For marketers trying to cut in on the action of PPC campaigns without a website, it is important to understand why they must first take a look at merchant TOS and policies regarding Direct-to-Merchant linking. Although it is possible to make money through affiliate marketing without a website, the methods that do not require a website are paid search, email marketing, offline marketing.

Search engine giants like Google, for example, do not allow display of more ads per search query if advertisers share the same top-level domain in the display URL. The problem comes when you find out that most advertisers do not allow Direct-to-Merchant affiliate linking altogether. For e.g. Amazon.com Inc. no longer pays advertising fees to associates who send users directly to it’s domains based on keyword bidding and other paid search on search engines. Another brand that does the same thing is Staples Inc., which requires that affiliates have their own landing page prior to linking to Staples.com. Yet another brand, Dell Inc., does not allow publishers to link directly to explore Direct-to-Merchant linking.

The list of merchants and brands who will not allow anything that even remotely sounds like DTM includes names like Apple, Office Depot Inc., and Best Buy Co., just to name a few.

It seems that the idea behind PPC affiliate marketing without a website will not be allowed much leeway, and the trend seems to be similar across many other affiliate programs too. Most reasons sighted and hinted on distrust and unethical practices, where certain publishers will do anything to get their hands on a piece of the pie. Lower quality traffic, trademark poaching, and ad copying tend to smell from the word GO!

The misery for marketers wanting to experiment with Direct-to-merchant linking is deepened when search engine services like Google starts having policies that forbid such practices by not allowing more than one unique display URL per ad copy. Policies and practices like this will naturally send multiple red flags to merchants, who as a result, will actively pursue disallowing DTM in their affiliate programs.

Affiliate marketing has it’s merits, and in order to achieve much needed consistency in transparency of services provided and methods of application in PPC campaigns, it is advisable and even strongly recommended to a thorough due diligence check on individual merchant Terms of Services for affiliate programs prior to investing resources into Direct-to-Merchant PPC campaigns.

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