I’ve just read the news about Google’s ad network now allowing the promotion of alcohol. It just makes sense.

In most countries I’ve been to I can see advertisement for alcohol everywhere in the offline world. Most major sports events are sponsored by beer brands. It seems that Google want their share of the advertising budgets of those companies.

This move also gives retailers a chance to sell good wine and spirits via AdWords. These can be luxury items with high profit margins for vendors. I suspect this results in good bid prices and higher revenues for Google.

Tell me when you see some ads with the Budweiser frogs or the Jäger deer.

Google announced that they’re going to start enforcing their new one-domain-per-ad-group policy next week. They are trying to get rid of multiple domains within the same ad group.

I can understand that they want to improve their user experience and get rid of affiliate spam. However, with this new rule they also keep advertisers from absolutely legitimate testing.

For instance many advertisers test example.com vs. uk.example.com vs. example.co.uk vs. example.net. I’ve seen huge changes in click-through rates just by choosing the right domain for a specific audience.

And when it comes to mobile ads, advertisers would like to be able to test whether m.example.com or example.mobi or even just example.com generates the highest click-through rate.

With the new policy in place all these tests are going to be outlawed. I suppose they don’t want people to create multiple ad groups per keyword or use multiple AdWords accounts. But at the minute I think these are the only options.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Google hates ringtones and other mobile content products. About six month ago they installed a manual approval for mobile content ads.

I’ve just been forwarded an email from a partner who is doing a lot of PPC in the mobile content industry. Google will require mobile content providers and their affiliates to put the price and billing interval for subscription services in the actual AdWords ads. Quote:

In the coming weeks [...] we will require text and image ads for these services to display the price and billing interval (such as per week or per month) in the ad text, e.g. ‘£5.99/month’. We will no longer accept text or image ads that don’t contain the price and billing interval when promoting mobile content services. When we make this change, Google will suspend all campaigns identified as being in violation of our revised policy.

The guy is seriously scared and concerned about his income now. For more than five years he has been living off mobile content stuff as an affiliate. The only advise I can give him is to move on to other niches. Mobile content has become a somewhat outdated product anyways. I wonder for how much longer people will actually be willing to pay money for this.

Anyways, I just wanted to take this instance as an occasion to reiterate three fundamental principles in affiliate marketing:

1. Never ever ever rely on Google alone. It’s never good to bet all your money on one horse. If you want to generate additional profit from AdWords campaigns, that’s fine. But the core of your business must be independent of the big G.
2. Do not copy but innovate. Focus on niches that are up-and-coming and not the ones that are going down the hill. This way you will generate much more sustainable profit.
3. Something that works today might not work tomorrow. Invest in new ideas and test them to prepare yourself for the future.

The Content Network has only been the very beginning. Google will be rolling out more advertising opportunities that are not related to search. Publishing offline ads in print media or local radio stations through Google AdWords has been possible in the U.S. for a while already. It looks like that stuff will come to Germany soon.

Here’s a screen shot of the reports section of the AdWords interface. Unfortunately it’s in German because it was sent to me by a friend. But you can figure out yourself that it covers click-to-call (telephone), video and audio ads. Click on the image to see the full version.