If you have been promoting Acai, Reveratrol, Dental whitening CPA offers, I have a bad news for you. Recently I received a mail from Google for one of my old accounts where I promoted Acai berry offers. The mail read:

“Dear AdWords Advertiser,
We’re writing to let you know about a change to Google’s advertising policies that could affect your AdWords account.

Beginning in the coming weeks, we’ll no longer accept ads that promote Unacceptable Business Practices. This includes, but is not limited to, negative option or unclear billing, the sale of normally free items or services, and false celebrity endorsements.”

Sites in violation of this policy automatically enter users into a subscription if they do not cancel within the pre-determined trial period. In order to comply, these pages must contain an opt-in checkbox that contains the price and billing interval of the subscription service on the page where a user enters their billing information.”

What does this mean? This means that if you are promoting any of the rebill offers where the landing page does not have opt in checkbox or does not inform users about the rebill, is going to be slapped hard. It will not just be a slap but total removal of the landing page & landing page quality disabling. This would effectively mean that the landing page would be useless for any adwords campaign. Google will also not allow any ads for any rebill offers which do not display the optin option.

So what does it mean to you as an affiliate

Well if you still promote products for such offers which do not comply with Google policy, you may end up losing your adwords account. It also means that your conversions are going to drop drastically if you only promote offers by saying “Free Trial” or “Free Product by Paying $3.95 S&H”. Since the landing page will have to clearly display the option for user to optin for rebill, I am not sure you will have many sign ups.

What should you do?

If you are into promoting the rebill offers or offers that belong to the Google’s negative options category, stop your campaigns before you lose your account & start promoting CPL offers.