Moose on the Loose

Just got accused by Tradedoubler for brand bidding on PC World, the term in Google they highlighted was “pc world business gfskjhf” when infact we were only bidding on the term “pc” on a broadmatch. True to form the unlikeable network Tradedoubler and PC World are, all they do is sanctimoniously accuse without establishing facts with their self righteous attitude. Have you noticed how complex the phrase “pc world business gfskjhf”? Google doesn’t even show any natural results for that. It illustrates what lengths Tradedoubler have to to come up with that term just to cause aggravation.

You may want to read this thread on the A4UForum how bad their program really is.

Click Here for the Forum Thread

I think this really summarises how bad the merchant & network is & part of what is wrong within the industry. Whilst on the forum, you may as well peruse the threads pertaining to their customer service.

For the record we had these negative terms were our account -[pc world], -[pcworld], -[p c world], -[p cworld], -[p.c world], -[p.c. world], -[p.c.world]

btw Tradedoubler habitually change keyword restriction rules without proper notification to affiliates.

If you view the network league table in the left hand column, Tradedoubler have been demoted from 2nd last to officially last place.

Why don’t they just cruel back under the stone from where they came from?

The IAB Affiliate Network Council (ANC) will draw up an affiliate code of conduct before the summer. The announcement follows this week’s appointment of David Hall, Affiliate Window head of communications, as its chairman. The ANC was set up in March last year to represent the interests of IAB members in affiliate marketing, offering advice and information. But a year on it hasn’t set up any industry best-practice guidelines. The issue of affiliate standards has been making headlines…

Read Here for NMA Article

Do I find this bit worrying? The ANC was set up in March last year to represent the interests of IAB members in affiliate marketing

Firstly, has the ANC actually made any formal approach to affiliate community as a whole to discuss this in any detail? Well, not to my knowledge or anybody I have asked. I just find it quite bizarre that there has been no consultation with any affiliate that I know of, and/or who’s opinion I respect. Without any direct input from affiliates themselves, I don’t think whatever they decide to implement will be a viable solution. They would have to careful that they don’t the affiliate community if it progresses further.

The IAB ANC are not on the front line of affiliate marketing, whilst examining their own members list, a number of their own members could possibly be brought into question, if anyone was pedantic enough to clutch at straws or pick holes.

However, there is no point in affiliates lashing out yet, until we are fully aware of the substance of their proposals and to what their actual agenda is. Whether it be for themselves or their members to try & dictate to affiliates or on a more positive note promote the affiliate marketing industry as a real solution to be part of their members marketing mix.

Is the IAB being exploited for somebody else’s agenda? Should affiliate marketing be within the remit of the IAB.

It reminds me of the following : I clearly recall attending a meeting on Anti-Spyware measures at the IMRG a couple of years ago. Tradedoubler at the time were very defensive in favour or Adware & Spyware. The IMRG had avenues into television, and an opportunity was lost to really let the consumer know the threats that pertain to them & protecting them online. Yet, all they achieved in two years was a definition of what spyware was (a short sentence), even that wasn’t very accurate. I guess they felt that bringing the topic of spyware into the public domain would simply affect the revenue of their members, when several of their members were considered partied to spyware at the time.

On the whole, I think it illustrates that affiliates have been maybe a little slow of the mark in establishing their own Affiliate Association for a code of fair & best practice, which has lost practically all of it’s momentum from last years preliminary meeting when a statement was issued. It has been foreseeable by the affiliate community for some time that the affiliate industry maybe regulated from an outside body rather than regulating ourselves.

If all this is a genuine attempt to bring all parties closer together, then it will probably be warmly welcomed, however not without full & proper consultation with the affiliate community. I hope it doesn’t resort to being deemed as a clueless bully yielding a big stick, especially if some may feel intimidated that rules are being imposed on affiliates from less knowledgeable outsiders.

Do affiliates only have themselves to blame? Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, since generally there is a real lack of selfless attitude out there apart from the same vociferous few. People seem to get more embroiled in a silly quip remark from an irrelevant person, like those from ASOS, than the core fundamentals of affiliate marketing.

If the IAB ANC does not include the affiliate communities input, then any proposed Affiliate Association, who would have to exclude those same members by reciprocation, which in turn would further fragment the industry. A possible solution would be as single Affiliate Association, brought under the umbrella of the IAB or IMRG, embracing all parties & the likes of e-consultancy on a unified front. This would demonstrate a greater unification within the industry as long as selected affiliates were themselves were at the forefront.

