It’s been a little frustrating to have to create a unique link in Performics before being able to utilize the link, this has often made creating large number of links very difficult.
Performics recently announced an upgrade to their link UI.
"I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a major redesign to our links interface for affiliate publishers. This UI is being made available concurrently with our legacy links interface in order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season" says Larry Adams, Affiliate Product Manager for Performics.
Performics has done a lot of user testing on the links and expects the new interface to save affiliates a lot of time.
This year I was invited to participate in the Share A Sale Think Tank session. The session was hosted in Scottsdale AZ. I don’t do a lot with SAS right now, so I was excited to be involved and to learn more about them and merchants in their program.
The hospitality of Brian Littleton and the Share-A-Sale staff was amazing. And frankly, I left feeling like I should explore their network and theie merchants more. Which I guess was the point of being invited. š By my estimation there were about 70 attendees including Affiliates, Merchants, OPMs, and SAS staff.
Overall, for my first Think Tank I had mixed feelings. On day one, 12 SAS merchants each had about 40 minutes to present their company and their programs and allowed time for Q&A from the group. The presentations were as I expected…sales pitches to get affiliates into the program. However, it was the Q&A that left me somewhat confused. The questions meandered from the normal percentage commission in the program and cookie duration to extreme conversations about website function and UI details. At one point the conversation went on for 30 minutes regarding where the user landed after they added an item to their shopping cart and the location of the checkout button. I certainly can understand why UI is important for conversions, but I question the value of the conversation in a forum such as this. Some of these program managers were getting hammered on issues that they may not have any control over.
It seemed to me like that time would have been better spent hearing from more merchants or discussing industry issues.
From what I understand this is only year 2 of the Think Tank so maybe this is just growing pains. I also understand that both the affiliates and merchants in Share A Sale are pationate and are vested in each other. Maybe this detailed discussion is just thid passion in overdrive?
Each day I am surprised by the level of misinformation that is being spread regarding PPC marketing. It all started with Googleās one URL rule and has snowballed from there. Some is being propagated by internal search teams and some by outside agencies. Either way it all boils down to protecting their turf.
The Direct Linking issue has been one that is most often misunderstood. Here is an example of a recent communication that I had with a program manager via email.
[PROGRAM MANAGER] IMWAVE is in violation of MERCHANTās keyword policy. MERCHANT affiliates are not allowed to use www.MERCHANT.com (or any variation thereof) as the visible URL. Please comply ASAP or we will have to deactivate you.
[ME] Thank you for your email. I have paused all of our promotions for MERCHANT while I review our campaign. Imwave does not currently build out landing pages for our merchant partners and instead works only with ones that we can direct link to. Do you have an alternate URL that we can use to promote your company? If not, Iām afraid we may have to stop promoting the MERCHANT program permanently.
Thanks in advance, Tony
[PROGRAM MANAGER] Thanks! I’ll get back to you with our Search Policy as I am waiting for an update from the Search team over here. As far as I know, you can use your affiliate links to link to MERCHANT but the display URL in the ad can not be www.MERCHANT.com or any variation of that.
Otherwise, our own ads get knocked out. I’ll get you the search terms as soon as I have them in hand.
Note that the Internal Search Team is apparently writing the Search Policy
[ME] I appreciate you looking into this. There are a few concerns that I wanted to share with you. In Google, if I directly link to the URL from your CJ links (MERCHANT.com) Google requires me to show MERCHANT.com in my ad. If I show something else, they will shut off my ads for violating their guidelines (inaccurate display URL). It may not happen immediately (usually does) but it will happen, so that is not a good long term solution.
As PPC marketers, the chances that our ads will āknock outā yours, is almost zero even if we use your URL. Many times, internal search departments do not understand this and simply think that allowing it will increase their costs.
In the rare case where our keyword terms do overlap, we would typically not be bidding high enough to have our ads show over yours. The hope is that we can generate a huge list of terms that you are not currently bidding on and if thatās the case, then again there isnāt a conflict on ads. We have done this with other advertisers very successfully and without increasing their internal search costs. If this sounds like something you may want to pursue, please let me know. Iād be happy to have a call to discuss how we have made this work with other large merchants.
Tony
[PROGRAM MANAGER] According to our Search team, 2 ads can’t use the same display URL on the same keyword. One will always be knocked out. If you are seeing otherwise, we’d love to see a screenshot.
Per Googleās policy: http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/18928.html Affiliate Policy: Affiliates get paid a commission to promote a merchant’s website and drive traffic or create sales on that site. We allow affiliates to use AdWords advertising. Please note that we will only allow one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same display URL per search query.
As far as bidding on terms we are not bidding on, you are right. It would not raise our costs. However, MERCHANT has not given any affiliates permission to use the display URL www.MERCHANT.com so, for right now, that option is blacklisted. This is not to say that it won’t change in the future. We’re in the process of building a new affiliate/search policy to present to MERCHANT so this is something we will bring up with them.
