Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

This is mainly a post aimed towards merchants and agencies, but if you are an affiliate or network then hopefully you’ll find my first blog post in what seems like years an interesting read all the same.

So let’s get straight into it and be honest here – whilst the perception of affiliate marketing continues to increase (and rightly so) this does also mean, even with a strong approval process on your affiliate programme, that the chances of abuse or fraud get bigger.  Detecting it is challenging but it’s one of the most important tasks to ensure that you don’t pay out when you shouldn’t.

Lead programmes are often the most common problem but it really can affect everyone in the industry.  For example, a few months ago I was innocently browsing a bittorrent site and an advertising message came up saying “This site is brought to you by Sky Digital” – the whole page was taken over with the Sky site and further investigation showed it was an Affiliate on their buy.at programme opening the site in an iFrame (screenshot below).  I passed on the details to Helen and the affiliate was removed from the programme (and hopefully the network) the next day.

Imagine how negative this could have been for the Sky brand… You can almost see the headline “Sky Digital sponsoring illegal downloads”!

From a merchant and agency perspective it’s actually quite difficult to stop this kind of abuse, after all, not many networks give you the referral URLs of where the sales or leads have been generated to protect the affiliate from having their ideas of information stolen, but there are tools that you can use to help you.

Tip 1 – Lag time analytics

Most networks will let you pull of a report that shows the time between a click and a sale – this may be presented a number of ways, either with the actual time that the last click & the sale were generated or actually be displaying the “lag” time in seconds.

A suggestion of what you can do here is start to categorise your affiliates and look out for non-standard lag times.   For example the lag time coming from a voucher code will generally be very low (as it’s often the last place that a user comes before completing their transaction) whereas a non-brand paid search affiliate of a content affiliate will be longer.

If you start to see very short lag times for affiliates that don’t fit into the brand/voucher/incentive types then it may be inductive of an affiliate using adware/spyware or at the very least someone to check with your network to find out more about how they are driving the traffic.   Very long lag times may be where affiliates have been cookie dropping (like the example above) and be especially important for some of the larger brands – again, categorise and check up on it, often it’s not that the affiliate is doing anything  wrong of course.

Tip 2 – Checking Transaction Times

Is going against your programme terms abuse?  We’d say that it is and you can use transaction times to check out where this may be happening.

For example, if you see a high rate of out of office hours transactions coming from a particular affiliate then it’s likely that they are using a day-parted PPC campaign – not always abuse obviously but if you have tight PPC guidelines (that more and more merchants do have these days) and block brand then they may be doing this to make sure they are bidding on brand when you are less likely to be checking.

You can also look out for temporary increases in traffic and sales too – this could just be where an offer has been featured on one of the deal sites but it could also be that an affiliate has sent out an unauthorised email campaign and if you’re very brand conscious then this may be against your terms and conditions.

Tip 3 – Checking Conversion rates

Again, just like with Lag times different types of affiliates and different promotional methods will give higher or lower conversion rates – someone that comes from an incentive site is likely, for example, to have a higher conversion rate and grouping / categorising your affiliates comes in handy again here.

High conversion rates will often indicate brand bidding and very low conversion rates may indicate adware/spyware so its definitely another one to check.

Tip 4 – Using Analytics

You can use Google Analytics (or other analytics packages!) to get to grips with your inbound referrers – not everything will be picked up because the traffic comes from an affiliate network but as technology evolves more information is starting to be made available here.

Bits you can look out for include:

Referrals from Webmail clients (yahoo, hotmail, etc) means that one or more of your affiliates has either featured you in their newsletter or send a solus email out.  Not indication of abuse but if it’s getting lots of clicks then you should check to see if it is something that you have provided them with or been authorised to send.

When I worked client side for a gambling company we used a few incentive sites and the volume and quality was often low but manageable – one day an incentive site decided to feature us as their main offer without telling us and it cost us a lot of money.. It would have been nice for a warning so that we could have at least budgeted for it!

