“Are You Being Duped By De-Duping” – A Change Of Focus
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
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.