[ME] Yes, that is Googleās policy. It is 100% correct that 2 ads can not show at the same time for the same keyword and using the same display URL.
The issue is which one will get āknocked out.ā My point was that even if we had the same display URL AND the same keywords the chances that we would knock out MERCHANT are slim to none. The merchant will typically always be bidding higher than an affiliate and that higher bid will knock the affiliate out, rather than the other way around.
Itās about gaining a volume of keywords. I realize that you must adhere to their policy. I just wanted to point out that they may be losing volume due to a lack of understanding of the process
Tony
PPC affiliates typically can not afford to bid high enough to trump the merchantās ads. There is also another key point in this correspondence. Channel conflict with the affiliate program. The affiliate channel is like hiring a commission only sales person, generating sales at a fixed cost per acquisition.
In my mind, placing an Internal Search Team in charge of creating the Search Policy is tantamount to having the fox guard the hen house. Our industry has got to find a way to get our message up to the āCā level.
Can you imagine a conversation with a company CFO about what we do? āWait, you are generating incremental sales, I donāt pay you unless you sell something AND each sale is at a fixed CPA.ā
UPDATE: As it turns out the Program Manager here works for an Agency not the merchant. The Agency is apparently handling both the Internal Search AND the management of the Affiliate Program….now that REALLY is the fox guarding the hen house!
I really hate to write this post because I love the folks at EcomXpo and I feel they are providing a unique and fun experience for the affiliate community as well as valuable educational content.
That being said, here was my 30 minute experience this year. I missed the first day because I had some meetings and was traveling to our office in York, PA.
On the 2nd day, I logged on in the morning, went through each booth and joined all the prize drawings I could. Left 2 emails, one to say hey to a partner of mine who was actually online in her both, and one to someone I wanted to follow up with from a conversation we had at CJU. He changed companies and I didn’t have his new contact info. (He wasn’t actually online, I hope he get’s it).
A brief stop in the education area to see if there was anything new and interesting I wanted to catch in today’s sessions and in the on demand section. Unfortunately I didn’t see anything that I could say would be more valuable then continuing to work on other 4th quarter projects I have going on.
And that was it. I feel sad, because I love EcomXpo, and don’t want to see it go away. I especially love the prizes I get every once in a while. In the past I have won Ipods, PSPs, Luggage, and more!
My advice to exhibitors, is to find something that is easy to mail and give away a lot of prizes so more people feel like winners, and you can actually get some information into the hands of the drive by prize folks like myself.
I don’t know of any other conference where you can visit each booth, register for all the prizes, and not even have to hand out business cards! Fantastic!
I’m sure that’s now what everyone wants to hear, but it was my experience this year. In past years, I have spent more time watching the presentations, and have also presented a couple of times. But, I always do the drive by prize registrations!
Affiliates aren’t considered “insiders” as far as the SEC is concerned for the companies that they market, but a lot of time as affiliate marketers we get some visibility into the health of a company that others just don’t see. Is a company’s website converting really well? Better than their competitors? Has a company’s site conversion rate dropped significantly? Has a company made some communications to their affiliate partners that might indicate future trouble for the company? We see this information all the time!
Here is an example. Like a lot of affiliates we have a relationship with Walmart. In June of 2007 we got a notice that Walmart was cutting their commission rates due to budget issues and that all departments across the board were being asked to make cuts. Take a look at Walmart’s stock chart from June of 2007 until today:
That’s almost a 10 point slide! Predictable? Probably. Shortly after that email came out they totally missed their quarterly numbers.
Here is a stock chart for a company we started marketing back in October of 2006. The campaign shot through the roof from day one. I didn’t know much about the company, but had I purchased their stock based on the strong site conversions I was seeing, I could have made a pretty penny:
Maybe there is a business around using affiliate conversion data to predict stock market behavior?
I have never met Jason, but I do like him. I think he is very smart, and also calculating. I have followed his comments on the SEO community, and he likes to stir things up by creating controversy, which ultimately gets people talking about him and linking to him. When he commented that "SEO isn’t rocket science" and put down the entire SEO community, the blogosphere went crazy.
I think Jason will be an "interesting" keynote speaker. It will be fun to hear his take on the market and where he sees things going. I am sure there will be something in there that will rile up the audience and get people linking to him as well. Wait and see!
I think as an affiliate many of us tend to spend way to much time sitting at our computers. I know I could stand to lose a few pounds. So I was intrigued when I came across Shawn Collin’s kick off post for his Affiliate Fit Club Website at http://www.affiliatefitclub.com.
I registered, but I’m not sure I will actually post and fully participate, I’m not one for posting my poundage, but I sure could stand to lose a few.
