You’re in quite a good possition then.

You can quite clearly see what affiliates are promoting the program and getting sales and introduce yourself & talk about how you can improve the figures further.

As well as that, you can speak to all the affiliates who may be promoting the program but not getting clicks / sales or may have signed up but still don’t promote the campaign. You can encourage them, incentivise them and do anything else that might help both your program and their income.

At the end of your comment you then say something very interesting (well, interesting to me!).

> Exposure is great but why do I need affiliates who don’t do anything

> I would rather give commission to those hardworking webmasters who keep current with campaigns and banners

At the end of the day – you WILL be giving commission to these affiliates, even if the others are still on the program.

It can take a long time to activate an affiliate but you can bet your bottom dollar (is that the right term?) that after kicking an affiliate off a program for no good reason they won’t be back.

Thanks for visiting the blog and taking part in the discussions!

James

However, to say “you’re underperforming, so we’re kicking you out”, that’s a new one, haven’t come across this before. Agencies need to understand the importance of small affiliates and their potential: the long tail of affiliates is equally important to the “super affiliates”. They’re costing you less, they are more consistent, they respect you more, why treat them like dirt?
Was there a term when joining the merchant “I shall only join if I pledge to provide 100 sales per month”?

The great thing about affiliate marketing is that the merchant doesn’t have to pay anything unless a sale is generated. So if for example an affiliate is displaying a banner which for one reason or another doesn’t directly generate sales, but puts Merchant X’s logo in front of a large number of users. Merchant X is infact getting something for nothing. If Merchant X has a well known brand the user may well automatically think of Merchant x and visit them directly when they actually do want to make a purchase. In a kind of subliminal… ‘Why did I think of that’, Derren Brown sort of way!

Any merchants out there who have done this please enlighten me… Are networks started to charge per affiliate on the program? If this was the case I could understand the cull, but to the best of my knowledge they don’t… IMHO it’s just a lack of awareness of affiliate marketing and a rather heavy handed approach to try and kick start a program which might not be doing so well. A little more carrot and less stick is needed here perhaps!

I can in some small instances see how or why this may happen as there are situations where a merchant does contact the affiliates (either in bulk or individually) and asks what can be changed to help them get better results or to contact the merchant with suggestions, but they aren’t interested.

I know of merchants that have noticed that there is something wrong or could be tweaked on affiliate’s sites and suggested that if they looked into it, it would help convert and make more sales and many of them still aren’t interested.

I guess it’s a case of leave the non performing affiliates alone and concentrate on those that are interested. Is it worth having loads of affiliates onboard that won’t do anything but send a couple of clicks through and have no interest in trying to improve when you offer them the extra help?

Networks are setup so that the account management can handle thousands of affiliates no matter on the volume – this is the reason they exist after all.

The point here is that the agency feel that having too many affiliates on their program is hard to manage, but having managed programs with thousands of programs previously I would not say that this is such a big chore – it’s important to try and get non-performing affiliates to react to an offer or program but kicking them off the program is not the right way to do it.

OK, sure tracking is an automated process, but dealing with the reality of tech support, day to day admin and payments involves a cost. If 1000 low performing affiliates cost more to administer than they make in profit for the networks, then surely it’s a fair game for the networks to carry out a cull.

IMHO, unless you can see all the numbers in front of you it’s hard to tell whether the networks are being fair or just plain greedy.

A lot of sites are slow burners or just create a steady, but very small stream of sales. The EPC argument is rubbish anyway, some of the smallest affiliates get excellent EPC’s just not enough of the ‘C’s!

If I were you I’d get hold of the merchant’s contact details and ask them directly, I’m sure that’ll stir a few people into action, and you might pick up some tips to get you onto a higher tier.

A more proactive approach might be to hold an open day for inactive affiliates to try to get a bit more action, rather than slinging them out of the programme, but I guess that’s just too much like hard work for some people.

I can’t say I’d ever do it, or recommend it, but neither can I say that I can’t see that there are some advantages. Particularly on programmes where clients are keen to protect and monitor their brand.