Using Adwords to promote personal site w/ affiliate products

[bigcat1967]

Can I use Adwords to promote my website that has affiliate products on them such as clickbank or adwords? Just wondering if this is against G's policy. I couldn't find it anywhere...

 

[djbaxter]

See What should I know as an affiliate advertiser? - AdWords Help

We currently don't accept ads for data entry affiliate programs. If you're another type of affiliate, your AdWords account is completely distinct from your affiliate program.

The AdWords account of an affiliate is no different from any other AdWords account -- your account follows the same rules (such as billing process, cost, and policy guidelines) as all other AdWords accounts. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with Google's URL policy which affects many affiliates, and then browse or search the AdWords Help Center for answers to your AdWords account questions. To help you get started, we've compiled some of the most common questions we receive from affiliate advertisers. One important thing to remember (as outlined in the 'Affiliate Performance' section below) is that there is stiff competition amongst affiliate advertisers, so you should pay special attention to the quality of your ads, keywords, and website in order to advertise effectively.

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Identify Affiliate Status: You must clearly identify yourself as an affiliate or distributor in your ad text. This will help provide clear, descriptive ads so that our users understand the nature of your site and your business. Affiliate status cannot be indicated in your URL, as the URL is not always visible on our ad network sites.

In a nutshell, you just need to add "aff", "affil" or "associate" to your ad copy, somewhere. Some people use "[aff]" but most of the affiliate ads I see just tack "aff." to the very end of the descriptive text.

 

[bigcat1967]

Wow - learning a lot here Minstrel.

I never heard of data entry affiliate programs before. From what I read - and please correct me if I'm wrong - I have to basically have my own landing page where my adwords would be linking too. No more direct link from adwords to my affiliate's site where they actually sell things. Am I correct about this?

 

[djbaxter]

I haven't actually tried it either but that does seem to be the case, although this part of my citation above seems to suggest that you may be able to get around this by adding "affiliate" to the ad content:

In a nutshell, you just need to add "aff", "affil" or "associate" to your ad copy, somewhere. Some people use "[aff]" but most of the affiliate ads I see just tack "aff." to the very end of the descriptive text.