Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

I should make it clear from the start that I do not have a problem with the idea of voucher or cashback sites – I often use them myself when I do my online shopping and ensure that when topping up my house insurance I use them to get some great CPAs!

But whilst networks, merchants and the affiliates themselves are happy seeing the sales come in, more and more affiliates are seeing a negative effect on their sales as customers €œget smart€ and cookies are overridden by these sites.

So is there a solution?

There have been a couple of suggestions.  One is that merchants should set up their sites so that if the visitor comes via affiliate traffic a discount code field is not available or that across the board discounts are not needed for returning customers.

Another mentioned a few times is that networks should create the ability to ensure that cookies are not overridden when visitors use cashback / discount code sites but this has yet to be implemented as far as I am aware.

In an effort to restrict my own views I thought it would be fun to ask a few affiliates what they think about the issue.

Wardy, a popular character in the industry said he has concerns about it all;

€œI think that all it does is benefit the minority and the majority get shafted by such sites€, so what would be the solution? €œIf there was a way that if one affiliates cookie was replaced by a voucher site cookie within a small time frame then there could be some split commission€ he continued.

Peter Dickenson from Affiliate Future had a very different view;

€œI think it’s more an issue for merchants than affiliates.  Customers are changing their buying word of mouth as people are looking for more discount codes and returning customers are costing more€

Mark from myvouchercodes.co.uk – one of the larger voucher code sites had a bit to say about the matter:

€œI do feel that voucher sites provide sales without taking other affiliates last cookie etc, because we have nearly 200,000 people subscribed to our email newsletter, 2 million unique visitors a month, customised email alerts etc a lot of our visitors are return visitors, so they come to sites like mine as a way to shop online, not as a simple last minute look for a discount code€

In summary

I’d love to see some more comments from all areas of the industry about what they would do (if anything) to resolve this issue.  I really do think that technology is the key here and I expect to see some changes over the coming months from pro-active networks that see this as a real issue.

If you managed to catch yesterdays article focused around brand name bidding then you may remember that the second part of the article was still to come and on another hot topic in the affiliate industry – merchant de-duping.

For those of you that are unaware it’s potentially worth reminding us all what I mean by de-duping before going on to talk about how I feel that it’s a disgrace that networks let merchants get away with it.

Imagine for a moment the following customer journey€¦

A web user, who we’ll call Bob, decides that they are in the market for a widget and goes searching on the web for different widget reviews to find the right one.  After spending a long time finding what he feels is the right widget Bob eventually clicks on the link to widgetstore.com.  He decides that he is not going to pay straight away (maybe he does not have the cash till pay day, maybe he wants to check with his wife, Margret first – who knows).  A few days later Bob decides to go ahead with it but as he didn’t bookmark the widget review site he searches for widgetstore.com and clicks on their PPC advert.

Bob pays for the item and is happy to find out that his item will be delivered in just a few days time.  Bob is happy, Widgetstore.com is happy but all of a sudden the Widget review site owner is not.

What happened, I hear you cry?  Well the agency that looks after the widgetstore.com marketing has decided that the sale did not originate from the widget review site, even if the cookie triggered, they have decided that it was of course their hard work in bidding on the widgetstore.com brand name that got the customer into buying mode and rejected the affiliate sale for that very reason – makes their CPA look a little bit lower too.

I may use a little comedy above but the reality is far from funny.   As merchants and agencies €œget smart€ more de-duping is done both network and client side and it’s not just brand terms in my mind that are unjustifiably causing affiliates to lose out on commission.

Yes – we all know that the last click €œwins€ is an industry standard but the issue here is massive and brings more questions than answers, here’s a few that I have..

1)    Why should content affiliates who spend hours and hours every day writing quality comparisons like the ones on widgets suffer and lose out because of multiple activity occurring.
2)    What kind of response do you think you would get from google if you tried to claw back the valid fees because of de-duplication?
3)    Why should affiliate networks sit on their back and let this happen?
4)    Why do affiliates have to put up with this crap.

I work in an agency and would never dream of doing this.  Here is an example of how we work it.

We work on an affiliate campaign and a huge PPC campaign with a sports retailer.  As part of the reporting process we look for duplications of order numbers across both the affiliate and PPC campaign.

We report back to the client on this happening and explain (quite rightly) that affiliates should not be screwed over just because the customer was not in €œbuy€ mode.  We explain that if we were to start reversing sales then less and less content affiliates would be in business and eventually it would get harder to get the sales in the first place.

Report – do not punish!

So how does it get sorted?

I think networks need to take a stance here and stop letting the retailers think they can get away with this; perhaps there is a better level of tracking required to stop it from causing problems and perhaps the last click wins needs to be revisited.

At the very, very, very minimum I think that the industry needs to ensure that the situation above in relation to widgetstore.com does not happen – perhaps de-duping will never go away but it should not happen on the brand name level like it is now.

There have been a few buyouts in the affiliate market place recently, and specifically with networks:

• Buy.at didn’t tell us what they sold for, but industry mags are saying around £70m
• Affiliate Future deal went through the courts yesterday for £10m
• DGM did the whole management buyout thing

And now I will give you my own prediction… first a bit of silence so I can concentrate…

*silence*

Mystic James predicts that the next acquisition, announced within the next 3 months will be the buyout of Affiliate Window.

That’s right folks – you read it here first.  It’s based purely on speculation and the fact that I had someone coming to my site on the search term “Affiliate Window buyout”!

Good luck with the sale Kevin!

Ever since I can remember there have been some strong views in the affiliate marketing world about brand name bidding and the latest hot topic in the industry is merchants de-duping their sales and reversing potential commissions to affiliates.

As someone that runs an affiliate network and someone that has in the past run a few affiliate sites I’ve been meaning to jot down some works about both for a while now and have finally found a few minutes to do so.

So let’s start with brand name bidding€¦

My view is quite clear – as a merchant there are very few reasons to allow brand name bidding – the only ones I can think of are:

a) You have a brand that is not possible to get trademarked
b) You’ve been waiting for ages to google to protect your trademarked brand
c) You don’t rank in position #1 in the organic search results

I’d welcome suggestions for other reasons but if your network is suggesting you allow it there is one clear reason why; they will make money from it.

I’ll highlight two things I have seen that show why on earth this is so mucked up.

A client being bullied by his affiliates

We were talking to a client based in American who sells online software. This client allows affiliates to bid on their very well known brand name and we suggested that they do this themselves and stop affiliates from doing so.

I was shocked when the client said they had spoken to their existing network and some of the affiliates and were told that if the policy changed, a number of the affiliates would stop promoting them and they would loose sales; essentially he explained that he felt he was being held to ransom by his affiliates but because they needed the sales they would allow this to happen.

What kind of world are we in when a client is saying he is being held to ransom by his affiliates!!

A network back hander

I’ve made it quite clear on previous occasions that when I have done affiliate work (especially the limited PPC I have done) I do not work with any programs that I manage; I feel this is an ethical decision that I have stuck to for years.

While we’re talking of ethics, imagine my surprise when a very large network that we were working with suggested to me that if we allowed a small closed group of brand name biddings, they would suggest that I myself was on that group.

Obviously I turned this offer down but imagine that this is not the first case of it happening.

So who should bid on the brand?

There are two very simple things you should do here/allow here:

1) Either set up your own campaign on Google, Yahoo and MSN for brand terms and bid on them yourself – you won’t need a large budget for this
2) If you work with an agency (on a % of media spend rather than % of sale basis) then get them to setup the campaign to do this, it will work out a lot cheaper.

I’d welcome further comments and suggestions from affiliates, merchants, agencies or networks about other reasons to allow this but still find it strange that there are so many closed groups for brands that really don’t need to waste money in this way.

Make sure that you come back to the blog soon for part 2 of my rant about merchant de-duping of sales!

I thought I would jump to the defense against the vicious rumors about my hair that seem to have been going around the industry over the past few weeks.

Apparently some unscrupulous people have been saying that I need a hair cut, saying that the current style is a little “out of control”.

In my defense I have decided to announce to the world the real reason why I have not had it cut for a while – because I aim to become a rock star.

I’ve started up a band with a few friends called “Cats in the Kitchen” and am looking for a venue for our first sell out gig.   We’ve got one song so far which is also entitled “Cats in the Kitchen” and goes something like this.

CATS IN THE KITCHEN what we going to doooooo?
MEEEEOOWWWW
YEAHHH!!!!
ROCK AND ROLL BABY!!!!!!!

A solo guitar piece then follows and in all honesty that’s about as far as I’ve got, but I think you’ll agree that we’re onto something.