The ads provided by our advertisers are often time sensitive and require replacement by publishers on a regular basis. We have been told by many publishers that they have a hard time keeping track of out of date ads present on their site(s). To help alleviate this challenge we will now display notifications on the publisher home page whenever we detect traffic on links (ads) that have past their end date.
A new message center, featured prominently in the top center of the publisher home page, provides a daily summary with the number of clicks recorded on out of date links. Users can view a detailed list of the ads generating these clicks including the creative, if applicable, and a link to a list of current ads for each advertiser associated to an out of date link. Notifications may be dismissed, but will continue to appear daily if traffic on out of date links is detected on subsequent days. The first notifications were generated as we pushed out the feature, so publishers may see a notification upon their next login. Please note that while a promotion may be past its end date we will continue to track clicks and conversions, and commissions will accrue for any conversions recorded for an active but out of date link.
Google Affiliate Network provides multiple features to help publishers keep up with these frequent changes; we offer daily updates of promotional ads (via email or FTP) and advertiser product catalogs (FTP only). We strongly encourage publishers to try out these features by visiting Links > Link Subscriptions and Links > Product Feeds.
Finally, we have added a feature to automatically send an email notification to publishers when a change to commissions specific to an advertiser/publisher relationship is made; advertiser users will also get a copy of the message. Publishers must opt in to receive these notifications on the Settings > Communications Preferences page. Please note that notifications are not yet available if advertisers change their default commission rate, or if the advertiser is using Category/Product Level Commissions. We are working to provide coverage for these types of changes too, and will be making improvements based on your feedback as we enhance this feature.
As a reminder, we have altered the naming convention for Link Subscriptions. Files will now come in the form Link_Subscriptions_YYYYMMDD.txt. Beginning March 13, all files will follow this convention.
Larry Adams
Product Manager
