Google introduced referral ads or pay per action ads few months ago. It is still under development. Google has been changing their policy for this PPA ads from the beginning. Today, i noticed Google made another change to their Referral Ads policy which is called “validation period”.

I wrote an article few weeks ago on how to make money with Google referral ads. I suggested some possible ways of how bloggers or adsense users can increase their earning using this new affiliate program by Google. As you can see I had to cross out one of my 5 options from that list due to Google TOS change.

1. Google’s 1st change in Referral ads TOS was kind of like this, “Google referrals ads publisher(the person who is showing Google referral ads on his/her website) is not allow to drive traffic to their specefic referral advertisement page, unless they have permission from the advertiser(the organization who is promoting the product or service). The page also has to satisfy Google’s landing page criteria in order comply with this policy”.
2. Google announced a brand new policy that publishers or referrers have to wait for a specefic period of time (validation period) until Google get positive reply from the advertiser (have to be a valid conversion and my guess is it will be manually confirmed by advertisers). This will be applicable for all Google referral ads (non Google product of course). Once publishers got their first valid conversion successfully, Google will waive the validation period for the next referral.

I personally think both of these new policies are controversial. Here is why:

• If anyone wants to promote a product/service in the internet, is it wrong to buying/driving traffic to that product promotion page? NO
• If advertisers(affiliated companies) have the power to announce their conversion then many small advertisers like online money making eBook sellers can definitely cheat with Google and not tell them “the correct number of conversions (since conversion is manually announced)”. In this case referrers will get only partial payment.

It seem that Google is having hard time fighting against fraud for Google referral ads. Whatever Google is doing, i hope they will bring a easy and user friendly affiliate programs like their PPC program, Google Adsese(). Otherwise they CANNOT stay in the large affiliate market competition. I will keep Google referral ads away from my blog for a while until i know Google is 100% ready with their service (PPA ads/Referral ads) and their term of service (Google Referral Ads Policy).