWordsPro

I’d like to speak to the reply quoted above, because I think it could easily give an incorrect impression and lead to incorrect conclusions. In particular, Google is not disabling the accounts of affiliates because they are affiliates, nor are accounts being disabled because there are ‘too many affiliates’.

Accounts are indeed being disabled – but this occurs after violation of AdWords policy and/or the Terms and Conditions – and not because the advertisers are affiliates.

Last but not least when “death of” posts come out, many times I think it’s due to fear mongering with a hidden agenda in mind. A few days ago some of us were discussing this on the forum (Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?) and you can read some of my thoughts there. That’s where I encourage affiliates to read between the lines, see the bigger picture and realize that new products and seminars are coming out that ‘could’ get a sales boost from this line of thinking. ;-)

What do you think???

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