Affiliate Marketing Blog

Over the past few months personal circumstances have changed a little & I am maybe looking for a slightly new direction within the industry & new projects.

Therefore I am contemplating selling the website  ShopperUK.com. Being unfamiliar territory for me, I am not sure of the procedure of how to go about selling a website, so any advice would be appreciated, together with any potential interested parties.

Where is it written (graved) within the 10 commandments on the two tablets of granite & stone that Moses brought down from affiliate mountain “thy cookie shalth only be 30 days”.

(Please excuse my lack of knowledge / ignorance on biblical history)

The wrong message is being sent, perhaps from outset even, rather than bending over a barrel & accepting the cookie period terms “any” merchant desires or badly recommended by “any” network, perhaps “all” networks should be actively persuading their merchants (there is no time like the present) to increase cookie periods. Nip it in the bud.

Perhaps 365 days should delineated as standard !

It was warned in an earlier blog entry to be wary of merchants squeezing the cheese from affiliates during a difficult finanacial climate that gradually more & more will try to reduce cookie periods to increase the merchants margins.

Two of the several oldest excuses given are along the lines of :

“These investigations have shown that the majority of transactions occur within 30 days of the original click time (with the vast proportion occurring within 3 days of the click).”

Poppycock … If so insignificant, why bother reducing the cookie period?!

“We have moved their cookie period in line with major competitors in the sector “

Poppycock … Well this doesn’t make the merchant stand out from the crowd, but more just one of the mindless sheep.

Moving Forward:

Perhaps there should be a a concerted campaign of a short period of time, where “all” networks make a real concerted effort, not just a token one, to ask “all” their merchants to consider & action the increase their cookie periods ideally 365 days or more, but at least some decent improvement. Some merchants like Buyagift already have a 9999 day cookie. Even affiliates could at least ask / persuade / educate merchants they deal with.

I think this is one sign which shows good intent from a merchant in how much they value the affiliate channel.

You don’t get unless you ask ! Even if only “two” out of “ten”say YES , that’s still a whopping 20% increase.

Depending on which angle you approach the discussion & the question. What is king? Is content king or is cookie king? As part one of however many I end up blogging about. Let’s look at “The Cookie Is King”, for some this maybe sucking eggs but through our own trial and error over sustained periods of time, this s what has worked for us, in our KISS approach (Keep It Simple Silly).

Can I firstly say, I am not condemning the discussion or subjective opinions of what actually is content, but consider this momentarily, how a ppc ad of less than 100 characters can trigger & yield as many if not more sales than a full page of content.

When you visit various sites displaying products, the most common button you see is “Buy Now”. The problem is with button appearing alone, there is an over assertive (aggressive) assumption as to presuming what stage the customer is during the purchasing journey. This command alone will probably not yield a massively high click through rate, you could argue that conversion is good if your pre-sell as well (just one type of content,  which we will come onto again), but if that person is not ready to buy now, there is more likelihood that the “Buy Now” button is not clicked & thus no cookie dropped, so what’s happened, your content (varying in degree & subjective in discussion & opinion to what is quality or effective) may have the bells & whistles or not, but realistically in most cases your site won’t necessarily be remembered if & when they are ready to purchase.

The next most common button used (though not used often enough) is “More Info”, again it can be suggested that you should only provide the potential customer just a taster of the product, if you provide them with too much information on your web site then there is less likelihood this button is pressed, thus less cookies are dropped. Very often when linking to a merchant web site or better still deep linking to a product, that consumer is presented with more or less the same information … again … the customer is being pre sold to what amounts to the same content twice, why? It’s a shame that still 10 years or so into affiliate marketing, the item cannot be put into the basket on the merchant site on following a link from an affiliate site, surely this could increase conversions.

From our own tests by featuring both a “Buy Now” & “More Info” with less content the click thru rate (CTR) increased, thus so did sales, as it considered different stages of a customers journey. Appraoch this sales technique like a funnel effect, the wide part of the funnel represents a stage where a customer is less committed to purchasing a product.

Some of you are thinking, “hey Moose, your teaching me to suck eggs.” … Fair enough.

By the same token & taking this still further now introduce a “Check Stock” button, the consumer maybe at a stage where they are thinking, “I don’t want to buy quite yet let’s check to see if the item is in stock and I’ll come back later.” The consumer clicks, another cookie is dropped, remembering the consumer is more likely to return to the merchant’s site than your own if returning later, but at least the cookie is dropped & in place.

So far we have “Buy Now”, “More Info”, “Check Stock”. Again experiments have shown the CTR has increased and so have sales, which do you think had the highest conversion rate or yielded the most commission? It might not be that obvious.