Referrals from Search Engines may well show that you have affiliates using paid search and sending the traffic direct to site.  One of our clients at AffiliateFuture recently noticed this in their google logs and as the affiliate was going against the Paid search policy they were removed from the programme and their commission was revoked but they were a “house hold” name in the affiliate industry.  Perhaps an honest mistake, perhaps a deliberate one.. who knows?

If there is traffic coming through with no referrer then it may well be affiliates masking their links and removing the referrer from the users session.  Some affiliates just don’t trust networks or merchants to see where their traffic is coming from but personally I always suspect that affiliates masking their links on purpose may well be doing something against the terms.

Tip 5 – IP Addresses

This tip really speaks for itself.  Check the IP addresses for transactions, if you are seeing multiple transactions coming from IP then you may have problems.   This could be that your network is using some advance technology (so for example with Veracitag on AffiliateFuture all these transactions show on the same IP address)  but often it is more likely a someone doing something dodgy.  We kick affiliates off our network daily for filling out multiple lead forms time and time again.  It must take them ages and I can’t believe they are stupid enough to think that they won’t get caught out but there are ebooks being sold on ebay which tell people to do this to earn additional income – scary.

Tip 5 – Check the sales or leads even after you have paid out

I’ve left this tip till last as its one of the most important things that you can do and really does show where there could be fraud on your programme, not just abuse.  This may be from an affiliate or it may be from an incentive site user but the outcome is the same.

As more and more networks and merchants look to improve the validation time and payout to affiliates this can lead to potential problems.

For example, depending on your sector you should be looking for an abnormal amount of chargebacks (gaming) and returns (retail and telecoms).  Validating quickly can lead to a stronger affiliate programme but as mentioned, it’s always worth checking for abuse here.

If you’ve got a lead based programme then you should really validate the email addresses and make sure you are not paying for bounce backs too – also check how long it is before a user unsubscribes, if it’s after the first email (or before) then they have probably signed up for an incentive and you should check if you are allowing this.

I’m sure there is plenty more of this but the overall advise is there for all to see.  You will get abuse, you might even get fraud.  Plan for it, be wary of it and make sure that if you’ve got an affiliate programme you’ve also got the resource and the systems to manage it correctly and check things like this.

As the clocks stroked 12 on New Years Eve, I reflected back on the past 10 years in my life, and wow, what a ten years it’s been!

In the past 10 years I’ve done the following (in pretty much this order)..

• Left College, got a job working in a call centre for One.Tel
• After 1 month, moved from the call centre to do Tech Support for One.Tels newly launched ISP
• Was introduced to Lindsey by some friends on a trip to Birmingham
• Moved from Tech Support to Web Development for One.Tel
• Moved in with Lindsey, renting a flat in Tunbridge Wells
• Announced that Lindsey was pregnant with our first child
• Moved into a house in Tunbridge Wells
• Had our first child – Kieran, born in September 2002
• Moved up North to One.Tel Manchester office – spent 6 months living with the in-laws
• Got a house in Leyland, Lancashire
• Got married on Friday 13th August, 2004
• Announced that Lindsey was pregnant with our second son
• Moved back down to London
• Moved into Marketing Role at One.Tel
• Moved to Field and Trek as their first Internet Marketing Manager
• Jacob was born in May 2005
• Moved from Field and Trek to a dodgy mobile phone company where I stayed for all of one month
• Sold my first Affiliate Marketing site for £1,500.
• Moved to St. Minver as their first Affiliate Manager
• Launched the St. Minver affiliate platform
• Went to Barbados with AffiliateFuture for the first time
• Moved to Eyefall (now Altogether Digital) as their Affiliate Director
• Went to Barbados with AffiliateFuture for the second time
• Spoke at A4UExpo London
• Employed Ken and Renee to build a successful team at Altogether
• Announced that Lindsey was pregnant with our third son
• Moved to Head of Affiliates at AffiliateFuture
• Went to Barbados again
• Was an Usher at Simon’s Wedding (who I’ve known since I was around 3)
• Had our third child – Connor was born in December 08
• Spoke to Affiliate Summit Vegas
• Spoke at A4U Europe
• Went to Barbados again

I’ve already started to set some personal goals for the next 10 years (which includes having no more children!) and already it’s looking like a busy 2010 with lots of plans both professionally and personally.

