Why would anyone cloak with Adwords?

Zwielicht said:

Why not just follow Google's TOS entirely and never use any black hat methods at all? These are questions that have persisted since the 90's and it has one very simple answer: because cheating, when done properly, can give you amazing guaranteed temporary results.

In the case of cloaked CB links on Adwords, most affiliates understand that they can attract a copious amount of quality traffic using CB with Adwords than they can with Bing ads. Even if that success is temporary, the black hat affiliate believes they can generate more money this way than by following Adword's TOS (and this sometimes works for black hat affiliates, too).

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clickj4ck said:

I have the same question bro. I think What he was asking was that why would anyone do it? What are the advantages? Hows does cloaking get you more "copious" amount of quality traffic ? Do they get free traffic? I'm honestly confused ! I would appreciate it if you can explain.

I've seen people creating landing pages/websites and promoting clickbank offers (using Adwords) without any problem. One thing i don't know is that why would anyone Risk their Adwords account and cloak the clickbank offers? I mean i've always been told that Landing Pages increases the sales !

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• Cloaked links often look much more legitimate than those long affiliate links.
• If you tell your visitor that they need to go to example.com but the URL displays as longclickbankurl.affiliateid.trackingid.com, this looks dubious. Visitors who think a link is safe will click on more links.

• If your landing page has an opt-in emal form for you to build a list, this gives you a chance to advertise to them through email.
• Your landing page can give your lead important information about the product in the form of reviews.
• You can use specific colours to psychologically manipulate your leads (using blue to make them feel trust, orange to attract their attention, green to make them think of money, etcetera), although the colours depend on what country your leads are coming from (I once read about using gold and red for Chinese customers, although I cannot confirm the veracity of this statement).
• You can optimise the landing page to increase conversions (CTA above the fold, using specific fonts, etcetera)

" But this isn't really new is it? And it's not only about the display URL policy either... It's about hijacking a good page / domain to get a good quality score, and using that quality score to make sure you get cheap clicks on your bad landing pages (with high CTR's, I bet)..."

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