Is it time to move to Overture?

I've been ignoring Overture for a while now because Google allowed direct linking to merchant site via affiliate links. For as long as I remember, Overture has always required a landing page. But now that Google also requires a landing page, I'm starting to reevaluate what overture has to offer.

I already had a few landing pages for some programs I had been promoting, but it seems like Google has a very strict rule about what an acceptable landing page is.

Right now it seems like overture is less strict about landing pages, so I'm going to start testing how my ads work on overture.

As for AdWords, my long term goal is to start building "landing mini-sites" instead of landing pages. But this is only going to be for my most profitable campaigns.

Google AdWords™ Announcement: Affiliate Policy Change

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate
advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user
and advertiser experience.

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per
search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the
same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling
of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be
displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is
determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click
(price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for 'books' on Google.com or
anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google
will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword 'books'.
If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL,
we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to
identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However,
your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate
status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will
not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display
URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not
simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads'
performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're
bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization
Tips page for more information:
https://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html

By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have
a better search experience, which will help you reach more
potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make
improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user
experience and help increase the performance of your ads.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

Big changes for affiliates using AdWords

So the buzz everywhere is that Google is soon going to allow only one affiliate per search phrase. This announcement could happen as soon as tomorrow.

There's been a lot of talk about what this means to affiliates, and what affiliates can do about it. But, until Google makes this announcement, we're all really guessing.

I'm going to keep looking into this and report back to you once everything is official. I'll also have suggestions and tips on how to change your advertising to comply with any changes that may occur.

Accepted for perfomics

I just got accepted into the performics program a few days ago, I've already appliade for a few of the affiliate programs that I listed in my earlier post.