Starting 6 January 2005, Google revised their policy on AdWords Advertising:

Excerpt From Google AdWords Update (1/6/05):

“With this new affiliate policy, we’ll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad’s maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we’ll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank. “

What this means to you is this…. if you’re promoting an affiliate product, you need to create a ‘landing page’ on your website to increase the chance of your AdWords ad showing up on Google.

This is becuase if you simply directed your AdWords visitors to your affiliate homepage (i.e. without a ‘landing page’) and other advertisers were also directing their visitors to the same URL, you risk not having your ad displayed on Google.

The great news is I recently found a free and useful software that helps you build landing pages specifically for Google AdWords campaigns.

Cost: Free

Landing Page Builder

I recently downloaded Mozilla’s Thunderbird desktop e-mail program and I must say I like it alot. It’s simply packed with great features. For example, it allows you to view RSS feeds within the same application. No need for a separate RSS Feed Reader!

Cost: Free

Link: Mozilla Thunderbird