“Don’t be evil” is Google’s slogan and it can be found in the Google internal code of conduct.

it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can

Unfortunately for us affiliates, Google is only referring to serving their users with this motto. They seem to have no qualms about taking the bread and butter from affiliates by moving into vertical space such as finance, travel and gaming.

Typing “Credit cards” into Google shows the usual few paid ads above the organic listings, but hello – squeezed between the paid adverts and the organic listings, we now see “Google Comparison Ads”, offering Google’s own Credit Card comparison facility.

Was there a need for this? I doubt it. Is Google providing superior services to their users than was not already available? Definitely not. Google is diversifying, and some might say, being greedy.

As well as providing search, Google’s primary business model was copying your content analyzing it and displaying their advertising around it. Publishers and web-site creators are essential to Google’s business, and without publishers Google can’t exist.

Recently Google has spent a heck of a lot of money buying data companies which will allow the search giant to KO a lot of small, medium and large online affiliates and businesses by essentially jumping the queue on search results pages, offering their own services before those of these affiliate web-sites.

In July, Google acquired flight information company ITA, and recently Google is rumoured to have secretly paid up to $200M for shares of Zynga, which owns the biggest social poker site in the world. When poker inevitably gets legalised in the USA again, will it be PokerStars and FullTilt which players flock to to play poker for real money, or will it be Zynga (which boasts millions of users, has no affiliate program, and which is awash with bad players, also known as “fish”)?

No doubt many SEOers and finance site owners are pretty cut up about the seemingly anti-competitive move that Google has made by planting its own advertisements in the SERPS (can anyone else bid on this particular lucrative ad-spot?). The same will no doubt happen in the travel vertical (we have already seen the near-death of the high-street travel agent due to the internet. Does anyone actually go to bricks and mortal travel agents anymore?)

It seems affiliate marketing is doomed if Google decides to take the cream at the top of every vertical for itself. First finance, then travel, then gaming.. what’s next? Pornography and dating? A world where Google’s own pornographic site is ranked above sex.com and redtube may not be far away!

Is Google knocking the first nail into the coffin of online affiliate marketing?

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This morning I noticed that Microsoft’s search engine Bing! is listing affiliate links in some sitelinks (the groups of links you see under some sites in the SERP listings).

Example:

The sitelink shown in the image above for 32vegas Casino on UKGF is actually an affiliate link (301′d via a .htaccess file). The link is sitewide in one of the tabs of the sidebar on the site in question, and is actually rel=nofollow’ed. Note that the URI may appear to be internal to a “dumb” spider (the link goes to to http://example.com/32vegas.com/).

Pre-third-coffee thoughts on affiliate links in SERPs:

• The fact that Bing is giving sitelinks for something which isn’t even particularly emphasised or important is interesting, but not very encouraging in regards to spiders/search-engine technology working well to improve the user experience.
• Would Bing! have indexed the link as a sitelink if it were awash with parameters and linked out rather than seeming to be an internal link (at first glance)?
• This has got to be good for affiliates, right?
• This is bad for usability – users will click on the link and bypass the desired web-site completely, perhaps causing confusion, and debasing all the good stuff the webmaster put in, in regards content creation, editorial costs, technical costs and on and off-site SEO
• If the site owner wants to ditch the sitelink on Bing! to help navigation and actually take users their own site content as expected, it seems that this site owner, and other webmasters need to monitor and occassionally edit their site-links using Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools!

Maybe this is a temporary glitch from Bing, but for now, what does affiliate links in SERP listings mean to you and to your users?

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Internet marketing is about getting traffic (potential customers) and turning them into actual customers (converted). The conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert from website visits into desired actions (e.g. depositing players on a poker/casino/bingo site). The Conversion rate is defined as number of goals achieved divided by the number of visits (where goals may refer to registrations or depositors).

Here I present 10 top tips for affiliates to increase conversions from a gambling related web-site.

