Martin Lee Affiliate Marketing

A couple of weeks ago, Goggle released the full version of their Google Referrals program to all their Adsense publishers.

In case you do not know what Adsense is, it is basically the Google advertisements that you see on websites. The owner of the website (also called the publisher) earns a cut of the advertising fee whenever someone clicks on the advertisements served by Google.

Google Referrals is a subset of Adsense whereby you can earn a small commission by referral people to some of Google’s products or services. The two main services you can refer are of course Adsense and Adwords (Adwords is the program that advertisers join to get their advertisements shown on Adsense).

Quite some time ago, Google started experimenting with a pay per lead or pay per sale program with their Adsense Referrals program. Instead of earning pennies for each click, the publisher may now earn more (or nothing) depending on what the person did after clicking.

If the person completes the action of either completing a form (lead) or making a purchase (sale), the publisher will earn a much higher amount than the few cents he would have make initially. On the other hand, if there is no action, you don’t get paid a cent.

I need to clarify that the referrals program is not just restricted to Google products. Merchants can freely bid on what they want to pay for each sale or lead.

As to whether it pays for you to run Google Referral advertisements on your site compared to the normal Adsense advertisements, you would probably have to test it out for yourself to see which one gives you a higher payout.

The good thing about Google Referrals is that you can select the exact advertisement you want to run on your site. So, it is really possible to micromanage and optimize your advertisements. Here’s an example of how a Google Referral advertisement looks like:

I forsee Google Referrals to have a significant impact on the affiliate marketing industry as it is now possible for any merchant or serviee provider to start an affiliate program by running it completely through Google!

This means that you can easily promote a product for a merchant even if you have not signed up for their private affiliate program. I remember I used to have problems being approved by some merchants because they only accept affiliates from certain countries. Now, it’s no longer a problem if they are using Google Referrals.

One thing I didn’t like about Google Referrals is that for the time being, the navigation process of selecting advertisements is still a bit not user-friendly. Hope they improve it soon.

I’m also expecting the various merchants who are advertising on Google Referrals to be constantly monitoring the performance and adjusting their payout rates. Depending on the results, it is highly possible that their rates might change.

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