Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

Every couple of months we seem the same issue reoccurring in the affiliate industry - a bright spark somewhere decides to €œreview€ their affiliate base and kick off affiliates who may not be sending a high volume of clicks or sales. Here is a copy of an email received from the latest culprit:

Merchant X is currently under going a review of their affiliate activities. We are looking to ensure Merchant X partners with Affiliates driving high volume traffic and sales to merchantx.com.

As part of this process we are looking to remove affiliates who are not delivering the desired threshold on these metrics from the program.

After reviewing the clicks and sales delivered from your website in the last 3 months, you have not met our minimum threshold. Thus, it is with regret that we will be suspending you from the Merchant X program. This will take effect 7 days from receipt of this email.

Please ensure that all Merchant X advertising material including banners, text copy, XML information and logos are removed from your website.

If you are looking to increase your marketing activities for Merchant X over the coming months and feel the clicks and sales measured are not reflective of your potential performance - please get in contact with one of the Merchant X affiliate marketing team to discuss your potential options.

Please don’t hesitate to contact a member of our Affiliate team regarding any queries or questions. However if wish to do so please ensure you quote your Affiliate ID.

So what possible reasons are there for doing this? As an affiliate manager I struggle to find the answer to that question; it has been suggested in the past that kicking off the low performing affiliates will help increase the EPC (Earnings per 100 clicks), but in doing so you can be losing valuable sales.

Officially the reason for the cull is because it will make it easier for the agency handling the campaign to manage, but surely it’s better to ENCOURAGE these affiliates rather than suspend / kick them off the program?

Why does this keep happening? Unfortunately it is giving agencies a bad name - a shame considering some of them (including the one I work for, obviously) are really trying to help improve the industry and get more merchants involved.

If anyone can think of a good reason to cull affiliates please do comment and let us all know.

It’s been a hectic few weeks and as such I have not updated the blog for a while - the idea was that I had a load of content in my head that I wanted to jot down on the way to the Bristol Affiliate event last Friday; a good idea that ended up being spoiled by flooding and a distinct lack of trains.

So what have the past few weeks entailed?

A lot of work€¦

Firstly I’ve taken on a new member of staff (this officially happened just before I went to Barbados) who has been doing a fantastic job so far.

I’ve started working on a few more affiliate programs (we now have seven programs either running or soon to be running)

I’ve managed to bag myself a shiny new black macbook and seeing as I’m running Linux (Ubuntu) at home this means I’m now living a windows free life. It also means I can work better on the go as I have MySQL, Apache and PHP all up and running locally.

More Affiliate Work…

Whilst I may have been finding it hard to find time to think, I have managed to find a little time not only to get the building blocks in place for a few new sites, but also to start to teach Lindsey (my wife) a little more about how affiliate marketing works and get her to start doing some content for a freebie site, motivating her to allowing her to spend all the profits at Lush.

I’m also happy to say that I’ve been invited by Matt to speak at the A4UEXPO in October - it’s building up to be a great event so it will be nice to see a few of you there.

And Lastly€¦

It seems that more and more Affiliate Events are now being organised on Facebook - if you’ve not signed up yet I really would say it’s a good idea.  The next one is on Thursday in Covent Garden so if you’re in town do pop along and say hello.   Hopefully I’ll find some more time over the next few days to actually put up the posts that I’ve been meaning to do for the past month or two.

I was directed to the Curve training site today and thought it was worth a mention.   It’s something that’s been on the cards for a while and it’s great to see it up and running with the first course organised for 3rd September.

Curve is a killer team with Jess Luthi, Helen Porter and Brendon Scott - all well known names in the industry and some of the nicest people I have met.   Courses are on Affiliate Marketing, PPC and SEO and I am sure that they will all be very successful and fill the seats.

The only criticism that I have is the fact that I am saying how good the courses will be and they don’t even have an affiliate program for me to use to get some cash for my kind words!

