Is Adwords Dead For Affiliate Marketing?

I've been out of the IM game for some years.

My question is are people still profiting with "Affiliate Marketing" with Adwords as their advertising medium. Reason why I ask is yes I could make it profitable of course if I was the company selling a product or service in the long run.

My main concerns with adwords is the devices targeting Mobile and Computer/Tablet all have just about the identical CPC. Also you want to target mobile your ad will still display in Computer search, So can't really just promote WAP offers have to run 2 offers simultaneously. Some of the ads that used to run for 4.00 are now upwards to 39.00 It's insane now. I think I find a good keyword with low search volume and "low" competition according to googles keyword finder then create a campaign around it it wants me to bid a minimum of 7.00-27.00 to even have my ad show.... That would be because people are using broad search and didn't take out the words that i put in as a negative so it's very interesting and I'm just wondering if people are still profiting using adwords as a medium for Affiliate Marketing, whether it's WAP offers, Online offers, Pay Per Call Offers... Because I'm pretty stumped right now. If you are profiting without asking keyword information, what is your avg CPC on google with your ECP on your affiliate network, So I have an idea of the margin of profit in the year 2013. I'm not asking for niches you are promoting or anything along those lines... I'm just beginning to think adwords is dead for affiliate marketing and now only good for brand recognition... Please fill me in everyone

Thanks for Reading! I'm not looking for a handout advice unless you are just feeling charitable at this moment just wondering is it dead or not. I haven't been in the IM game in Years got really sick back in 2007 just been doing things off and on for a while to make some quick money.

Appreciate your replies,

- John

Adwords is definitely not dead for affiliate marketing / product promoting - it's just Google makes life for affiliate marketers complicated, so the gateway for this is Cloaking - while using a good solid cloaker, u can use Adwords (and other PPC based platforms such as: Bing and FB) for driving traffic to your aff / CPA offers under the radar with good CPC rates

You can use adwords to promote your squeeze page to capture email lists. But for direct promotion affiliate link using adwords, surely you will get banned. Your squeeze page must also comply with their rules. You can search on google about "adwords friendly squeeze pages". Hope that help

Man.... affiliate marketing is DEAD on adwords.

They have so many policies its ridiculous

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/topic/1626336

you can't link to other sites, you can't use duplicate content, you can't "harvest info" aka capture leads...etc.etc.etc.

It's just 1 big f4cking headache.

Learn Media buy my friend!

Like mrblackjack said, it's definately not dead. However Google is trying to kill it. Every 2 months now they seem to change something which gets harder to work around. So it gives me 1 bad night of little sleep but after I find the way around, I'm good again for a while...

Affiliates have always been discouraged On Adwords. Theres nothing new about it.

CPC has never been constant. It varies with instant competition. If you are observing your campaign granually you will see CPCs during certain rush months going upward. One can leash the CPC by continuously breaking keywords into themes ad groups and using better ad copies.

Another issue affiliates have is in getting landing pages approved. You need to be well versed with TOS to have a bold conversion-focused LP approved after ad submission. There are a lot of ways of going about it & each niche has its own hurdles when it comes to Ad Approval. Sometimes a simple misspelling can also do wonders

Ohh ok thanks for the responses.... I always send to a landing page specified on the vertical IE: if I was going for "online degrees" I wouldn't big on that because my payout is way less then the CPC but I put my mindset of a person looking for an education....
"Online Degrees" > "Criminal Justice Degree" > "Homicide Detective Degree"> Even more specific or what someone would type interested in said subject. People wouldn't type "Criminal Justice Degree" most people would type in how to become a police officer, police officer salaries/requirements etc. Social Workers so many opportunities....

So Many angles you could go into just from criminal justice degree even higher from online degrees. I did just a real fast job but just to give example I didn't get to the cheap clicks yet but got them cheaper. I usually won't even stay with degree I go for what a person would actually type and get in there head... but IE:
1. Online Degrees = $34.86
2. Criminal Just Degree = $46.85
3. Homicide Detective Degree = $3.11
If I had spent more then 2 minutes doing this i would have found a gem I just winged it but take into effect that last crap keyword "homicide detective degree" it states ecpc 3.11 If I for example created a campaign around that my cost would be around 8.00 just to be shown going to a targeted landing page with no outbound links.. I would also have a quality score of 8/10 - 9/10 because I would do something like that for click to call so do not want them to go to another website.

So It looks like Media Buying is the thing to do now. I've done that in the past just always preferred adwords for the "HIGHLY" Targeted Traffic.

I had a highly targeted keyword in the Education Niche I found this morning CPC .10 was like WOW I created a demo campaign just to see if that was legit had quality score of 9/10 it would not show ads unless i paid 7.25 per click..... So Adwords is definately puzzling me now..... The traffic was nice for that one keyword 10k monthly searches and extremely targeted so should have had a high CTR

I would say 2 things. In terms of CPA Adwords is a bad idea. Cloaking, Leads capturing might work, but not always in a long run. It's only good if you sell your own product. That's pretty much it.

Your CPC also depends on account health. Number of infarctions, warnings, disapprovals also determine quality score.

Difference in Estimated CPC and actual CPC could be an initial thing only which often happens with nascent campaigns.

my advice if you want run mobile traffic in adwords - use in app traffic, not the search.
display content network also can bring you a lot good cheap traffic

Yeah, Display/Content Network definitely *works* when done right .

I dont think you can even use adwords to a sales page...even if its your own. I have a cb product and tried direct linking with msn and still go it shut down.

Adwords is not dead, it's just certain niches they've been clamping down on. With all the lawsuits that's coming after Google, I think they're trying to minimize their risk by clamping down on niches that's on the FTC's radar.