Boost sales through affiliate marketing

Inside AdWords

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Boost sales through affiliate marketing

Posted: 29 Aug 2011 09:00 AM PDT

Are you looking to infuse new life into your marketing strategy? If so, we’d like to tell you more about Google Affiliate Network, a powerful platform that gives you access to trusted affiliate publishers who actively promote your products and drive high-quality traffic to your site. Best of all, you only pay for valid conversions. What is affiliate marketing?
Over one third of global marketers use affiliate marketing as a key component of their online marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing allows you to leverage the reach, influence, and promotional methods of trusted publisher affiliates. These publishers place your ads or links on their site with the goal of driving a sale, lead, or other high-value online goal that you define. You pay only when a user clicks through one of your affiliates and performs a desired action.

How is affiliate marketing different from my AdWords campaigns?

Unlike the campaigns you run through AdWords, affiliate marketing is an ongoing performance-based program that you actively run with a group of affiliates whom you have selected to promote your product or service. Your affiliates choose which of your ads to run on their website, and they earn a performance fee for valid conversions. Google Affiliate Network’s online interface allows you to set up your affiliate program, track conversions, manage your affiliates, and promote your site to our thousands of publishers. A well-executed affiliate marketing program can be a great complement to your search, display, and offline campaigns.

What types of publishers are in Google Affiliate Network?

Google Affiliate Network has a rapidly-growing global network of publishers in all verticals. All publishers in the network abide by both AdSense and Google Affiliate Network policies, ensuring that you pay only for valid conversions. Below are just a few examples of the publishers in our network:

• Loyalty/Rewards: Cartera Commerce, DBG Loyalty, Ebates, FatWallet, Upromise
• Shopping/Promotions: CouponCabin, DesignerApparel, Offers.com, Savings.com, Whaleshark Media
• Community/Content: Blogpire Productions, Olioboard, Polyvore, ShopStyle, StyleFind
• Comparison Shopping: Milo, Shopping.com, ShopWiki, Smarter.com, TheFind Inc.

Ready to apply?

If you’re an online business interested in starting an affiliate program, Google Affiliate Network may be a good fit for you. Please note that advertising with Google Affiliate Network is currently only available to advertisers based in the United States, and a select group of advertisers based in Canada and the UK. We will be sure to let you know when other locales are supported. Click the “Sign up now” button below to receive more information about Google Affiliate Network and speak with a sales representative.

If you are an online publisher and would like to monetize your website with affiliate ads, please visit our publisher sign-up form.

Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager, Google Affiliate Network

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AdWords Editor Version 9.5 for Windows and Mac now available

Inside AdWords

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AdWords Editor Version 9.5 for Windows and Mac now available Posted: 25 Aug 2011 11:43 AM PDT Today, we’re excited to announce Adwords Editor 9.5! This version supports Campaign Experiments, Location Extensions, and plenty of other features to boost your productivity while managing your AdWords campaigns. We've highlighted the key changes below, and you can see the complete list of feature updates in the AdWords Editor Version 9.5 release notes. AdWords Editor Version 9.5 highlights: Campaign Experiments You can now do the following to maintain your campaign experiments: Apply and edit an experiment status (e.g. “control only”, “experiment only”, “control and experiment”) at the ad group, ad, or keyword level. Apply and edit a Default Max. CPC, Display Network Max. CPC, or Max. CPM bid multiplier at the ad group level. Apply and edit a Max. CPC bid multiplier at the keyword level. Import and export experiment status and bid multipliers in both CSV and XML formats. Location Extensions Version 9.5 supports new and existing location extensions. You can create new manual location extensions for any address, modify existing locations, and download/upload location extensions in CSV and XML formats. Background Download If you’re working on several large accounts, you can now download them in the background while you’re working on another open account. This can be a great timesaver by allowing you to continue working rather than waiting for the download to finish. We also listened to your feedback and made several usability improvements, including improved revert functionality and streamlined Add Multiple Items workflow. The next time you log into your AdWords Editor account, you will be prompted to upgrade. You may also download Version 9.5 from the AdWords Editor website. After you install the new version of AdWords Editor, you will need to download your accounts again. To preserve your comments and unposted changes, select the Backup then Upgrade option in the automatic upgrade prompt and save the backup file to your computer. Then, re-download your account and import the backup file to AdWords Editor. A small portion of users may need to manually uninstall the previous version of AdWords Editor. For more information, check out the release notes and visit the AdWords Editor Help Center. Posted by Lauren Barbato, Inside AdWords crew

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Google News now crawling with Googlebot

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

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Google News now crawling with Googlebot Posted: 25 Aug 2011 02:02 PM PDT Webmaster Level: intermediate (Cross-posted on the Google News Blog) Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent, Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers. Any news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so: Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, our former user-agent, if it is more restrictive than the robots.txt entry for Googlebot. Our Help Center provides detailed guidance on using the robots exclusion protocol for Google News, and publishers can contact the Google News Support Team if they have any questions, but we wanted to first clarify the following: Although you’ll now only see the Googlebot user-agent in your site’s logs, no need to worry: the appearance of Googlebot instead of Googlebot-News is independent of our inclusion policies. (You can always check whether your site is included in Google News by searching with the “site:” operator. For instance, enter “site:yournewssite.com” in the search field for Google News, and if you see results then we are currently indexing your news site.) Your analytics tool will still be able to differentiate user traffic coming to your website from Google Search and traffic coming from Google News, so you should see no changes there. The main difference is that you will no longer see occasional automated visits to your site from the Googlebot-news crawler. If you’re currently respecting our guidelines for Googlebot, you will not need to make any code changes to your site. Sites that have implemented subscriptions using a metered model or who have implemented First Click Free will not experience any changes. For sites which require registration, payment or login prior to reading any full article, Google News will only be able to crawl and index the title and snippet that you show all users who visit your page. Our Webmaster Guidelines provide additional information about “cloaking” (i.e., showing a bot a different version than what users experience). Learn more about Google News and subscription publishers in this Help Center article. Rest assured, your Sitemap will still be crawled. This change does not affect how we crawl News Sitemaps. If you are a News publisher who hasn’t yet set up a News Sitemap and are interested in getting started, please follow this link. For any publishers that wish to opt out of Google News and stay in Google Search, you can simply disallow Googlebot-news and allow Googlebot. For more information on how to do this, consult our Help Center. As with any website, from time to time we need to make updates to our infrastructure. At the same time, we want to continue to provide as much control as possible to news web sites. We hope we have answered any questions you might have about this update. If you have additional questions, please check out our Help Center. Posted by David Smydra, Google News Product Specialist

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