However, there is one more option. You know there has been a lot of heated debate, discussion & policies related to voucher code & discount code sites in relation to “click to reveal code & visit merchant site” when there is not a valid code available. Well the last option, stemmed from the aforementioned & considers that it is not necessarily a necessity to display the price of a product. With the adoption of a “Show Price” button, taking the user to relevant merchant page also significantly increases CTR, cookie drops & sales.

With these four buttons : “Buy Now”, “More Info”, “Check Stock”, “Show Price” you are considering different elements of a customers journey. But sometimes users don’t always click on these buttons as they are and you really have to say exactly what is meant to do on the tin, by prefixing these with “Click Here”, thus we have “Click Here to Buy Now”, “Click Here for More Info”, “Click Here to Check If In Stock”, “Click Here to Show Price”.

Long winded you may think, it’s up to you to experiment for yourselves to draw your own conclusions. For us, it has been conclusive that CTR’s have been increased & so have sales by reducing information or content about any particular product simply because more cookies were dropped. It’s also worthwhile split testing with different colour buttons or fonts for each one as well as different placement orders to find the optimum setting for you.

There are several other small improvements which can be appended to this to tweak even more, but this blog entry is getting quite long now, and I’ll save it for another time.

If you can get the right blend of “content” & consideration of the different stages the consumer is on their purchasing journey, you should hopefully yield better commissions.

Until a mechanism is found to reward affiliates at various integral parts of a customers journey (where content could be king), also remembering the recent adoption of voucher code “click to reveal “policies introduced via some networks partly because of the cookie dropping … Unfortunately it’s not an ideal world & for sometime yet Cookie will be King.

Are you exasperated or unimpressed up with the bulk of any merchant information / details  page being filled with telling what you what you CANNOT do? This goes for a good portion of the number of emails sent out too.

Rather than “hey” you CANNOT do this or CANNOT do that, otherwise we’ll castrate you and give you a life long sentence banished to the Badlands from a program for ever, where pillaging & murder often get less stiffer penalties/sentences.

How about, hey did you know you CAN do this & you CAN do that … like a summary of merchants who you can link direct on generic / product terms on paid search, we publish voucher codes or that your sales won’t be deduped against xyz … and these are really our top sellers rather than this is stock we are trying to shift so lets get the affiliates try & shift it. Tell us that you pay on gross value of sale (including delivery) or that your action referral occurence is not set to one (ie the cookie doesn’t burn after the first sale) even a decent merchant write up. Even boast about your EPC or conversion rate being higher than certain merchants (even name the other merchants), tell us your high ticket value items that sell. If tracking goes down, give affiliates a guarantee that they will be remunerated rather than hide under a stone until the affiliate forgets. Isn’t it strange that merchants can reject sales at the tick of a box or the snap of a finger, but affiliates claim remuneration on lost tracking by the same seedy process, where is the parity.

… and so forth.

Personally, on the PPC side I would like a single page on each network telling me who I can direct link to & use the display URL for generic & product related terms. Perusing through just one page is better than trawling through hundreds examining the small print telling me what I CANNOT do or worse still written in lemon juice (used to make invisible ink).

Don’t you see, these will make such better selling points & any program a more appealing & attractive proposition to affiliates rather than intimidating affiliates, if more thought & effort went into mentioning what affiliate CAN do.

You see when you are in the decision making process of selecting which merchants to promote, all this don’t do that & don’t do this or draconian measures simply makes you want to move onto the next program.

Most networks are guilty of this to varying degrees. For example have you ever been bemused when you read all the T&Cs on OMG (Online Media Group) on many of their programs, It is OMG (Oh My God). Rather than scrolling down monotonously, If there ever is a need for pressing the browser back button or that little red sqaure with the white cross on the top right hand side of the browser (the exit). To reiterate same can be said with many other programs & a few other networks.

So remember, tell affiliates what we CAN DO & don’t harp on & scold affiliates on what they CANNOT DO. Imagine new affiliates / fresh blood coming industry reading all this. They are going to think “sod this for a game of soldiers” I am going to find a new vocation earning my 5 stars at MacDonalds, when they don’t realise what they are missing out on, simply because they are scared off or felt intimidated.

Thought For The Day

There are quite a few respected industry peers who regularly attend the IAB AMC, in my own opinion if it is to gain a wider respect in the affiliate community, rather than focus on what affiliates shouldn’t be doing. It should focus more on protecting affiliates in relation to the usual problems we see occuring day in & day out. At the moment I don’t see the IAB AMC as representing any of my personal interests as an affiliate, therefore I don’t recognise it as so, but more in the interests of merchants & agencies, so lets see how it pans out during 2009. I still see the joining fee as an obstacle as there are other network & merchants opinions who I do sit up and listen to.