In all seriousness courses are a while off yet but if you are serious about learning about the industry and advancing your skills I can think of no better teachers

Earlier today I posted an article about the Direct Line Affiliate program (on OMG) and their new above the line TV advertising. I have a fair few readers on the blog so was unsurprised to see some traffic come though straight away but was quite amazed at how quickly google picked up on the article.

As you can see below I received a couple of visitors starting from just 1pm come though to the site - seeing as it was around 10pm that I posted the article that means it took just three hours to get into the serps for these terms.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a term rank so quickly but the first time I’ve really measured it - I do wonder if this is a result of the normal google web spider or something to do with the blog spider; whatever it is it’s pretty damn good though.

I also ping a few different servers (list in the SEO Wordpress Guide I wrote in January) which may have something to do with it.  An example of this would be that another site that I run powered by wordpress recently ranked for a targeted keyword before I pointed even 1 link at it (or wrote any decent content)!  Google wasn’t displaying any links to the site either, so the only explanation I could come up with was that I posted some tests blog posts and got picked up from the pings.

Last month Direct Line, a large motor/home insurance company in the UK, decided to launch an above the line advertising campaign against what are known as €œAggregator€ sites.

Essentially these sites includes the likes of moneysupermarket & confused.com which allow you to enter in personal details and then provide you with quotes for your insurance; whilst acting as 3rd parties it’s fair to say that they are paid for new customers they send to the insurers, & may well promote some companies more, based on these payments.

Direct Line have claimed that these sites are simply middlemen and that the best way for customers to go is direct. In a Telegraph interview, Direct Line said the reasons for the ads were that they:

wanted to reassert our position that Direct Line always cuts out the middleman….By their very nature, these sites are focused primarily on price. As our ads make clear, we offer unique benefits which can’t easily be conveyed in an online best-buy table.

It therefore makes sense why Direct Line would refuse to use aggregator & comparisson sites (even if I don’t agree with their statement, this has been its policy since its launch - the ads just reassert this). But what is slightly strange is that they are still running an affiliate program.

Surely all affiliates are also middlemen and using them seems to go against their statement above. At the same time, Cashback sites such as Greasypalm & Quidco have recently been banned from the Direct Line program. Cashback sites offer money back to their customers when they complete an action such as taking out a new insurance policy and send all traffic directly to their merchant site; whilst we can see that they act as the sort of middlemen Direct Line want to exclude, they at least pass benefits on to the user in the form of cash, which normal affiliates do not.

Price comparison sites (and Cashback sites) have certainly changed the way lots of people shop and it will be interesting to see if Direct Lines’ high profile campaign will influence anyone else to follow suite. We would be really interested to get the views of Cashback and Price comparison sites on this advertising campaign and if they feel that if will convince potential customers to go direct; we’d also love to hear from Direct Line about how they differentiate comparisson sites, affiliates & cash back schemes.

It’s back to the real world after a week away in Barbados for the Affiliate Future 2007 Affiliate Incentive. Whilst I still have the jet lag I’m starting get back into the rhythm of things and already trying to look of ways of getting there again next year.

This really is one of the best incentives out there (though I think that they should take us to an all inclusive resort so we don’t need to worry about paying for food and drink) and as an affiliate manager have now sponsored affiliates two years in a row and would advice other merchants to do the same - it doesn’t cost much and can lead to a very positive ROI.

Ignoring the networking, workshops and speed dating sessions (!) there were a number of excursions this year, the best of which being the Jolly Rodger (a pirate ship) where the rum flowed throughout on our first full day on the Island.

Also managed to take a journey to the north point of the Island in a mini moke (with the brakes failing a few times!) to an amazing cave with a glorious natural lake that we were able to swim in - absolutely amazing.

Harbour Lights was one of the best nights on the Island - an all you can drink place for about £12 where a number of us performance a fantastic buttercup rendition on the stage followed by a dance off (which I apparently won) with some locals.

So much more I could write, but will not bore you with. A massive thank you goes out to Pete, Costa, Mary & everyone else at Affiliate Future for organising the conference and fingers crossed that I get invited again next year.