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Via an email to affiliates, Amazon.com announced they are scaling back their associates program in North America by disallowing direct linking from paid search results:
After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.
As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.
As the paid search market has matured and competitive research tools have improved the value of using affiliates for discovering new keywords has been sharply reduced. Other merchants will follow Amazon's lead. Some might wait for the economy to pick up first, but the fact that Amazon is trimming this in a down market (recession/possible depression) shows how little they feel they benefit from affiliate arbitrage of paid search results.
Yet another reason to find SEO based affiliate work more stable than PPC affiliate efforts. Any PPC-based affiliate that is sick of having to rebuild from the ground up over and over again would be smart to (and is welcome to) taking the enlightened path :)
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I don't get this move. Isn't this just giving up marginal sales?
Anyways, I personally wouldn't use their program except as backfill in the event other merchants didn't carry something. Only getting paid if a visitor converts in the same session is RIDICULOUS crediting theft.
If affiliates are increasing Amazon's costs and/or marketing aggressively in a way that could risk Amazon's quality score then filtering them out may not be a bad idea.
Not surprisingly, this post didn't get a lot of fan fare or engagement, but it's actually huge news and I appreciate you posting it.
This could potentially lead to a large boom for agencies that provide direct PPC management services for large Fortune 500 clients.
A lot of the big companies like Amazon.com probably already have sophisticated internal bidding algorithms. It doesn't really make sense to outsource paid search on such a site when they already got all that data in databases, realtime sales data, a search box on their own site, and probably a good bit of leeway with Google AdWords quality scores.
it wouldn't be hard for amazon to collect kw conversion data, as long as most ppc traffic is not cloaked (i'm not sure if they accept cloaked traffic). at that point, the ppc traffic is just driving up their CPCs. they could just wipe out all competing traffic and run ads for kw's that they know are converting. wouldn't surprise me, and wouldn't surprise me if other big companies follow. and if they're passive about it and don't actively wipe out competitors after may 1, then it's free traffic for them since they're not paying out commissions.
Hey Aaron,
I know that UK affiliates of Amazon have been hit by a SEO slap as well as Amazon won't be paying any commissions on links that show up in the SERPs. But do you know anything about U.S. traffic? Amazon is currently holding my December & November commissions for me having pulled some sales off the SERPs. It's a small amount probably but Amazon has nixed all my commissions (5 figures).
Any precedents?
Bummer to hear that. Not sure what to say about it though...other than I expect some other big companies may follow in their path.
Yes. It hurts as a blogger to lose that much money in a month. But I am glad I didn't put all my eggs in one basket. The funny thing is, I am not even sure how to contact Amazon other than their online form. So far no one has gotten back to me to tell me why my commissions were removed when they don't mention anything about free search in their U.S. agreement. I do agree with you that Amazon and other companies will use this practice in the future. But is it even legal or ethical to do that when it's not in their affiliate agreement?
Is it just me or the affiliate marketing business is getting destroyed by these moves and all the talk about Internet tax.
Its not just you...and don't forget Google whacking tons of affiliates too ;)
I just hope this is a bad joke as Amazon never warned US affiliates on free search traffic. But what do I know?
@aaron. Thanks so much for taking time to respond to my comments anyway. If there is anyone here who can help me get out of this mess or have any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.
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