Improving Your Results
Dealing With PPC Affiliates
By Rob Wood
Tue, 21 Mar 2006, 23:31:00

There is a lot of confusion amongst Merchants when it comes to dealing with Affiliates who use search engines services such as Google Adwords to promote their Merchant program. Many Merchants are not even aware that it is possible for Affiliates to promote their program in this manner. This article will go through the various aspects of this method of online marketing and the issues that affect Merchants.

What is PPC Affiliate Advertising?

When an Affiliate joins your program with the intention of promoting you, they will be given access to code that enables clixGalore to track customers from their site through to your site and hopefully through to the end of sale page. Affiliates are able to take a part of this code and use it within PPC programs such as Google Adwords. For example, if you were to go to Google.com and type in a keyword such as "loans", you will see a lot of advertisements in the right hand column - that is the area that PPC marketers will use to advertise Merchant programs. They do this by bidding on search terms that search engine visitors type into the search engines - if their bid is high enough, their advertisement will be displayed in the right hand column and if somebody clicks on that add, they will pay Google for that click. If you would like to know the exact steps that Affiliates use to do this, then please view our Affiliate tutorial on this topic.

How does that affect me?

In general, the effect of Affiliates using a PPC campaign to promote your Merchant program is overwhelmingly positive. Professionally run PPC campaigns setup by knowledgeable individuals can cost companies into the tens of thousands of dollars per month to maintain. If you are lucky enough to have some of these marketers promoting your program then you are getting the service for free and only paying for sales produced from it.

In general, the traffic will be highly targeted and already searching for products related to your line when they arrive on your site. In our opinion, the quality of traffic generated by PPC advertising is amongst the best on the internet.

So What Issues Should I be Concerned About?

While in general it is a very positive thing to be promoted by PPC Affiliates, there are a few issue that may concern some Merchants.

For starters, it is usually in the best interests of the Merchant to add a small proviso to their Terms of Service to forbid Affiliate PPC marketers from bidding on the Merchant's trademarks such as their company name. This is usually because an online company will usually rank well enough in the organic search results for searches on their own name to not require bids on that term.

So How Do I Change My Terms of Service?

This is the easy part. Just log into your Merchant account and go to "Program Maintenance" > "Edit Merchant Programs / Banners" and then click on the name of your program. On the next page you will see a link that states "Set Affiliate Terms and Conditions for Merchant Program." Clicking on that link will bring up a popup window that allows you to set your TOS.

We would suggest adding the following:

"Affiliates using PPC are forbidden from bidding on our company name. Any sales generated from this will be rejected."

If you already have a team of Affiliates, it is courtesy to let them know that you have changed your TOS. Just use our email functionality by logging into your account and going to "Email" > "Email Your Affiliates" and drop them a note explaining the changes.

After that, there is usually very little need to do anything. These PPC marketers will promote your products to your target audience according to your terms. Hopefully you will also be making a lot of sales!

Note: 'Google Adwords' is a registered trademark of Google Inc.

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