Diorex

Lots of marketers, both affiliate and otherwise have been encouraged, bribed, cajoled or otherwise convinced to use Google Analytics to track their campaigns. I actually suspect that Google reps are incentivized to get advertisers to use the product.

The main selling point is that it ties into Adwords and uses tracking to determine your cost per lead/sale/whatever back to each keyword with little or no effort on your behalf. If you know which keywords perform good or bad you can then improve your ROI and become more efficient in managing your campaigns. The pitch is perfect for affiliates since they are typically both lazy and like the pricepoint of free.

Google recently bought Doubleclick and there was this huge uproar that they might be in the business of selling rankings via their Performics unit (which they said they would be selling that part of the company), but it turns out performics is also an affiliate marketing network.

Yesterday Google announced that they had renamed the affiliate network to the Google Affiliate Network.

Seems innocuous enough… NOT!

Heres why I think this is a major red flag… If you are an affiliate marketer using Analytics for a product through another network where you are driving traffic via search and Google also has that or a similar offer on their network, then they can simply arbitrage your conversion data and use it to identify the best converting keywords etc.

Say you sell Widgets and Google’s free analytics tool say that the keyword ‘blue widgets’ converts for you at a cost of $6 a sale, yet the widget manufacturer has an affiliate listing through Performics
paying $12 a sale. Your 100% ROI profit is in danger of becoming a $12 profit for Google.  Why should they share that with you? afterall it was their visitor in the first place. Your free analytics tool has now cost you 100% of your profit!

Think Google will not do it? The last time I read their terms and conditions, there is nowhere that it says they cant do this. They will make oral statements saying things like “If we did that we would lose the trust of our advertisers and go out of business”, but they have refused to put that in writing in any way, shape or form. In other words, they can do it.

Something to think about next time you take the easy way out and throw Google Analytics on your pages. There is no such thing as a free lunch.