Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

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.

Seriously - I don’t understand why retailers STILL insist on having stupidly long or complicated forms that get in the way of people trying to buy something.

Here’s a good example.

This evening I was attempting to purchase something on  for my son for Christmas.  I found the item I wanted, went to the checkout, selected to pay via paypal (nice to have the option) and then ebuyer presented me with a long signup form.  I had to firstly spend a few minutes to fill in everything and wonder why on earth they need a memorable date for gods sake - it’s more secure than my bank!  Next I tried to submit and it told my my username was already taken (it took about 5 attemps to find a memorable one that wasn’t) and I didn’t read the password stuff correctly - not only did it ask for a combination of letters AND numbers but also asked for a combination of CAPS and non caps.

For the love of god guys - it does NOT need to be that secure and all you are doing is putting people off the checkout process and sending them to a competitor!

I’m sad tonight.  My (work) Macbook died.  I’ve had it for all of about 2 months, decided that as my iTunes database was getting pretty big (8gb) I would back it up.

Went through the backup process and about half way through writing to the first DVD it all froze up.  Did a hard reboot and now it won’t boot up & the disk is making some funny noises.

A bit of googling leads me to believe that it’s a HDD crash and that I have not got much chance of seeing my data again, and that I could be without my laptop for a few weeks, which would suck.

It’s a sad day - ever since getting the macbook I’ve been configuring it, buying some great software and generally enjoying being on a mac again.

I’m off to cry myself to sleep

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.

A friday funny for you all.

See if you can spot the hard part of this journey from London to Chicago (point 37 if you get a bit lost along the way).

This was posted on the a4uforum today as a quote from the latest edition of NMA.

“Next year we’ll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were” said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO.

“(There’ll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales”

I am absolutely astonished (and that’s putting it mildly) at this quote.  ASOS was a big success story in the UK on how a brand can be built by affiliates but famously killed that relationship after culling affiliates and changing the terms before shutting it down completely towards the end of 2006.

Bearing in mind that sales are on a PERFORMANCE basis I still have no idea how on earth they can say that affiliates were €œgetting in the way€ of sales.  Can’t wait to see how their re-launch goes and will make sure I remember this quote at the time.