A few networks have implemented cookieless tracking, and a few bold claims have been made. My problem is that I’ve never seen any empirical evidence that demonstrates this, which must be not only the most categoric way of proving these claims, but also the easiest.

Networks such as Webgains, Paid on Results and Affiliate Future have invested in “cookieless” tracking and Affiliate Window are currently rolling it out across their merchant base. Now all of these networks run campaigns that are dual network with traditional, cookie only tracking in place. Surely a comparison of the conversion rate across each campaign would answer the argument once and for all. Whilst I appreciate that this may vary slightly dependant on the type of affiliates on each campaign, it should give a reasonable indication.

Furthermore, affiliates are generally pretty savvy and I’m convinced that we’d have seen a switch from those networks without “cookieless” tracking to those with, to take advantage of the increased sales. In particular, the big cashback sites who work across multiple networks and also invest a lot of resource in dealing with missing transactions. They have more visibility than anyone and yet there doesn’t seem to have been much desire to consolidate their business to the networks with the more advanced tracking.

My second point is that if we do accept that more sales will be tracked through “cookieless” tracking, does that mean that merchants should reduce their commission rates? It has always been accepted that a certain percentage of sales will not be tracked and so therefore, CPA rates have always been artificially high to compensate for this. If tracking is improving, should we be looking to reduce commissions as merchants are effectively now paying for sales that they would previously have got for free.

I’m sure this argument will not be popular with affiliates or networks, but should provoke interesting debate…

We’ve been working with Orange and FusePump to overhaul the way in which the Orange product feed is produced and distributed. FusePump extract content dynamically from Orange’s site and use the data to produce a feed, and also a couple of really handy affiliate tools.

The benefits of taking the information this way are that the information is current as it comes direct from what customers see on the site. Also we take all information that is available, meaning a much richer feed than previously.

The first of the two tools is FeedCreator. This allows affiliates to customise the feed to suit your requirements. So for example, you can customise a feed that contains only Nokia handsets or pink phones, making it easier to manage.

The second tool is AdCreator, which allows affiliates to create dynamically updated content units in a full range of IAB approved ad creative sizes. Rather than just witter on about them, here’s one I prepared earlier.

Big thanks to Rob and Lee from FusePump for getting us live so quickly and if anyone has any questions about the technology or how to use it, give the Orange affiliate team at i-level a shout.

However, something else to consider. 5 years ago, tech savvy entrepreneurs became affiliates. Are they now developing apps instead?

Cost of entry is lower, money earned comes through quicker and more transparently. Something for networks, agencies and merchants to consider?

One interesting upshot of this was brought to light on eConsultancy last week by Andrew Girdwood of Bigmouthmedia. The new generation of URL shorteners which, instead of directing the user straight to a site,  wrap the destination site in a frame. You may be familiar with this if you’ve clicked on shortlinks in Twitter, but if not here is this site if shortened with Digg. There are also versions from companies like Hootsuite, a Twitter management tool, and rumours that major player Stumbled Upon are aboout to release something similar.

Andrew highlights the issues with analytics, with the referrer being the URL shortener, eg Digg, rather than the site the user clicked the link upon. He also raises the point that SEO will be harmed, with link juice not being passed on as well with the use of URL shorteners.

Both very valid points and worthy of further debate, but on the affiliate side of things will this affect us?

Somewhat worrying from a merchant’s point of view. As mentioned above, this method obscures the referring URL meaning that transparency is reduced. I think it is vital that merchants have visibility of where and how affiliates are promoting them and clouding this, deliberately or not, can lead to confusion and mistrust.

Secondly, not good for affiliates either. When clicking through a shortURL which contains an affiliate link, when you open the link, the wrapped window will display the affiliate link rather than the destination URL. Take this example for Borders – http://ow.ly/2O33. Clicking on this, the frame shows the URL as http://www.awin1.com/a…. Punters not completely familiar with the whole affiliate tracking model (ie 99.9% of the population) may well be confused by this and see it as akin to a bank card phishing scam.

So what do we do about this? Should merchants try and prevent affiliates using these framed shortURL’s? Would affiliates want to use them anyway? My personal view is that we should probably try and stay away. A lot of merchants, networks, agencies and affiliates are driving towards greater transparency and this is something that pushes us away from that goal.

As ever, interested to hear everyone elses views (and don’t forget to back me)…

Therefore I thought it would be useful to write a quick post on what we look for when approving affiliates to the campaigns that we run.

Where will you promote them

Brands like to have control over where they appear, and in other channels go to great lengths to ensure that they know exactly where they will be represented. This is not just to be able to differentiate between cashback sites, voucher sites etc, but to ensure that their brands are not featured next to content that is likely to reflect badly on their brand. I think it is key that we increase transparency, and of course, as discussed elsewhere in our IAB meeting, this transparency must go both ways.