So all that is left for me to say (albeit 5 days late) is that I’d like to wish all my readers a very happy new year – let’s hope it’s a successful one for us all!

Lots of readers of this blog may not have experienced Social Media Virtual currency platforms before, so I’ll give a quick overview, using Mafia Wars as an example.

Within Mafia Wars you’re able to use “Godfather points” to level up quicker, transferring them into topping up energy or gaining additional skill points – you get a certain amount when you start the game and can buy points using Paypal.

In addition to buying the points, you can also go and complete some CPA offers (taken from Affiliate networks) and depending on the offer and payment from the network, different points are available. So basically a glorified incentive site…

So now you have the background we’ll go onto what has happened in the past few weeks.   The Virtual currency community had a conference (Virtual Goods Summit) and Mike Arrington (Techcrunch Owner/Editor) went off at the now ex-ceo of Offerpal – a Virtual currency platform that work with the game developers.

His argument was that “most” of the offers available to the end users to get these points were “scammy” – using an example of a Mobile offer that charges a subscription of $9.99 per month; whilst I’ve never been a fan of mobile offers like this they tend to be heavily regulated these days and do normally display the details of the subscription in the terms and conditions, however these are typically ignored by the end user who is just signing up to get the free points.

The other point example that Arrington uses is Netflix (the US equivalent of Lovefilm) – saying that the quality of the users will be very poor and that they will look to get around their policy of one payout per user.

The Techcrunch article covers off all his points in more detail and is worth a read.  You can also see a follow up post by Offerpal which covers off most of the points raised.

Personally I believe that Arrington has raised some good points – but most of them have been raised badly.

Are kids stealing their parents credit cards or mobile phones and signing up for these offers?  Perhaps a small amount are, but I wouldn’t think that this is a widescope issue – the wider problem with ringtone style offers is that they are not clear enough about the costs and perhaps the developers (or the aggregators such as Offerpal) should be careful about which merchants that they work with in this sector.  Typically these offers are not scams but customers are often stupid and don’t read the terms like they should.

The Netflix example in my mind shows that Arrington doesn’t really understand the Affiliate / CPA market – companies like this are fully aware of what incentive sites are and work with them to ensure that the CPAs that they are offering work for them and are typically very analytical to ensure that this provides them with a positive ROI – Arrington seems to suggest that they don’t de-dupe correctly and states:

Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads.

I just don’t buy in to that statement above – whilst incentive sites in general may affect over CPA advertisers it’s more the cookies that they are potentially taking rather than lowering the overall payment from them.  Whilst I don’t have much knowledge of the Netflix campaign that’s certainly the case with the Lovefilms of the world who understand incentive sites and their customers very well.

So what now?

All said and done the questions that Arrington has asked have indeed started to change the landscape – Facebook (and the game developers) have taken note of the comments and are now enforcing the FB Advertising Guidelines; meaning that a number of the offers have been removed; Gambling clients, Sweepstakes, Mobile offers, etc are no longer able to use this as an advertising channel for them.

It will now be interesting to see if these guidelines are continued to be enforced (as the guidelines have been out there since July 09) as a lot of the offers removed, such as the bingo ones, are big revenue earners for the game developers and companies such as Offerpal.

As collecting data (email addresses specifically) is one of the most important parts of the Free Bingo Cards project it’s one of the first things that I’ve started working on, using an auto-responder called GetResponse.