Remember … Affiliates are the lifeblood of the industry … Simple ! Sometimes that gets lost in translation.

Fancy having voucher code site with less hassle, here is a possibility of a cunning plan which might earn a few pennies. It might not be popular, but not all seem to be playing by the rules and networks maybe not proactive enough in addressing cookie overwriting within certain time frames. So please slap & spank this blog entry to your hearts content, but hopefully you can see through it, by understanding & appreciating the constructive criticism in the underlying message, by reading between the lines & the intended good intent.

• 1. Purchase a domain name with discount & voucher codes in it. Maybe a different name as a few might be cheesed off, though not their jurisdiction.
• 2. Develope a basic style directory adopted by some of current VC/DC sites with merchant logos.
• 3. It will be a voucher code site with no affiliate links, only sponsored listings for a given merchant. If you have the tools you know what they are bidding highly on, if not not brand names & hybrids will suffice.
• 4. Spam meta tag, you only have to do a search on search engine for “brand + voucher code” etc to get an idea.
• 5. Optimise the layout by old keyword style keyword stuffing, this old school tactic still seems to work with some.
• 6. Do hybrid brand bidding (not recommended) and claim ignorance. Do not have brands written in any url properties or strings. Otherwise broad match on generics & analyse the search string on site entry to present the correct merchants.
• 7. Acquire & aggregate as many published codes out there & display, whether direct from sites or free databases. Since it’ll only be an information / resource site. Maybe encourage users to post as they find them.
• 8. Sign up to all other voucher code site newsletters, making it easier to collect codes.
• 9. Collect & harvest email databases.
• 10. Earn via various sponsored link sources, easy to know what merchant bids on, but brand alone will bring in the pennies & with so many merchants converting poorly generally it might just be better than you think.
• 11. Note there are no affiliate links, so no networks are involved & thus out of their jurisdiction.
• 12. No revenue for networks, perhaps they should be doing more but not allowing other affiliate cookies to be overwritten within a certain time frame, or stop merchants de duping against voucher codes.
• 13. Click here to reveal code & visit merchant could be adopted.
• 14. Eats into the margins of competing VC / DC sites and you can still offer a decent service.
• 15. Reduces their margins of competitors so that some might have to look at other options.
• 16. No need to worry about merchants who are starting to exclude voucher code sites in their program t&cs.
• 17. You might initially think the EPC might not be great, but if you know what you are doing this can be increased to more appealing levels.
• 18. There is no jurisdiction for networks to get involved.
• 19. You have a VC / DC site without the network & affiliate hassle. Less merchant hassle.
• 20. If anything it might prevent “content” & “ppc” affiliates cookies being overwritten. PROTECTS THEM ! Unless merchant de-dupes against their own ppc activity and/or if a voucher code is used.

Finally:

Oh .. and … no cookie overwrite issues… no de-duping issues … no tracking issues … no not getting remuneration issues … no unpaid or late invoice issues !!!

“If not enough is being done or quick enough to appease affiliate concerns by networks (in their juggling & balancing act) who still get override, then affected ppc & content affiliates should shoulder the burden, take responsibility themselves by taking matters into their own hands … to protect their own (and other content & ppc affiliate) revenue stream by deflecting traffic to themselves preventing cookie over-write. There is no reason why a good site cannot be produced in the aforementioned way”

Are You Being Duped By De-Duping? Merchants deduping against various channels is probably a bigger issue than affiliates realise, which has never really got the column width on the forum. Some merchants are being naughty.

Yet, hardly anybody comments or notices, and industry wide this has been going on a lot more & longer than all this voucher code malarky. When, on the forum you can create a conversation about “aquamarine coloured widgets” & it ends up being a discussion on voucher code sites & then ultimately MVC … yawn.

I suspected something with a sports merchant recently who likes to post the same thing in about half a dozen sections on the forum, when I noticed their EPC had dropped right down. Once more those suspicions were founded. It reminded me of another merchant who declined sales because that user visited the site sometime in the past (not last click/referrer).

Anyhow I was having a chat with a network representative & this is the summary of the conversation we had.

“ironic that more attention is on voucher code sites when de-duplication transparency may yield a lot more revenue for all.”

Some merchants de-dupe against all channels, i.e. paid search, display, email etc, often this will be done using local cookies so only last referring tracking is shown on confirmation page, other times I am informed “they use 3rd party software like analytics packages (popular ones include Atlas,Coremetrics, Doubleclick ). Some of these have their own ‘rules’ system in place for attributing commission, thus merchants will choose which channels they want to de-dupe affiliates against”

It should not only be strongly recommended, but enforced through industry standardisation, that merchants do not de-dupe against brand PPC for obvious reasons, although which do and which don’t is difficult to establish. Affiliates commissions shouldn’t be de-duped against display advertising akin to de-duping against TV adverts.

