Affiliate Musketeer

When you use AdWords to promote affiliate products you have two choices on how you want to do it.  The first is to link your text ad directly to the affiliate offer by putting your affiliate link in the destination url of the ad.  The second is to direct traffic from the text ad to your own landing page where you then link out to the affiliate offering.  The only way to achieve a high quality score (and thus better CTRs and CPCs) is to use the second method.

With the first method, you will find that google may intially give you a decent ‘inital’ quality score value but you’ll find after a day or so (in some cases less depending on volume), that you’ve been slapped – a google penalty which penalises non-relevant ads with high CPCs.  The AdWords system automatically finds affiliate links in destination urls as non-relevant and will therefore always slap you for it (you’ll end up paying $5 per click or something crazy like that).  There is a guide available to help you fight off the google slap but my honest advice is to avoid this direct linking method at all costs.  Besides, you can have more control over your own landing pages which will ultimately help you split test for better conversions.

To use your own landing pages, direct traffic to them and receive a much higher quality score when promoting affiliate products, read this post to see a live example of how I did it with a clickbank product.

When you’ve finished reading that, you might then want to read about how get a 10/10 AdWords Quality score.