• Use Analytics - Information is Power. Get detailed information on yout site visitor habits using a third party analytics application such as Google analytics. Examples of the kind of data your analytics account can yield includes data such as how long visitors stay on the site, whether they proceed to a new page or leave (bounce), how they found your site (organic / direct / via a 3rd party site), if they came via search engine (organic), which keyword they searched for. Using the information available to you by analytics will give you a basis to tweak and test your site to maximise the # of visitors you reach and to work on conversions.
• Banner Blindness / In content links – banner blindness is real. Eye-tracking studies have shown that web-site visitors almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad. This means that you shouldn’t overload your site with adverts, and should consider placing advertis in the middle of articles, as well as using text-links within content to maximise conversions and clicks.
• Banner to Content Match - One important consideration if you choose to use banners is to ensure that banners match the content of the page (i.e don’t put bingo banners on a poker page). Some affiliate systems allow affiliates to set up rotating banner groups which will show a number of unique (but related) banners in one spot on your site. Using these rotating groups will help you get a quantifiable idea of which banners work best with your content.
• Custom Creatives and Promotions from merchants – Poker / Casino / Bingo sites are happy to create bespoke banners for your site. These can mention a promotion being “exclusive for site X” etc, to lend credibility to your site and to point out value in promotions for players (who often assume that promotions are network-wide, and that they stand a snowball in hell’s chance of winning!). If you run a small online community (via forum or mailing list), leagues and competitions are a great way to get started with getting sign-ups, and encouraging your players to be loyal to a specific brand. For example, a small poker related forum might get a poker room to “sponsor” a small poker league, by starting with a freeroll, then some value added tournaments (this gets players a- depositing, b- using your trackers, and c- generating rake). Such promotions are an excellent way to attract new depositors and signups on your site because of the value and small fields. This concept can be re-applied to different niches and products.
• Get the Scoop, Get the traffic – Good for SEO and good for getting a lot of targeted traffic to your site is getting an exclusive story and publishing it before anyone else. If you have a good rapport with an AM, they might give you a 20 minute headstart before they publish important news (such as moving networks). If you publish an article on the subject and hit the major poker sites with a link to your story it is unlikely to be zapped as spam (as it’s an exclusive story!), and will result in a lot of targeted traffic which you can try to convert. Scoops are an excellent way to generate massive traffic spikes, and traffic = potential customers.
• Call to Action – The “call to action” is one of the most important concepts in marketing and promotion. In simple terms, once you’ve established that you have something of value to offer and that your site / company the perfect choice to deliver it, you want to ask your prospective customer to take the next step. You deliver a call to action.

  This may seem obvious, however it is very common to see a call to action ommitted in promotional articles on large gaming sites where rather than ending the promotional article with a call to action, the user is merely presented with a bunch of terms and conditions which could instead be linked to, and replaced with some copy which tells the user to sign up (for example the if the article is about a live poker tournament, the call to action could be: ” Satellites are running NOW! – click the download link to try your luck and get your $600 deposit bonus”.

• Implement a Mailing List – Developing a mailing list is of massive benefit to affiliates. Having targeted user mailing lists at your disposal means that special deals which crop up can be monetised quickly via one bulk email to potentially interested parties. The other up-side of having a mailing list is that you can bring information to the attention of potential customers without them having to visit your site!

  How do you generate a mailing list? One option is to have a “newsletter” sign-up form on your site, this may be incentivised (e.g. “subscribe to our newsletter and you might win a free trip to ‘Vegas in our monthly draw”). Another method of developing a good mailing list is to deploy a forum on your site (using free software for example phpBB, or commercial forum software like vBulletin). Plugins exist to implement newsletter subscription opt-in for common content management systems such as Wordpress (e.g. Sendblaster Newsletter Plugin) , allowing you to easily implement opt-in or non-opt in mailing lists with little or no technical knowledge.

• Buy Traffic from niche sites – so you own a poker bonus site, and know that a lot of your target customers hang out on biggest poker forum in the world, which sells ad-spots to interested parties.

  Purchasing some banner spots on the poker site will get you maximum exposure targeting people who may be interested in your product. It is better for 1,000 poker players (your target demographic) to see your banner than for 1,000 people on a gamer site to see your banner (even though advertising here might be a tad cheaper). Do the math, Keep an eye on conversions, banner views and clicks, and optimise your campaign or banners accordingly.

• Build a Brand – A brand is a name or TM connected with a product or producer.Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy.Brand Loyalty exists when customers have a high attitude toward your brand (which is then exhibited through repurchase behavior). Brand loyalty is a great asset to any online or offline company: in many cases customers are willing to pay higher prices, they may cost less to serve, and can bring new customers to you. In the case of large gaming companies, branding is especially important as it can sometimes serve as the delivery mechanism for over 60% of web-traffic, whereas non-branded competitors will have to rely on other traffic acquisition mechanisms such as organic seo to drive a similar amount of traffic to their sites.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – PPC advertising on search engines such as Bing, Yahoo! and Google (adwords) (PPC on Google is only available in the UK for gambling related sites) is an excellent method of acquiring cheap traffic, depending on the keywords you wish to target. The most popular gambling keywords are known to be expensive (”short tail” keywords such as “Bingo”, “Poker”, “Casino” etc, however running a small budget test-campaign using some “long-tail keywords” (e.g. “Bingo in London”, “Order Casino Chips online”) often proves to be very profitable for many webmasters, and a PPC is certainly an attractive route to market for internet marketers, but also represents something which needs constant tweaking and optimisation in order to acquire good conversions on budget

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