A note for the ANC / IAB: An affiliates door is generally always open, but you must be prepared to actually listen & implement. Affiliates move, adjust & evolve rapidly according to the environment & cannot be caught up in any bureaucratic red tape.

Just look at how some networks are still languishing in the dark ages with their lack of innovation & protection of affiliates from corporate bullies or unfair practices. It’s the affiliates with drive & self motivation who are pioneering the creative edge, it’s affiliates who are the true Performance Marketeers in the industry.

I have held back from posting on forums for a while now, as you can lead a horse to the water, but you cannot make them drink it. What we are seeing is possibly just a precursor to an inevitable cycle of events through ignorance and not engaging in debate or acting upon it, by being quite placid in accepting what unfair rules & regulations are reluctantly thrown upon us.

The ANC IAB cannot claim to be the voice of the affiliate community & should’t proceed as so, if indeed that is their intention, but they cannot claim to represent us in any shape or form, nor infact represent the affiliate marketing industry. Please note the word “affiliate” in “affiliate marketing”. How many networks have actually signed up with this? … and is part of the agenda simply to win favour with members within the IAB or is it to truly to educate them?

But couldn’t they impose it on us as the IAB and their members are more powerful than individual affiliates?

Affiliates have more resolve in communicating their messages & opinions online to a wide & varied audience, it would be foolhardy to assume otherwise.

If anything there needs to be a merchant code of conduct, we don’t want anything lop sided as is the current situation within the industry. At the end of the day we can only sit back and see what they “advise” or “propose” before making any final or adverse judgement.

In my opinion NMA is not a publication that has yet grasped an accurate perception of affiliate marketing and don’t actually “Get It”. Has the IAB or NMA actually attended any affiliate G2G’s (Get Togethers) on a regular basis? Probably not, therefore reporting, opinions & rules can only be derived from a perspective of ignorance. It’s about time they came along to mix & mingle with us “grubby” affiliates on a regular basis if they are to be taken seriously. We can only sit back, await and observe what definitive impact this will have, if any.

But before any index finger is pointed at the affiliate community, remember when you point with a finger, there are always three pointing straight back at you!

Affiliate Marketing isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s about having a certain individual mindset peculiar to oneself & a matter of application.

For more comments read my Karaoke Partners Blog One Little Duck

What exactly is the deal we affiliates receive on commission and are you entirely sure? This was discussed in general conversation many moons ago and unfortunately there is still lack of clarification generally in the marketplace.

Scenario: A customer makes a purchase and the affiliate is duly rewarded a % percentage commission, but a % of what?

Is it the total gross value (including vat) of the item(s) or the net value (without vat) of the items(s). Does the affiliate receive commission on the delivery / postage or gift wrapping charges if applicable which are subsequently added to the shopping cart / basket? It seems there is a possible number of permutations & combinations.

Is there a mis-sell, where the affiliate correctly or incorrectly presumed it was a % of the total value of the basket OR on the flip side are merchants double paying on vat or paying additional increments of commission they shouldn’t be.

I really do think that in this day and age it’s about time this is re-addressed and proper clarification if provided on the merchant information pages of all networks.

I will leave my buddy Clarke to give you more details on this confusion over on his blog

Clarke’s Affiliate Marketing Blog – Not All Commission is Equal

As you are no doubt aware, I am not a fan of Tradedoubler for a multitude of reasons. Affiliate Support being one of their flaws.

See Are Tradedoubler “The Borg” in Disguise?

Apart from ignoring emails they also ignore telephone calls, something we are all guilty off at sometime, but not constantly.

If you are finding your phone calls are being avoided too, try getting somebody else to call as themselves, then have the phone passed to you once they get through, it’s miraculous how somebody can suddenly be available.

Perhaps with the AOL deal “apparently” hitting a brick wall, some senior major shareholders are perhaps wallowing in their sorrows after their cash cow didn’t quite come home.

At the end of the day, there are plenty of good merchants & networks. If one merchant from a particular merchant is keen on dealing with you from a network you don’t receive adequate service or support from, simply express your thoughts, and hope that the merchant moves to a more amenable network.

There’s not a lot more you can really do apart from that, since so many of the familiar problems are still rooted, if things haven’t changed now after all these years it’s unlikely they ever will, you cannot change free will like a leopard cannot change it’s spots.