How you will promote them

As I’ve written about previously there are many different types of affiliates, requiring different approaches. As more merchants are beginning to realise this, more of them will wish to segment affiliates by type. By default we do this for all merchants on any i-level campaign now. This is vital when attempting to understand how your affiliate campaign is working. I’m sure we’d all agree that a campaign where 80% of sales are coming from voucher code and cashback sites is not a healthy campaign.

So it is key that affiliates are open in demonstrating to merchants how they are driving traffic. Personally I would like to see different accounts for voucher code activity, cashback activity, email and any brand PPC allowed but I appreciate that this isn’t feasible.

Again this goes both ways. Numerous times on the forum affiliates complain about the amount of communication they receive and how they miss important information because of the volume of email they get. Differentiating your activity would allow a merchant to target communication more effectively. It would also allow merchants to more accurately measure the value of different channels, therefore ending the assumptions about how cashback and voucher codes are cannibalising other channels that have been made without people being in full possession of the facts.

What works well for you?

In my time managing campaigns, it is very seldom that any affiliates have come to me and suggested ways that they can increase sales. Maybe the communication channels haven’t existed before or up and coming affiliates don’t feel confident enough to make these suggestions. I know, however, that if I’m managing an account and an affiliate were to approach me and say that something has worked with another merchant, is there room to try it, I’d be more than opening to discussing it.

How do we do this?

I fully appreciate that a lot of this is the job of the affliate manager> They should take the time to build up a relationship with their affiliates and get to know and understand what they do and how they do it. Realistically though, this isn’t always feasible so what’s stopping affiliates taking a lead on this? There are clearly benefits to affiliates as merchants will work more closely with those displaying transparency and coming up with ideas.

I’m afraid I don’t have any answers on how this should be facilitated. Communicating individually with every merchant is obviously draining on an affiliates precious time. Maybe this is something that networks can champion? One idea that has been put forward is that affiliates operating in different sectors put together a portfolio site, that can be offered up to a merchant to explain their business methods within the network interfaces.

I’m sure plenty of debate will follow on how transparent affiliates need to be, but I would like to emphasise again that I completely agree that this transparency should be two-way and if merchants are not approving affiliates then the reason should be clearly communicated – article to follow…

Sector differences

Different vertical sectors have different buying cycles and so this should influence the length of the cookie period. For example, buying a CD can be an impulse purchase, whereas people generally tend to research substantially when buying items such as holidays or loans.

My question to networks, agencies and merchants is do they take their traditional purchase cycle into account when setting the cookie period?

Rewarding affiliates fairly

Any merchant that truly buys into the affiliate model will be aware of the need to reward affiliates fairly for what they do. Whilst metrics like CPA and deduplication criteria are hotly debated by affiliates to ensure they’re getting their dues, is cookie length examined as closely?

This works the other way round too. An affiliate should only expect to be paid for a sale that they can reasonably claim to have played a major part in influencing. I struggle to see how anyone can justify that a click from an affiliate site has been the main influencer on a sale 12 months later.

Finding a balance

So how do you find common ground between these two factors. You have to weigh up the need to reward affiliates effectively for the work they have done, whilst merchants need to know they are only paying for those sales that affiliates have played the mejor part in.

So back to my point about varying this by product and understanding how consumers go about buying different items. Currently, it seems to be accepted that 30 days is the norm. Where has this come from? Is there any thought put into it?

Do networks have any data on what percentage of sales this would influence? It seems that as we speak more about moving to multi-attribution models this will become more of an issue, so time to address it now?

Because of the last click wins model, many affiliates contribute to sales that they do not get rewarded for, and content affiliates are generally considered to be the worst affected category. With the advances that have occurred in cross channel tracking and deduplication, is there now an argument to reinstate PI as for affiliates?

Most large merchants nowadays utilise a third party tracking solution that automatically deduplicates between marketing channels and awards the sale to the party that generated the last action. In affiliate marketing this action is a click, in search a click but in display advertising it is a click or often simply a banner impression.

The argument in the display channel being that a consumer has seen this advert and this has influenced their decision. Why is the affiliate channel not treated the same? If we now have the ability to examine the journey of the consumer, and it can be demonstrated that they have had no other touchpoint with the brand apart from viewing a banner on an affiliate site, then there is a compelling argument that the affiliate has driven that sale.

I often feel that in the online world we live and die by the same sword because what we do is so trackable. You don’t need to have this argument when selling radio, press or TV advertising. Sorry Mr ITV, we’re not going to pay you for that sale because the consumer saw our advert in The Sun after they saw the ad during Coronation Street.

