Moose on the Loose

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

When it comes to public transport I’m a total Mardy Bum, I totally dislike it. So imagine my disappointment when my children insisted we were travelling by public transport to the first international match at Wembley today, to watch England Under 21’s v Italy Under 21’s. It is normally quicker to travel 150 miles from my gaff to Birmingham than travelling 15 miles to Central London or 30 miles across London.

Anyhow, the days course of events was as follows:

• £7 to park at the British Rail Station, where the car parking machine didn’t even have prices or times displayed and was temperamental in working.
• There were no seats on the train to Waterloo, infected the old man flu & travelling with kids, we had to stand the whole journey.
• The escalator wasn’t working at Waterloo to transfer onto the Jubilee line, so a nice trudge down the steps.
• Jumped on the train, well at least this time the platform doors didn’t decide to continuously trap me like they did last time.
• However, when we embarked on the underground train, it was sweaty & clammy, yet again there were no seats and the train was packed like sardines! It was awful
• What seemed like the slow train to China, we eventually arrived at Wembley.
• I treated my kids to England flags (£5 each) to wave & a scarf (£5 each) to enjoy the event. couldn’t find a program stand though. Took some photos of the historic occasion.
• Arrived at the stadium turnstiles, only for some security bloke, pleasant his manners were, insisting that children couldn’t bring flags (the sticks to be precise) into the stadium. Great, that’s a tenner down the pan. A bit of a con when they get you to buy the flags at one end of Wembley walk, then prevent you from bringing them in.
• Through the turnstiles we go, daughter had the bottle top of her fizzy drink confiscated/taken away. How petty that was, when if she really wanted to chuck something onto the pitch, she could have simply stuffed a spare bottle top down her sock.
• Before we managed to get to other side of the turnstiles, two security people “a different security company” they claimed, said that sticks under two metres were permitted, well too late, please make your bloody mind up.… However, then they said we were not allowed to use digital cameras to take photos in the stadium? Apparently you have to have a license. Well, you can imagine my verbal response to these poncy security stewards.
• I decided to buy a souvenir programme, until I saw the length of the queues, one I paced at 55 yards, the other snaked around at just under 100 yards, so left that to later.
• We felt peckish, knowing how extortionate food prices are at Wembley, there were no queues at all as most people brought packed lunches & I recommend anybody going to Wembley to do likewise. I remember hearing on Talk Sport radio that morning, how the manager of Wembley boasted about the food product being of high quality. Ermm, what’s difficult about putting hot water into a cup with a tea bag, oh yes, when they forget to add the milk. Bought a jacket spud & some kind of cheese / veggie mix which looked like some fur ball the cat had regurgitated, plus spud wasn’t fully cooked in the centre. We were actually quite jokey with the sales assistant about it all, who said we were her happiest customers all day, yep even a miserable git like me.
• Kick Off, we pulled the camera out to take photos, along with the hundreds of others, I could just imagine security kicking everyone out with cameras or camera phones at that point in time. Blimey it’s meant to be a family occasion. That took about 20 seconds, just enough time to catch what will probably always be the fastest goal at Wembley after 29 seconds.

After that the day picked up a bit.

• It was an entertaining match, 3-3 draw was the result.
• With the masses of people leaving and heading back down Wembley Walk to the train station. I must admit the police had it very well organised, to prevent stampeding, by cordoning off sections & then allowing crowds intermittently through into the station. It was very well rehearsed & executed. Yes, it took a while, but it was safe, especially as there were plenty of families.
• The train arrivals on the return leg of the journey were about every 3 minutes, the platform wasn’t jam packed & there were plenty of seats.

As I chanted to my inner self …

“double seat, double seat, got to get a double seat” .. as the mantra is echoed by other passengers … “double seat, double seat, got to get a double seat”

And to my pleasant surprise we all got one.

On the positive side even though it only cost £6.70 each for adults (1) and £1 each for the kids (2). It still would have been cheaper & more comfortable to travel by car. However i certainly won’t pay Ken Livingston’s congestion charge for the privilege of travelling into London. Probably why, I refuse to attend meetings in London, even if I am being offered lunch by a company. Also, more often than not I come home with a cold, like how this trip aggravated my “man flu” even more.

However the day wasn’t quite complete, as we were disappointed still further by the dire England performance this evening against Israel in what was a lacklustre 0-0 bore draw. To be honest, I think that was expected.

More Importantly, Am I Really A Bar Humbug:

Myself and the children had a really good time. Children as you probably are aware, are not fazed about minor trivialities in life. To them, riding on a train whether empty or full is an adventure, the buzz of the crowds, the junk food, wearing flags as cloaks rather than waving around, wanting to stroke every police horse they passed, and basically having quality time with their daddy. It just puts my Victor Meldrew opinion into a little perspective.

As you can probably tell, our blog has received a fresh lick of paint to spuce it up.

Many thanks to my mate Eric for the hard work he did this afternoon for making all the changes and for arranging the artist to do the cartoon caricature of myself, which epitimises me to some degree. I was gobsmacked at how quickly Eric acheived this all in just a few hours. Also many thanks to another true friend Fraser who initially set up my blog for me.

The artist was Jim Elmore

As you can tell from this Blog, myself like almost anybody else, whether blogging or posting on a forum am prone to making occasional typographical errors, even when I have proof-read it several times over, and then go back at a later date to identify yet another mistake, I guess that’s why we have spell checkers.

However, this no different to anyone typing a keyword phrase into a search engine, thus this can be exploited to a certain degree in any search marketing activity, whether it be generic or brand terms. A few pay per click search engines are gradually identifying some of these typo errors, but not most.This provides an opportunity for a small income to be derived on cheap traffic with a decent ROI, whether you are arbitraging or sending directly to a merchant.

These are known as QWERTY keyboard ‘typos’ (typing mistakes) which consist of various forms & degrees of errors like Transposition, Slip, Omission, Repetition, QWERTY Substitution, QWERTY Repetition.

• Transposition > Adjacent pairs of letters are swapped over.
• Omission > Individual letters are missed out.
• Repetition > Individual letters are entered twice consecutively.
• QWERTY Substitution > Letters are replaced by each of their QWERTY keyboard based physical neighbours (e.g. ‘h’ gets replaced with y, u, j, n, b, g)
• QWERTY Repetition Type 1 > Letters are followed by each of their QWERTY Keyboard Neighbours
• QWERTY Repetition Type 2 > Letters are preceded by each of their QWERTY Keyboard neighbours

Most of the time, we think as many up for ourselves as possible, but sometimes my minds creative juices are not always flowing. One site we occasionally utilise which is pretty useful is this free tool called the Free Online Typo Generation Tool

Their URL is http://www.typos.org.uk

I hope you’ll find the tool useful & that maybe it will take some of the strain out of thinking, more importantly I hope it makes you an extra few quid.

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 faired 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 reconsile.

I can hardly contain my excitement, today is the day that my two children are mascots for Tottenham Hotspur in their match against Watford at our home ground of White Hart Lane. I have got butterflies, my kids are as cool as cucumbers (which is normal) but all of us are extremely excited. We are really looking forward to it! … BTW Happy St Patricks’s Day.

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 chesnut excuses from their book entitled “Googles Book of Chesnut 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 Sausauge) is the only one to publically 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 imagione 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 privvy to can be freely accessed, yet they can manipulate as they desire to compete against affiliates.

I think it’s going to get messy.