However Tradedoubler have just provided a link for their account manager contact details

Tradedoubler Contact Details

My only comment is that after all these years, its about time merchant contact details were made available too, however I guess they are too paranoid. For example only recently (and this has happened on a number of occasions) we received an email from Tradedoubler about promoting eBags, we requested to speak with the merchant directly as we felt we could do good business with them. After a phone call & two emails we are still being ignored. I wonder if the merchant knows this?

If this list goes a small way to assisting you with whatever problems you have, then you have fared better than me.

By the way, I post a similar comment on the A4UForum, yesterday. Guess what? Yep I had an email from Tradedoubler, not relating to eBags though. Just another hollow attempt by Tradedoubler to reconcile.

As you are well aware i think Google’s Quality Score is absolute Poppycock.

Have you ever tried bidding on your domain name & variations plus a few obvious keywords pertaining to the site & sending this traffic to your homepage.

If bidding on your own domain name & sending to that site, your minimum bid should be 1 pence / cents not 30 pence / cents.

We conducted a simple experiment for a site we own where we hold both the .co.uk & .com extensions. All traffic within this account for PPC currently forwards to the .com domain which has been obviously labelled & discriminantly flagged by Google as an affiliate site, in our opinion. The content & structure of both websites are identical by the way.

I will get around to publishing the table another time so you can make your own inferences, but here is the results summary which we observed.

To send traffic to the .com site (i.e. the one Google knows about) the average minimum ad cost is 253% more than sending to co.uk !

So within the same Google adwords account (note the same account, as this is something we shall come onto at a later stage), we sent the same brand keywords (including our url) to a totally irrelevant site. Now listen to this, to send to the .co.uk of our own brand costs 62% more & to send to .com costs 87% more i.e. It’s cheaper to send to another unrelated website. Figure that out for relevancy?

We have experimented with this on other generic terms & the figures became more extreme.

Our Conclusion: Google Quality Score simple flags particular domains so that they pay more, especially if you are an affiliate or don t have a shopping cart /basket on your site.

So next we created a new Google Adwords account & allowed the same ads & keywords to settle, to see whether Google not only penalises domains but also accounts. In each instant, within the new account a very significant saving could be made, unfortunately is was still cheaper to send our own brand terms to an irrelevant site, not only on our own brand but generic terms too.

Our Conclusion: Google Quality Score also flags particular accounts so that they pay more. More notably if you are recognised as an affiliate.

The next test we shall conduct will be using the same phrases & ads but with a shopping cart / basket within the site. Something to note is that even merchants with an off site shopping cart, Google assumes you are an affiliate when you could well be a merchant. How do I know because when questioning other direct to merchant campaigns we run which initially got disapproved, this is what Google Adwords reps informed us.

As a suggestion, in every Google Adwords adgroup & campaign you write that sends traffic directly to your site, simply insert your url (as a keyword phrase) & notice the differences in prices. If you are lucky enough to have the ad active at the minimum bid, remain silent, keep your head down & don’t let Google suspect.

Next time we shall be looking at & revealing the solutions on how we actually cracked this from theorised solutions and remedied the problem, thus significantly reducing our adwords advertising spend.

Summary: All the above simply confirmed our suspicions & reaffirmed comments we had already made on the A4UForum, in that the Google Quality Score is Poppycock and is primarily nothing more than a hand edited tool to be increasingly more bias against affiliates. This is my opinion of free speech.

On a final note, part of this solution is some instances may mean, letting go of sites you may affectionately hold close to your heart, in this industry sometimes you may have to be ruthless which is unfortunate. Whenever publishing websites you sometimes have to consider them as disposable assets, even if you have sweated blood & tears over them.

Is content king, well YES for visitor retention, stickiness, visitor return rate & brand building. For Google Adwords NO.

Thus you may have to be prepared to continually close first, then create a new account & copying the content from one domain to another sacrificing the former one with regard to generating traffic from Google Adwords. Automating the process to a certain degree will assist.

Google Adwords still haven’t had the common courtesy to come back with suitable answers about from the same old chestnut excuses from their book entitled “Googles Book of Chestnut Excuses”, because they know they are in the wrong. If they won’t play fair, then why should anyone fight fair.