Obviously this would have to be policed correctly. Previously affiliates have “bent” rules by hiding the ad at the bottom of a page or even reducing the image to make it invisible whilst allowing a cookie to be dropped. Maybe it should only be allowed to occur on certain high traffic affiliate sites? Would it only benefit certain affiliate sectors? Maybe the CPA should be lower for a PI sale rather than a click driven sale?

So there are things to be taken into consideration but I feel that this issue may have been ruled out too soon. Because we have complete visibility, why should affiliates miss out when they can demonstrate that they are driving awareness and value to a merchant?

3-4 years ago then yes, affiliate marketing could be viewed as a single channel and as a merchant you could get away with a one size fits all approach. Affiliates generally sat in 3 categories; content, price comparison or PPC; and all you needed to do was offer a few banners and a CPA and off they went.

The first sign of this changing was when affiliates began to be permitted to bid on merchant brand terms in the search engines. Other types of affiliates started to express concern that this privilege was allowing the brand bidders an unfair advantage in gaining the last click.

Fast forward to 2009 and the race to gain the all powerful “last click” has lead to the rise of many different methods of promotion that all fall under the affiliate umbrella. Now we have cashback/loyalty sites, voucher code directories, traditional online “publishers” moving into the space, rebate catching applications and other new technologies such as Trialpay etc.

To effectively manage an affiliate campaign nowadays, you need to understand all of these different promotional methods and offer a different approach for each one. A cashback site promotes a merchant very differently to a price comparison site and therefore require a bespoke approach. A cashback site requires different marketing collateral, a different commission structure and, dare I say it, maybe a different cookie too?

You need a distinct approach for managing how you operate voucher codes, specific rules on what PPC affiliates are permitted to do and a strategy for how to best engage the long tail. You need to understand not only how these affiliates interact with each other, but also the impact they will have on other online and offline marketing channels.

So you can see that we can’t view what happens in the affiliate world as a single channel. Running a sophisticated affiliate campaign is a difficult job, requiring the affiliate manager to juggle the requirements of the client with the desires of the dynamic affiliate landscape, and fitting all of this in to an overall marketing plan.

Getting this wrong can not only damage your standing in the affiliate space, but can cost you money in the real world.

A bit of background: Medifusion have been around in the affiliate space since 2003, focussing on price comparison in entertainment and electronics, and for the last few years have been syndicating their comparison data to other affiliates on a rev share basis. The rationale behind their comparison content widget is to allow affliates with limited programming skills the option to feature professional looking animated content units into their site .

So can someone with zero programming skills get it to work – let me have a go.

A single product price comparison widget (really good book by the way):

A dynamically updating carousel widget:

A horizontal slideshow widget:

How did I find it?

Incredibly easy. Putting together all of the above three widgets took me less than 10 minutes and hopefully you agree that they look very professionally done. The building of the widgets is virtually idiot proof, but support is provided if you need it. I really like the way that some additional information is pulled from the datafeed in some instances, eg availability, delivery times.

Any qualms?

A couple of things. Affiliates are not given the opportunity to select which merchants they wish to work with, and all available merchants are displayed for all products. Therefore links are potentially being displayed for merchants with whom affiliates are not signed up, leading to loss of commission in some instances. What would be helpful is a list of all the merchants featured so affilaites can attempt to sign up for all of them. Also a couple of the larger networks are still not integrated, namely DGM and Affilinet.

Conclusion

A great tool and a way to augment quality content. I think the content units add a touch of professionalism to a blog or basic content site. I am assured that there are many more developments to come so go and have a play for yourself at http://widget.find-services.co.uk/

It got me thinking about whether this is something that affiliates can take on board.  Now I know that PPC affiliates will day-part target in order to capitalise on peak buying times but how do aother affiliates fit into this mix?

The research highlighted to me the fact that affiliates need to understand not only the demographic of their users, but also take into account the mindset of consumers when they are browsing the site.  The research claims to show that 64% of consumers have never clicked on an advert within a web page, although I suspect this relates to display advertising and should probably state that 64% of consumers have never knowingly clicked on an advert.

The report also states that “The research showed that 51% of consumers were more likely to pay attention to a relevant ad and 49% were more likely to notice useful ads, with consumers most likely to pay attention when researching deals(19%) and shopping online(13%).

Now I would argue that a lot of this researching and shopping is done on affiliate sites, so do affiliates optimise their sites in line with the customers mindset? Is there anything more that merchants can do to assist affiliates in converting traffic from consumers who are in a buying state of mind?