Affiliate Marketing Using Google Ads Without Getting BANNED!

Learn the method for Affiliate Marketing Using Google Ads, that thousands of others are using successfully, without getting banned.

You can either watch the video a bit further down for a quick walk-through, or use the step-by-step guide written here to start your affiliate marketing journey!

Affiliate Marketing Using Google Ads (Video Guide)

 

How To Promote Affiliate Products Using Google Ads

As a disclaimer, it is advised not to use Google Ads to promote affiliate products and this guide does not guarantee Google won’t ban your ads account, however it does lower your chances.

1. Don’t direct link… Create a website

You should always have a website rather than a straight link. You want to establish a high-quality website, not just any website.

By the way, I’m not talking about design here. Yes, accessibility, UI elements, and design are crucial, but I’m referring to the content on your website.

Everything begins with your content, so be sure to adhere to Google’s webmaster standards for ads as well as their policies and guidelines for webmasters.

First and foremost, you must ensure that you have adequate information on your landing page and throughout your entire website that is specifically focused on the product you are promoting.

Google prioritises the user above all else (whether it’s paid traffic or free organic traffic), so non-unique articles that don’t add anything useful to readers won’t ever outrank original, high-quality articles created by well-known websites with authority.

The same is true for Google Ads; you don’t want to have filler or bridge pages with only a few words before a large button that, when clicked, directs users to the affiliate product.

To do this build a brand, an established website, with authority and unique content that brings value to the users.

Another option is to not include any affiliate products or services on your page and instead include an opt-in form that asks users to sign up and then directs them to the offer. I don’t recommend it because most of you will sign up with Google Ads and simply send traffic to a squeeze page, only to be banned.

You can collect leads through Google Ads, but you’ll still need a relevant and high-quality website beyond your simple squeeze page.

If all of your website’s content is based on just one squeeze page to collect leads, or as Google puts it, “information harvesting,” your Google Ads account will fail.

Some of them are:

• Get rich quick / make money from online products
• How to lose pounds fast
• skin care products
• Illegal (obviously)
• Medicines or healthcare fads
• MLM or pyramid schemes

Find good, reputable products and services to affiliate and promote, think of big companies and brands that have been around for a while.

These companies aren’t likely to go away anytime soon or get involved in shady things like some of the affiliate offers you get on most CPA networks.

Think about real products and services that people can use every day to improve their lives and even think outside of affiliate networks and go straight to brands.

You can also deviate from the regular affiliate networks you know (you know the ones that offer CPA, Forex, Nutra, etc. dating) and try joining more “normal” networks.

Some examples: Amazon Associates and ShareASale. You will find a much better selection of products with superior quality and customer service than you will find in other affiliate networks that we marketers sometimes like to use.

3. Don’t include misguided/false claims

You want to avoid using superlatives and misleading claims on your landing page and in your ads.

First, it’s generally bad to promote such offers because you’re basically lying to customers, and secondly, your Google Ads account will definitely be suspended.

Do not claim things that the product or service or anything else cannot provide. Inventing things just to get clicks, leads, or sales isn’t a good approach, not just with Google Ads, but with affiliate marketing in general.

How come? Well, because customers won’t be happy with what they get and guess what they will? Request to be reimbursed. What will happen after that? Well, the network or affiliate will refund them and then withdraw funds from your account to pay the refund.

Oh…and bonus points, you could be banned from promoting the offer or even banned from the affiliate network, isn’t that “awesome”? No affiliate marketer wants a high refund rate because it leads to a lot of chargebacks and fees to incur. But if a product you’re trying to promote has a high refund rate, that’s a clear indication to stay away.

Most affiliate networks have a way to show you product performance, either by directly displaying the refund rate or by providing other metrics such as network performance and EPC value to other affiliates.

Bottom line: If you’re not promoting junk products with nonsensical claims, you should be fine, but as always, check the rules.

4. Read Google Ads Policies and Guidelines

Speaking of rules, go ahead and read them all. Yes, I mean everything. See all Google Ads policies and related webmaster guidelines, along with your landing page experience.

But you should also check the rules of your affiliate network and the product you are promoting. Some products will not allow affiliates to run paid search traffic on their products, so make sure that doesn’t happen. Yes, the rules for reading and policies and terms are boring.

However…

When it comes to Google advertising and advertising, you want to make sure you read and understand the rules and conditions of the advertising network before starting to promote them.

Each advertising network has a sort of rules you need to know, some are milder (such as pop and push advertising networks) others are more severe, such as Google -approach, advertising on Facebook and Microsoft advertising.

So, to prevent your advertising account from being suspended, read all the pages and you are better to familiarize yourself with how Google ads work and what their guidelines are. There are a lot of things on their policy pages that I just can’t explain in this article otherwise it will be even longer than it is now so if you have the time and before you advertise with them go ahead and read them, it shouldn’t take you more than 30-60 minutes anyway (if it does).

5. Check your tracking & affiliate links

I have always said that when doing affiliate marketing you should always use a tracker and keep track of everything that happens especially if you are paying for traffic.

But when it comes to Google Ads, you need to be careful about how you track your affiliate products and what kind of affiliate product links you have on your page.

First of all, you don’t want to use smart affiliate links or other affiliate links with redirects.

You don’t want to use shady scripts or tools that “mask” your links and avoid smart redirects again. You can have your Google Ads account suspended for this. You have been warned.

So how can you track your affiliate campaigns if you can’t use regular affiliate tracking software?

Well, you can still track how your campaigns are doing using Google’s UTM tags and with no affiliate links that contain redirects.

You want to use deep affiliate deep links which, once clicked, will send the user directly to the correct page, without going through further loops and domain redirects.

So here’s an example: YourSite.com => affiliateproductoffer.com/sign-up

Usually, affiliate links will have lots of other domain redirects for internal tracking, something like link1.com> link2.com> link3.com> affiliateproductoffer.com

Avoid this by using direct affiliate links that direct users directly to the product page. You want the whole process to be as smooth as possible without CHANGING the links in any way. As I said, use maximum UTM tags in your affiliate links and make sure the links are not redirected again.

So don’t use any tracking or cloaking software. Most affiliate marketing websites you see in Google don’t use external trackers or redirects, they use internal scripts along with UTM tags, and manually add conversions to your Google Ads account to make sure they’re compliant.

6. Avoid using brand terms in ad copy/keywords

Each affiliate program you sign up for has its own rules, as I explained above. Usually the most important thing is not to bid on brand terms on PPC ads.

This means that if the brand you are promoting is called XYZ, you cannot use XYZ anywhere in the ad text (title, description, URL) and sometimes not even as a keyword. .

So make sure you read all the terms and conditions of the affiliate program before promoting it, whether with Google Ads or with another advertising network.

If you ignore this rule, you will be kicked out of the offer, your commissions will be canceled and you may even be banned from the affiliate network. So yeah, that’s not good.

Example of Affiliate Marketing with Google Ads:

 

 

Need A Google Ads Specialist To Help With Your Campaign?

Feeling like you’re in over your head when it comes to Google Ads? At Savvy Digital, we’re experts in managing/optimizing Google Ads and are here to help you achieve the best possible results from every campaign. Contact Savvy Digital to get started with Google Ads setup today, or book in a FREE Google Ads audit.