Arose to the world today to be a little bemused by the latest blog read on Clarke’s personal blog about ASOS calling affiliates Grubby. Go over there & have a read at Clarke’s Affiliate Marketing Blog . Real handbags at dawn stuff & relatively unsurprising that ASOS should refer to affiliates as unfastidious or unkempt though perhaps if anyone saw what attire I sat around all day in, it would be enough to give anyone a traumatic nightmare, the wally might actually have a point.

Cantbarsed (who was their affiliate of the year), sums it up nicely about ASOS taking their ball home & quote : “ASOS turned their affiliate program into a virtual torture chamber and by no co-incidence shortly after affiliate marketing superhero Jess Luthi escaped her corporate shackles and took the ASOS brain cell with her.”

However, is this the perception that a small handful of networks & some merchants actually perceive affiliates, but Nick Robertson at ASOS (A Silly Old Sausage) is the only one to publicly have the gull to come out and say by denouncing affiliates. Perhaps this little insight may bring out more uncouth Ratner style comments by jumping on the bandwagon.

It will be curious to see which network, who will discredit themselves in the process, takes them onboard in the future, claiming they will be able to sort it out with affiliates, so much so it might be worth running a book on it. Who’s my money on, hmm well, here’s a clue “way hey man, we have them sorted”

Does this lay down the gauntlet to challenge affiliates to readdress the comment, well no not at all, sticks & stones & all that stuff. Treat them like amoeba brained pond spawn, if they come knocking at your door. Let the fool wallow in his zest pool of self-righteousness … Forget them & move on.
However I do wonder how a more volatile forum in the USA like ABestWeb may react.

IBG owns both Affiliate Future and IBG Media, which claims to run as a distinct division, have paid £120k, agreed in late January 2007, for NetFreeStuff (Owned by the John Lamerton).

They claim there really isn’t an attempt by Affiliate Future to compete with its affiliates, I haven’t really looked into it, except that maybe other freebie sites are the ones that maybe affected, and that in this industry can you really cannot distinguish the two?

Anyhow, many congratulations to John (who came out of retirement recently), I hope it was the right deal for him. Well done and good luck with your future projects & endeavours.

John has given an exclusive interview with Kieron over at his blog on www.here.org.uk

With some of it being well documented & other parts not so much. As a follow up to the NMA article about “super affiliates” (I dislike that expression) becoming small networks themselves, is it really surprising from the way some are treated.

More importantly the potential compromise of an individual affiliates data & worse still imagine that aggregated from the mass, whereby individuals from & even the network as a whole are affiliates of other rival networks. I don’t feel comfortable this private data that we are not privy to can be freely accessed, yet they can manipulate as they desire to compete against affiliates.

I think it’s going to get messy.

With the exception of maybe half a dozen good networks, it really is about time there was an affiliate network owned & ran by affiliates, or do affiliates have more sense that to become entangled & embroiled in that area, since networks are often in an unenviable predicament and maybe taking on more than they can chew, but overall there has been a real lack of innovation.

Here is a simple way to ascertain whether Ebay UK is encroaching on your company trademark or url (website address) or other well known ones that you are aware off.

It’s Quite simple really:

• Step 1: Within Google UK, type in the URL’s of 10 well known charities & then search i.e. www.barnardos.org.uk, there are dozens of them.

• Step 2: Into Google UK, type in the URL’s of 10 well known retail or finance or holiday companies i.e. www.butlinsonline.co.uk, again there are hundreds of them.

• Step 3: Into Google UK, type in the URL’s of any sites you have which are popular or other affiliates you are aware of. i.e. one good affiliate site is www.reviewcentre.com

Remember to try the above without the prefix “www.” as well

Please note the results maybe geo-targeted and may not show for your specific location.

Objectives : Observe the number of sponsored ads featuring “Ebay” & even “Ask” encroaching on the owners of those trademarks or intellectual property.Where is the ethics on taking money away from charities?

Spread the word to any companies you work closely with. Because this has been directly addressed with Ebay, as well as Google who in my opinion have the same hypocritical mindset & was also addressed with the affiliate network Commission Junction (as it’s CJ links which are being used at the time of this post).

Yet still none of them have had the decency to address this effectively.

If it’s your company being affected are you too yellow (chicken) to take on Ebay & ask / insist they stop this practice, whether it be them or close associates?

Report Ebay UK to the following:

Advertising Standards Authority, Office of Fair Trading, Trading Standards or the DTI,

or Alternatively send an email to any Newspapers or industry trade magazines like NMA or Revolution then perhaps this may then cease.

They are potentially taking away business & customers away from you !!!