If a programme is de-duped at source using local cookies, is it difficult for anyone except the merchant and their tech team to know how it actually works? Again where is the trust & transparency?

On the opposite side of the coin, there are merchants doing no de-duplication at all, could this open Pandora’s Box? Where merchants who don’t de-dupe start implementing policies which could see an overall revenue drop.

“in the interests of making things fair for all parties, so they know where they stand, everyone should be made aware of acceptable de-duplication policies. No nasty surprises for merchants or affiliates.”

Revenue from some merchants will go up and from others will go down, but on the whole significantly up in favour of affiliates. Quite possibly affiliates are losing out against deduping processes, so we need clarity on which programs have undesirable de-duplication policies but likewise there could be other big programmes where no de-duping takes place at all.

For the latter, if done correctly & fairly for affiliates it could free up budget for more affiliate activity.

Merchants who know about this issue in general take full advantage and de-dupe against whatever they can, some will take network advice on this & others do it arbitrarily. However, there’s probably a large amount that know nothing about it and don’t do it at all, this would cover most SMEs and probably a handful of larger merchants.

Are You Being Duped By De-Duping? How should we proceed?

Thoughts for the day:

1. Well done to Affiliate Window for announcing they are going to cover over £35,000 of commissions for the Empire Direct program, a merchant that recently went into administration. I genuinely applaud them. I believe the program is on at least one other network. Will they follow suit? As it has forced their hand slightly. I was also disappointed to see over £3000 worth of unpaid commission sitting on one network, via them being unable to collect commissions from merchants. If there was goodwill & they want me to trust or work with them more, then they should cover this debt themselves, isn’t that what they meant to do? collect payments, trusted 3rd party etc. Mutual goodwill payments would go some way in the affiliate placing more faith in the network.

2. Affiliate Window’s Raffle Bonanza - I didn’t get an opportunity to blog this, but wanted to say I thought that it was a very good promotion, I was a lucky winner with CD WOW, but wanted to say thanks to Affiliate Window & I hope they repeat it. How about an all year round one & more in your face withing the admin area?

3. I’ve been chasing a few merchants & a couple of networks recently for payments, it’s quite surprising how much is sitting out there not collected, worse still not even invoiced & disappointingly merchants stalling. If a network hasn’t chased to an affiliates satisfaction then network should cough up.

4. I am concerned about pending commissions disappearing from reports when a program closes or get automatically declined. Each network should have somewhere within interface where affiliates can easily access.

5. Not enough attention is paid towards tracking, even short durations (deliberate during peak periods & non deliberate). I ‘ll say again, there is a need for trend graphs over a rolling number of clicks, which affiliates can view for a merchant performance network wide. This will parties to more easily identify when tracking may have been down. It’s about transparency.

Again there is lack of transparency on merchant information pages or where commission details are listed, affiliates should be informed if they are being paid commission on the net value of the sale or the gross value of the sale & i.e. Taking a product for £115 at 10% commission. If paid net this is 10% of £100 = £10, Gross it be £11.50. You only need to scale this up to say £100,000 worth or products and you’ll be better of by £1500 (15% or the current rate of vat). Also we need to know if affiliates get paid a % of the delivery cost.

 It’s important to look at whether the commission rate is inclusive or exclusive of VAT as there is still a lack of consistency here, plus if commission is paid on delivery costs. Something which is all part of the decsion making process.

Bug Bear Of The Day :

A few years on I am still disappointed that we are still seeing “Action Referral Occurrence” set to once or “Recurring Events” set to none on several networks & are all networks disclosing? If so are they absolutely sure? Basically this means no matter what cookie length is published after the first sale the cookie crashes & burns. Something I’ll come onto again another time.

We Still Have “No Recurring Events” & “Action Referral Occurrence” Set to Only 1

Amercican Presidential Elections, repeated inauguration … & looming UK Elections are all tittle tattle when compared to impending vote for the chairman of the IAB Affiliate Marketing Council (AMC).

The potential elected Grand Master, from the two proposed candidates who will sit in the East, since all learning emanated from the East, the Grand Master will be able to bequeath their knowledge for the good of the affiliate brethren and guidance to the affiliate marketing industry.