I think it’s great that the affiliate marketing community can come up with an idea, launch it, and market it in short order. Fantastic!
The site itself is kind of designed with a “big fat loser” kind of look and feel.Ā It should be interesting to watch.
I’m not sure if I am routing for the red team or blue team. It’s really a tough call.
I’m sure for the ones that really stick too it, they will all be winners!
The term "affiliate" has and continues to come under much debate. Should what we do be called "Affiliate Marketing"? Are we affiliates, publishers, or advertisers? As a paid search affiliate, all I really do is advertising. Who is the advertiser, us, our merchant partners, or both of us? We both buy advertising to promote the partner’s products and services.
One of my super affiliate cohorts, IM’ed me about wiseaff, and said, "Why AFF, isn’t that a bit restrictive?". It made me stop and think. Why does the term "affiliate" leave a bad impression? Should it?
Like it or not, we are in the affiliate marketing business. We can try and call it performance marketing, CPA marketing, acquisition marketing, pay for performance marketing, post-paid marketing, or cost of goods sold marketing, all we want, but that is not how the industry has defined us.
Should we embrace the affiliate term and work on educating greater corporate America on the many benefits of using this large network of high performers to market their products and services and only get paid for the results they generate?
Personally, I don’t care what we end up calling ourselves, so long as our partners and the executives at their companies understand the value we are brining to the table and are willing to sit down with us, as partners, to determine what a win-win relationship looks like.
Embrace your inner AFF folks! If you are getting paid commissions for your marketing efforts, youāre an AFF!
Wow, it’s been over a week since I got home from Commission Junction University, and although I am just about caught up, I thought it would be a good time to get some of my thoughts and reflections together about the event.
Arrival in Santa Barbara I arrived mid-afternoon on Saturday and had a little trouble with my room. I couldn’t connect to the wi-fi network from the first room they gave me, and that wasn’t going to work for me. They gave me keys to another room and when I walked in, there was Joshua Slone from 1&1 ironing his shirt. Wow, I thought, good thing I knew the person in that room, it could have been really embarrassing. I called down and they finally got me a room that worked.
Saturday night, David Lewis, from 77Blue, and I went out to a nice steak house. It was great catching up with David, learning about what went wrong at ThisNext, and what he was currently working on. I was very intrigued by David’s concept if intrepreneurship. He thinks that the networks should start venture funds to help fund the development of new technologies and affiliate initiatives that will drive future revenues and commissions for the merchants in the network.
Misinformation and Educational Session Problems Sunday morning started early with the CJ Publisher Advisoy Board meeting. This is a group of top publishers (affiliates) that CJ has put together to bounce ideas off of, and discuss the future of affiliate marketing. It’s great to be part of this group, and always interesting to hear what other affiliates are up to and what they want most from the network to help them continue to grow their businesses.
Although the discussions are confidential, the topic of education and communication was discussed a great deal outside of the meeting as well. The major issue is that there is a lot of misinformation about affiliate marketing and many times advertising agencies will come in and convince the executive members of a business that affiliate marketing is a waste of time, especially search affiliates, and they of course should let their agency run 100% of their search campaign and not let the affilaites do any search for them. As affiliates we often make our case to the affiliate manager, but they have a hard time making the case up the chain of the business. The industry has to do better outreach and education to the CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs of these companies so that they appreciate the fixed cost, pay for performance model.
Although CJ did acknowledge this as an issue, they didn’t do a very good job using this year’s educational event, CJU, as a way to dispel these myths and agency misinformation. In fact in their Dispelling Myths of Search Affiliates session, they had someone from their own CJ Search team, and Mike Jacobs from iMarketing, speaking about restrictions that should be put on search affiliates, including not letting them use the company’s display urls. This is the critical issue that causes many top search players to switch from one company to better informed competitors. Jacobs argues that if the affiliates use the display url when he is marketing the company as their agency, than he "might" not be able to see 100% of the impression data, because there is a chance that on some keywords the affilaites’ ads might display instead of his. So in his world, his ability to see all the data is more important than the other 80% of the keyword market space that these affiliates would advertise the company on driving sales at fixed CPAs without using up the company’s search budget. Tony Pantano, our CEO at IMWAVE, actually stood up and said they propagated more myths than they dispelled, and after Tony and I both gave our thoughts on the many inaccuracies of their presentation; we had a lot of people thank us for showing the flaws in their thinking.