I stumbled across GetResponse a few weeks ago when I was looking for an alternative to Aweber and was so impressed that I signed up as a paid customer straight away. It’s not let me down so far.

The main reasons for using the system are:

• It makes it very easy to collect the data – you don’t need any technical knowledge
• They have a good delivery rate
• You can do all your newsletter sends from it – it does all the opt-ins (validating the email addresses) and unsubscribes for you – taking out lots of the hard work!
• Most importantly – it lets you set auto responders based on the number of days since the user signed up, so you can setup 10 different offers over 10 different weeks and just change them across the board when you analyse the conversion rates.

So for the Bingo site I’ve started to pull of some email creative from the affiliate networks that I work with and setup the different auto mails. I’ve also customised the signup aspects (confirmation page, etc) but need to make a decision on what data I collect – i.e. just the name and email from the off or do I try and get more data (postcodes, etc) that will come in handy for non-bingo email campaigns in the future?

The next job is going to be designing the template and deciding between using Wordpress/Drupal or just some flat HTML. More on that next week…

I’ve been thinking about starting a new affiliate project for a while now – not really with the aim of making a huge amount of cash out of it (though I can always live in hope), but more because I haven’t built anything new for a while and feel it’s about time to do so – like many others I enjoy the buzz of seeing those earnings come through from a new site for the first time which is reason enough.

So I’ve dug out a domain I purchased a while ago – FreeBingoCards.org.uk.   I’ve found in the past that .org.uk domains have ranked quite well; especially on MSN but it’s obviously a hugely competitive space.

The first stage when I start a new site is generally to brainstorm a few ideas on how I want the site to work, so here goes:

• Data capture will be an important part of the site, including the opt-in process so that I can market to these email addresses with offers in the future.
• After a user has signed up I’ll put together an auto-mail path – so I’ll get creative from a number of bingo sites and send a different email each week.  Gathering the email creative may take a while!
• Need to make a decision on if I use a CMS like Drupal for the site, or just build it in flat HTML… still undecided on this.
• After I’ve put the main template together, I’ll start by reviewing the top 10 bingo merchants based on their Hitwise or Alexa rankings.

The next step is going to be to put together a calendar with some deadlines of when I want each stage of the site finished – I often find that this helps with making sure that I stay on track with the timelines and can plan it around the kids parties and the TV schedule!

I’ll look to do at least one post a week on the blog with an update on this project until it’s live and then keep the updates going once I’ve started the link building and traffic generation.

Suggestions and feedback are always welcome!

A few days ago I found one of my new favourite iPhone apps – Stanza.

My typically journey time each day is around 2/2.5 hours and I generally spend the time reading books but sometimes they are thousands of pages and can be a bit of a pain to carry around.. I looked at the Kindle and whilst it looked pretty good, it’s yet another item to carry around with me on a daily basis and is the kind of gadget I’d buy and use a few times before it ends up in gadget heaven, aka, my bedside cabinet with the Archos, PSP and DSi.

A quick google search revealed a free ebook app for my iPhone, Stanza.  Once downloaded it gives you the chance to download books from either some free stores or buy them and download straight to your phone from other ebook stores…. this is all well and good but the best bit for me is the Desktop application (also free) that allows you to convert any existing ebook that you have and Sync it via Wifi straight onto your phone.. Within minutes I had the Terry Goodkind novel that I am currently reading transferred onto the phone and into my pocket, probably saving me from developing arthritis later in life.

I also got a free Google reader app recently that lets you tweet / share stories quickly and easily aswell as bringing a few other useful features that make it easier to use than the typical webapp, so another one to try if you’re a news junkie and have plenty of time to spare on public transport.

This news is almost a week old now, but I’ve not seen it appear much in affiliate circles as of yet.  Back on 15th October there was a post on Search Engine Land about Yahoo announcing the end of their Paid Search Inclusion programme.

For the unaware, Yahoo offered two products – Search Submit Basic, which charged an annual fee, and Search Submit Pro, a CPC based programme.  Whilst it’s been free for spiders to come and crawl sites for a long time these packages allowed you to be a lot more flexible about your Yahoo search – allowing you to change items such as the descriptions and also by paying a CPC allowed clients to increase their organic search listings.

There are also a few very large affiliates who have built their model around this method and worked with a number of large blue chip brands in the Affiliate market space; essentially replacing the clients organic Yahoo listings with their affiliate links but increasing their overall rankings for some competitive search terms on a CPA basis – one of them was apparently TD and CJ’s second largest UK affiliate and responsible for huge amounts of revenue / commission.

I’m sure that these companies will find other channels to utilise and after the Microsoft deal was announced it was inevitable that it would happen but whilst a bit old school it’s a shame to see this advertising method come to an end and I do wonder what effect it will have with some of the networks that they will have generated millions of pounds worth of sales with.

I’ve not blogged in a while, but after a few people moaned at me at the rather excellent Expo about it, I thought it was time to try and get a bit more going again.

So I’ll start this with a rant.   As regular readers will know, as well as now working for a network I still operate a couple of affiliate sites which pay for some beer tokens every now and again – not as much as I would like, but with a wife, three kids and a full time job it’s difficult to find the time!

Anyhow – when I apply to programmes it is generally with the explicit aim of doing some revenue with them, perhaps I’ve purchased a niche domain and want to use them on this site for example.  I don’t sign up to every programme under the sun as some affiliates will do.

Today I received notification that I had been suspended/removed from one of the programmes that I am signed up to due to lack of activity.  It’s not the first time that this has happened but does lead me once again to ask why there is such a lack of understanding from merchants that do this?  Do the networks advise their merchants that it’s a stupid idea? I believe they should…

The only good reason I’ve ever heard for this is that some networks charge merchants on a CPM for their banners being displayed, and the costs for this are sometimes more than the commission being paid – but this is more of an issue in the states from what I understand.

I challenge anyone to give me another decent reason for this, especially for a retailer.

I would suggest that any merchant who has thought about doing this thinks again for the following reasons:

• Just because I’m not promoting you currently doesn’t mean I won’t in the future
• If you reject me, I will just use your competitors in the future and you’ll be the ones losing out
• If you communicate with your affiliates via newsletters then just by being signed up I’m likely to receive and read these looking for more opportunities – surely the more affiliates that read this the better

I’m all for rejecting specific affiliates if their harming your brand / reputation but just culling all the non-active affiliates really is stupid.

After watching the Apprentice this year I decided, like many people, that I could probably do a much better job than most of the ones on the show so applied to take part in Series 6 that goes into production in Setpember.

Much to my shock I got accepted received an email on Thursday 2nd asking me to come for an interview on Friday 10th July.  Last year Steve (another employee of AffiliateFuture) also went for an interview but didn’t get past the first round so I was quite excited at the prospect of beating him!

The terms sounded awful though – ignoring the fact that you sign all your rights away it’s something that I couldn’t ever do – it potentially lasts 8 weeks and the email tells us that you only get 1 call per week to your friends and family.   I also love the job that I do and wasn’t interested in selling TV’s to Hospitals which is apparently what Yasmina, this year’s winner, is now doing!
So today I went to the interviews – I told the whole company about it and went purely for a bit of a giggle.

My interview time was meant to be at 3.45pm – I took off half a day from work and filled out the application form just hours before turning up – here are some of the questions on the form:

• What is the most INTERESTING thing about you?
• What tactics would you use on The Apprentice to make sure you win?
• What makes you DIFFERENT from all the other people applying for The Apprentice?
• Who is your role model (excluding Sir Alan Sugar), and why?
• How would someone who knows you well describe your best points?
• What makes you angry?
• What is the worst lie you have ever told?

