Adwords to Ban Affiliate CPA Free Trial/Rebill Offers and Fake Testimonials

[Linda Buquet]

Has anyone heard about this???

Someone posted a letter that looks and sounds official to me. It was received from Adwords saying they soon will not allow CPA free trial/rebill offers and other "Unacceptable Business Practices" including fake celebrity endorsements.

Big Heads Up For Adwords Advertizers

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We?re writing to let you know about a change to Google?s advertising policies that could affect your AdWords account.

Beginning in the coming weeks, we?ll no longer accept ads that promote Unacceptable Business Practices. This includes, but is not limited to, negative option or unclear billing, the sale of normally free items or services, and false celebrity endorsements.

Negative option billing specifically relates to sites that offer free trials, services, or other offers in conjunction with a subscription service. Sites in violation of this policy automatically enter users into a subscription if they do not cancel within the pre-determined trial period.

In order to comply, these pages must contain an opt-in checkbox that contains the price and billing interval of the subscription service on the page where a user enter their billing information.

When we make this change any URLs in violation of this policy may be submitted for Landing Page Quality disabling. Once this has been completed you will have 10 days to make any necessary changes to your website in order to comply before the disabling will take effect. We ask that you make changes to your ads and/or website to comply, so that your campaigns can continue to run.

As a business, Google must make decisions regarding the advertising we accept. We?ve given much thought to our stance on this content, as well as the potential effect our policy decision could have on AdWords advertisers, and we apologize for any inconvenience it may cause you.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

Note: The part in bold is not up to the affiliates. They are not saying the disclosure needs to be on the affiliate's landing page, it needs to be on the payment page, so affiliates will need to find offers that comply with Google's new rules if they want to continue to run their free trial, rebill offers.

Note 2: The part in RED is good news because for a change they are giving advertisers notice and a chance to correct the problem instead of just banning accounts.

I think Google has been cracking down on rebill offers for awhile and sounds like they are about to make it official. I think it's a good thing as most of these rebills are shady and give affiliate marketing a bad name.

What do you think?

 

[James Martell]

Hi Linda,

This will definitely clean up a number of the nastier CPA offers. I would think all of this is the beginning for more and more regulation of the web, which is both good and bad.

I was reading an article yesterday in the New York Times F.T.C. that shows the crack down is coming.

Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure

I am not sure why they referenced only bloggers, but I am sure they meant everyone.

I guess all of this is a another good reminder, one in a long string, that it's important to develop real content that is 100% above board.

James

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi James,

Great to see you posting and I agree.

Here's a thread we have going with some REALLY important info about the FTC issue.

<a href="http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5staraffiliateprograms.com/general-topics-affiliate-forum/19237-affiliates-new-ftc-rules-11-000-fines-non-disclosure.html#post60274">Affiliates - New FTC Rules and $11,000 Fines for Non-Disclosure</a>

Feel free to weigh in there too or pass the info on.

 

[JulieO]

I read about this several days ago. I'm glad it's coming. I hate these offers that sneak in reoccurring subscriptions causing people to either cancel their credit cards or close out their bank account completely to get these people to stop billing them. Calling them never works.

I used to try out the CPA offers that I want to offer and have been turned off to them because of their (as James puts it) nastier CPA offers.

 

[Bryan Zimmerman]

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Even Ezine articles is starting to be very selective as to what they are letting go in the resource boxes. From what a few people have said, the clickbank products have no problem going through, but the CPA offers doing just redirects are starting to have issues.

 

[Seascape]

JulieO, the recent update to the adwords guidelines literally says that they will assign a low QS to "Affiliate sites that the primary purpose of which is to drive traffic to another site with a different domain". Although the rumors are that its just a crackdown on the nastier CPA sites, the policy wording makes no distinction.

Are you using adwords to drive traffic to that shoulder bag site in your sig? Nothing personal, but it looks like every post is just a short presell to an aff link. Technically, THAT would fall under the new adwords policy change, even though it's a fairly benign niche.

 

[JulieO]

JulieO, the recent update to the adwords guidelines literally says that they will assign a low QS to "Affiliate sites that the primary purpose of which is to drive traffic to another site with a different domain". Although the rumors are that its just a crackdown on the nastier CPA sites, the policy wording makes no distinction.

Are you using adwords to drive traffic to that shoulder bag site in your sig? Nothing personal, but it looks like every post is just a short presell to an aff link. Technically, THAT would fall under the new adwords policy change, even though it's a fairly benign niche.

No, that site I have given up on but not completely abandoned. I tried turning it into a datafeeder site to see if that would make a difference, but it did not.