My biggest issue, is that CJ, who has typically been very careful about the message they present at CJU, would allow this kind of one sided presentation to take place. It seemed a bit self serving to their agency CJ search side of the business, and I think they really risked alienating some of the top search partners in their network. Odd choice…
The Good News! I was impressed with Rebecca Madigan’s presentation. Rebecca called a lot of top merchants and affiliates in the network and had a lot of facts and figures to report about what was really important and gave us some incite as to what it would be like to "walk in the shoes" of merchants and affiliates. The presentation was most enlightening and helpful. I heard a lot of merchants discussing the presentation and specifically talking about the idea of focusing more on consumer offers and incentives as opposed to affiliate incentives. This is great advice! You can have the best commission rates in the industry but if your pages don’t convert it really won’t matter, our relative commissions per click number will be low, and we won’t be able to afford to market for you.
I don’t want to sound negative, I love CJU! The event is hands down the best networking event in the industry. The affiliate managers that attend are engaged in their programs and are actively looking to build relationships in the industry. I have made many contacts and friends at CJU this year and in the past, and wouldn’t miss it for the world! CJ knows how to run a professional event, and each activity is well planed and executed.
Excited about Borders The folks at Commission Junction were veryexcited this year about the soon to be launched Borders Books program. I think CJ felt the sting of losing Barnes and Noble to Performics. If you recall Barnes and Noble was one of the first affiliate programs in the industry, after Amazon, and was the initial program that helped bring BeFree into existence. So it must of hurt on many levels. But, Honestly I think they might have been a bit too over the top. As you can see in this exclusive video captured late night at CJU of Tom Vadnais, CJ’s General Manager, and Kerri Pollard, CJ’s VP Client Development celebrating:
Affiliates Gone Wild After a night of drinking and networking, I got back from the Dell sponsored Tonic Party around 1:30am. Apparently I was an early bid and missed some of the action. I have been piecing bits of the story together, but from what I can tell, a bunch of affiliates ended up breaking into the Pool at the hotel around 2:30am for a little late night swim. Jeremy Palmer was among the crowd and gave a video interview about the events, I am sure that will surface soon. Apparently Jeremy had someone take Scott Jangro’s iPhone from him and then Jeremy pulled Scott, fully clothed, into the pool. Scott said he was glad he brought an extra pair of shoes and that he would have his revenge. Apparently the entire crew, approx 40, got thrown out of the pool by hotel security. There are also rumors of security video and pictures, but none have surfaced so far. š
Later rumors, confirm that Scott and Jeremy have since made up and are actually on vacation together in Hawaii. This exclusive Wiseaff video shows that they have actually become quite close…
Rumors, Tends and Issues Overheard at CJU I overhead a bunch of tends and thoughts in the industry. Here are some of them:
Consolidation There was a lot of talk about consolidation in the industry at all levels. We have already seen a number of acquisitions by and of the networks. I have written about the distribution land grab that I see happening in the near future. Someone close inside of CJ told me that in their network 1% of the top affiliates drive 99% of the revenues. I think CJ and the other networks have to take a hard look at the 1% and ask them what their business would look like if a competitor acquired those companies out from underneath them.
Direct vs. Network Relationships I think at events like this, it’s always interesting to listen to what people are saying after they have had a few drinks in them. I had one affiliate manager practically falling over dunk tell me over and over again that if I wanted to make any money with her program, that I had to go direct. Apparently search affiliates just can’t make money with the commissions they offer though the CJ program. Are more and more merchants trying to get top affiliates to go direct? What does this mean for the networks, and how much harder will it make for affiliates trying to automate their business if top tier commissions can only be achieved by going direct?
Employees today, Top Performers Tomorrow The issue of CJ employees being affiliates is long behind us. Even though Chad Darling hasn’t surfaced at a CJU event since leaving the network. Come on Chad, we miss you man! It was interesting to run into an x-employee of Traffic Strategies who has apparently become a CJ Performer less than a year since leaving the company. I approached him at the CJ Peformer event and asked him about it. He said all he did was web design for Traffic Strategies, and never realized they even did affiliate marketing. Yeah Right!!! Nice one!!!
Search Affiliates vs Agencies As I pointed out earlier, paid search affiliates are increasingly seeing competition from agencies that are being hired by companies to manage their campaigns. There needs to be a lot more discussion about this and the use of display urls and how affiliates and agencies can work better together. From what I heard the general consensus is that companies are making some bad decisions based on some bad advice. Honestly I think there are ways search affiliates and agencies can and should work together. This discussion needs to continue and for us, is probably the most important issue. It’s tough to sit back and watch companies making a "less is more" decision when it comes to sales and leads. Companies should be expanding the reach of their search campaigns using expertise and budgets of top paid search affiliates. More is More, more sales and more customers at fixed pre-set costs shouldn’t be bad.
The beauty of online advertising is that everything can be tested. I don’t know how many times I heard myself saying that EVERYONE has an agenda, and that companies should take in all the advice they hear, and setup tests to determine how they can get the most customers at the least amount of costs.
All in all, CJU is a great event! Here are some of the other good summaries I have seen on the net:
