De-Duping and brand name bidding – part 2 of 2
15 Feb
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.
An interesting two parter blog posting. What is disconcernting that Part 1 could seem quite obvious who it is. I did a straw poll from a few people & the answer was unanimous. Obviously we don’t know for sure
As for de-duping, this is another piece of detail which illustrates we don’t know the real deal, and this should go on any merchant information page along with are we getting paid gross or net of vat, which was asked many moons ago and still today we see lethargy.
I am copy-pasting from an article I wrote a few moons ago on this subject (it never got to be published, can’t imagine why :-p). It’s a bit long, apologies:
Cross-channel local tracking and channel overlap
One thing you need to be very wary of is merchants who pay on last referrer across the board, using click through parameters in all their marketing activities to identify the referrer in their local tracking. As mentioned, affiliate marketing works on the basis that last referring affiliate/network gets the order. This logic does not apply to other online marketing channels. If a merchant, apart from the affiliates, is engaging in SEM & SEO, email marketing, has direct affiliates (like Kelkoo for instance) and lists in places like ebay and amazon marketplace, these marketing channels should not be part of the €œlast referrer€ equation in the merchant’s local tracking. The merchant can set click through parameters to all of them in order to track activity, but not to include this information in the Local Cookie overwriting any information on previous channels. Why, one will ask. The obvious answer is that the merchant is comparing apples with pears: the payment model for each one of these channels is completely different. If all the channels are remunerated in the same way, then they are equal and the merchant has every right to be comparing them. But, they are not. SEO and email marketing (newsletters sent by the merchant to their subscribers) are not paid-for; the merchant isn’t paying for every click/sale resulting from their natural listings or from their newsletter. Sure, both cost money to set up and maintain, but that cost is indirect. SEM and listings in price comparison/directories/shopping channels are all paid by click. It’s the traffic you pay for. You can’t NOT pay for those clicks. The merchant can’t say €œoh, sorry, I’m only paying for clicks to have resulted in sales€. With affiliates however, the merchant CAN AVOID paying the commission. The affiliates are paid when the traffic they have sent over generates orders. The merchant, seeing that they can apply local tracking to all their channels, avoids paying the -costly- commission by attributing the order to another channel. If the affiliates were paid cpc, then the merchant wouldn’t be able to claw back those clicks to not have resulted in sales. In other words, the merchant shouldn’t be applying local tracking across all their marketing channels overwriting cookies in order to define the last referring channel to have resulted in an order. They can apply local tracking to store information on all the channels a customer has had to go through before placing an order, so as to see the combination that results in a sale: the winning combination. If the majority of their customers have to go through price comparison, affiliates and PPC, then that’s the marketing channels they need to mostly focus on.
In the UK it’s becoming more and more frequent that merchants in specific sectors (travel mostly) include in the last referrer equation their PPC. A couple of years ago, this would not have been acceptable. Nowadays, it’s on the verge of acceptability, because more merchants choose to go down this road and the competition rules are changing. My personal opinion is that it’s still not entirely justified, so personally I oppose to my merchants applying this to their affiliates as well. It’s common sense that a customer who has been convinced by two different channels to shop from a particular site will search for that site in a search engine right before shopping. It’s also common knowledge that a merchant should/would occupy the first spot in sponsored links, so it’s inevitable that the customer will click on that link. To claim that the order was a result of their PPC however is far-fetched, or even absurd, and annuls all marketing rules, on and off line.
However, if their PPC has started to become acceptable to be included in the equation, their SEO and email marketing is not. These channels should not be included in the last referrer at all. One strong argument against the newsletter: an affiliate has referred a customer to the merchant; the customer, although interested in the merchant, doesn’t shop immediately, but signs up to the newsletter, which the affiliate is not compensated for. The customer receives a newsletter from the merchant with some interesting new products, clicks through and buys. Why is this order a newsletter order rather than an affiliate order? If the merchant wants to attribute the order to the newsletter, they should pay the affiliate for the newsletter subscription. Whatever the case though, the merchant can’t have the cake and eat it, ie get the order and not pay for it.
The beauty of online marketing is that everything is traceable down to the last detail; each and every impression and click can be attributed to a particular referrer. However, the referrer doesn’t necessarily indicate the sole responsible for that order. The referrer, when viewed as the cause for an effect (action) unfortunately distorts reality. Up until about a decade ago, merchants were pumping money in various advertising channels in hope that they would get consumers to part with their money. Online advertising has changed that, in the sense that merchants no longer have to blindly spend money; they can see the effectiveness of each channel within a very short period of time and they can adjust their budgets accordingly. Why this is a bad thing? Because we have now started to move to the new mentality that everything is measurable. Merchants have forgotten (or conveniently ignore) that a customer is buying from them as a result of having been exposed to this particular merchant from a number of different sources. A customer buys from this specific merchant because they have seen their TV ad, they have come across their press placements, they saw them coming up top on price comparisons, they have been given a discount voucher for them and they have been recommended by a number of sites the customer has visited. What resulted in the order? What made the customer actually buy from this merchant? The tracking (referrer) says it was as a result of the customer going in google and typing the merchant’s brand. The tracking doesn’t take under account that the customer used a discount code provided by a network affiliate, that the customer had run a price comparison on Kelkoo, that the customer had been exposed to offline advertising. All this channel overlap is not measurable at the moment. The merchant can’t attribute the order to one source; the order is the effect of a number of sources affecting in their own way the consumer’s behaviour. A customer needs to be exposed to a minimum of 2-3 different channels before making up their mind. A merchant needs to be recommended to them from a variety of sources to be convinced to part with their money.
As more and more people go online and become internet-savvy, this minimum channel overlap will grow bigger. Brand loyalty becomes less and less important to consumers online. They will shop from wherever they get the best deal, so the merchant and its marketing channels need to convince the customer every time, for every order. The customer won’t go back to them just because they’ve shopped before and were happy with the service. Every time they shop, they research. And that is precisely the reason why merchants need the affiliates – they help them retain their existing customers, they help them re-convince them that this is where they want to place their order with.
maybe this part should have been first
i wish I would see this kind of view point more often.
spot on Billy-Bob!
Hope all is well!
p.s. Hero – you got a summary version. Just got back from witnessing an attempted murder and need to get my self some nice Mount Gay to numb the nerves!
the short version? Yeah, sure, it’s called phonecall :-p