The two candidates are:

Duncan Popham - MD of Total Search Solutions & A Moderator on the A4UForum.
Matt Bailey - Head of the affiliate channel at i-level

Ben Wood’s one year tenure as chair of the AMC ends next week, with the new appointment to be decided at an IAB AMC meeting on Thursday.

Who will you elect & who will you black ball?

For a bit of fun you can vote here on the forum. By request it has been made a secret ballot & individual votes are not publically viewable. Though I am not a fan of cloak & dagger & would have preferred a publically viewable vote, it’s only a bit of fun after all.

Click Here To Vote Hopefully the poll might engage a few more affiliates. For me I want to see less focus of what affiliates should & shouldn’t be doing but a lot more on what merchants & agencies shouldn’t be doing!!!

Is content really king or a pretender to the throne?

Or when you get down to the actual bottom line, the king is the winner of the last cookie, irrelevant of content (except where de-duping occurs)

Epitomise by the bloodied fued between the tyranny of Longshanks (King Edward I) and the moral premise of Braveheart (William Wallace).

Gordon Brown & Alistair “Captain” Darling (Blackadder Goes Forth), so called strategy to recapitalise Britain’s banks and get them lending again, which has been copied all over the world, has not worked, and what’s more disconcerting is that the Treasury’s “cunning” Plan B might simply be a replication of the failed Plan A. Like clueless generals sending hapless soldiers (general public & small businesses) over the top from the relative safety of the trenches towards the inevitable result from incoming shells & bullets.

Seriously, does anyone think that lining the coffers of banks still further, is going to leverage them them into lending again .. I wouldn’t bank on it … These Pontius Pilates seem to be crucifying the rest of us by pocketing the dough to save their own sorry backsides instead of assisting Joe Public and / or small businesses. A number of banking institutions haven’t even passed on the full interest rate reductions (The recent half percentage point reduction brings interest rates below 2% to 1.5% for the first time since the Bank of England was founded in 1694). Let’s not forget the majority of savers whom too have been affected by banks, making scrooge looking like a spendthrift.

As for the current temporary VAT reduction, well I don’t know whether to be bemused or laugh so much that my spleen wobbles.

A senior “adviser” to chancellor Alistair “Captain” Darling insisted that lending shouldn’t be taken as the sole measure of success: “Plan A has not failed, because the banks are still standing.”

Huh … but at the expense of who & what .. so a juicy fat raspberry to that comment!

Although UK banks are open for business, Britain is still facing a lending drought with banks & building societies continuing to reduce the amount of credit available to businesses & would-be homebuyers.

This has left Alistair “Captain” Darling with a gambling dilemma, does he stick or twist by throwing / chucking more money at the banks, (who haven’t really assisted economic recovery) effectively admitting that £billions of taxpayers’ money wasn’t enough, or does he wait (stick)?

No ! No ! No ! No more money for banks, please.

“I have come up with a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel.”  - Blackadder

Instead, as I suggested said before … reduce income tax & corporation tax, even if you have to maybe reduce public spending temporarily. this will at least put monies into employees pockets & improve cashflow of small businesses (even survivability). That way the economy can find a natural “real” equilibrium, with the increase of net income in peoples pockets, they can wisely decide whether to reduce or eliminate any existing debts they have, spend to revive the retail industry or save. Though I do wonder if savers will start seeking more attractive rates overseas or take riskier options with buying shares in markets they might be unfamiliar with, then what would the financial institutions do in the UK.

This will hopefully get everything & everyone Thrifty. (Definition Below)

1. Practicing or marked by the practice of thrift; wisely economical.
2. Industrious and thriving; prosperous.

I am no economics expert, but the above is just common sense. If I put my hat in the ring again, why do we have National Insurance & Tax calculated & paid seperately. Why can’t they be merged? That might save a few bob.

Alistair “Captain” Darling has got to stop relying on the banking regimes to assist in any economic recovery, any more charitable donations (of which is effectively public money) to the banks would be a public & political humiliation. Risking public money by gambling at russian roulette will bound to explode in his face. (singeing those eyebrows might well do him a favour)

Alistair “Captain” Darling saviours ARE / WILL BE the discerning public, where Alistair “Captain” Darling should literally tell the banks to “Goe Forth & Multiply” and place his trust in the UK public by reducing income tax & corporation tax, which in itself will be a huge vote winner.

Will Alistair “Captain” Darling listen to the public? … well … once again there goes the oinky sonic BOOM of another pig flying past the window.

PS Someone tell Alistair “Captain” Darling too sort out his hair & eyebrows, he looks like a photo negative (for those that don’t have digital cameras). I guess it characterises an undecisive politician who doesn’t know whether to dye his hair or eyebrows to match with his economic decisions which are leaving SKA’s. (deliberate spell variation).