As you can imagine some of those were quite difficult to imagine – I won’t go over my responses (as I don’t think I’ve saved them anywhere) but after his suggestion I did put Mark Smith (CEO of TMN Group) as my role model, partly because he suggested it but mostly because I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for him!

So onto the interviews…  I got there to a pretty large queue of people and realised that I certainly wasn’t going to get to see anyone at 3.45pm and was standing around talking to some of the others guys and girls for around till around 4.30pm when our group finally got seen… Everyone’s surname began with L that was around me by at least an hour so that gives you an idea of how long the auditions go on for.

Once inside we were sat in the waiting area (which was actually full – I had to stand) and called out in groups of 12 people.

Once called out you go into another room where there are 12 numbers on the floor and a desk in front of us with two senior producers – we were told that we had 30 seconds each to convince them why you we should be in the Apprentice and why we should get through to the next stage, each number was called our randomly and there wasn’t much time to prepare.  She did say that it was up to us if we wanted to make them laugh, cry or impressed within that time period.

I had to decide what to say – should I be honest and tell them that I didn’t really *want* to be the next apprentice?  Everyone was doing quite well and then my number was read out and I said something along these lines:

Hi my name is J Lil, formally known as James Little and the company I work for provide online marketing services.  I feel slightly guilty about being up here as I have a fantastic job that I enjoy but believe I have a tremendous amount of talent that I would love to showcase in front of the world.  I also promised myself and had a bet on that I’d get further than a colleague of mine called Steve who only made it this far last time.

My 30 seconds were over and I was impressed with the fact that I got the truth about Steve in there after all.

Once everyone has finished they called out three numbers (out of the 12) who then progress to the next stage; I was shocked to find I was one of them, perhaps they wanted to help me win that bet.

Next the three of us were taken to another waiting room and informed that the next stage would be a one on one interview with the video camera filming it – apparently there is meant to be a first one on one before this but it was running late in the day and they were over an hour behind schedule.

At this point I’d managed to speak to a few of the production staff and ask a couple of questions and was absolutely positive that I didn’t want to get any further – according to some of the friendly people I spoke to the show isn’t everything you would imagine.. If the 16 hour day tasks are not enough to put you off then being pretty much under house arrest when not doing tasks was a little too much for me, even if it did mean that the world would have to cope without seeing me on their TV screens for a while longer.

So after another 20 minutes or so of waiting around I was called in for my interview… they went over some of the questions in the application form and towards the end I told them that I honestly wasn’t interested in going any further and could find better use of my time off work as it doesn’t sound like the most fun experience; I didn’t want to waste anymore of anyone’s time and the interview was over and I got up to leave.

So that’s my Apprentice experience over with – it was an interesting afternoon where I met some very nice people but I can honestly say that I’m glad I bailed out and happy that I beat Steve past the first round which was my ultimate goal.   I’d miss my family, friends and job too much for the length of the production and if I’m honest, I’m not Alan Sugars biggest fan.

Good luck to anyone that attends these interviews and I look forward to watching the show without me in it!

Not sure if anyone noticed but according to an article in the Telephraph on Saturday, Quidco is going to have a management buy-in this week by Michael Murphy, of friends reunited fame.   His appoinment as Executive Chairman has also been confirmed on their blog.

A lot has changed for Quidco over the past year – many people will remember the public falling out with Affiliate Window and whilst two very different sides of the story were told by each party it’s fair to say that despite some saying it would be the start of the end for Quidco they have continued to be the biggest cashback/reward site out there – double the size of their nearest competitor according to Hitwise stats.

There has also been a lot of new staff members – Tyson and Laura the two most recent recruits and both from buy.at.  There was also an advert in one of the big newspapers recently too so they are certainly looking at new ways of getting members.

Whilst it’s unclear what impact Michael will have on the business in the short term it’s fair to say that Quidco seems unstoppable at the moment and if the additional money & resource helps with more advertising then their possition as the most visited cashback site is unlikely to change anytime soon.