In an email we received today, Google Affiliate Network confirmed they will be closing on July 31st.

“We’ll continue to support our customers as we wind down the product over the next few months. While we will no longer be adding new product functionality, we will maintain the platform during the transition period. We plan to disable publisher relationships from advertiser programs on July 31, 2013. Publisher payments will be disbursed for network activity generated through this date. We will continue to make certain functionality available through October 31, 2013 for retrieving reports, reconciling orders, and processing payments.”

Yesterday’s announcement that Google Affiliate Network would be shutting down caught many people by surprise. The network will be closed down completely on 7/31/13. The next few months of migrations will keep a lot of us in the affiliate marketing industry very busy. On the bright side, we are happy this happened well before Q4!

As an FMTC client, you can count on us to keep you informed on where to find the GAN merchants that FMTC supports on other networks. Bookmark this page and visit it often, as we will be updating it frequently.
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Commission Junction will open early registration for CJU on April 29, 2013. Reserve your spot before May 10, 2013 and get $100 off the registration fee. This year’s conference will be held at the Bacara Resort & Spa in Santa Barbara from September 10–12, 2013. This event usually sells out well before the conference date and hotel rooms sell out even sooner. Like last year, rooms at the Bacara are already sold out! If you are planning to attend this important industry event, CJ has a list of nearby hotels posted on their site.

The Google Affiliate Network (GAN) just released a statement on their blog saying the network will officially be closing!

“To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.” - J.J. Hirschle, Head of Google Affiliate Network

Read the full story here.  Others quick to blog about this surprising announcement were affiliate Tricia Meyer and industry blogger Pace Lattin.

What does this mean for merchants? Well, if you are only currently housed in GAN, you will obviously have to find a new network to call home. Luckily, For Me To Coupon supports 11 other networks!

What does this mean for affiliates? Updating a lot of links for some, but if you are a For Me To Coupon client, you won’t have to worry about that daunting task! For Me To Coupon will be watching closely to see where all of the GAN merchants migrate and we will be adding them to our database as soon as possible. Once you are signed up for the merchant under its new network, you will simply need to select the merchant in your FMTC admin, remove the old one, and, if necessary, map the merchant on its new network to your site. Your links will refresh on your next download.

You can view new merchants by logging in to your FMTC account. You can also opt to receive a daily summary via email of our merchant additions and deletions by ticking “Enable Merchant Activations/Deactivations” here and saving the new preference setting. If you need the emails sent to more than one person on your team, you can add recipients here.

Stay tuned for more Google Affiliate Network happenings – we will be reporting more details as they become available.