Monitoring in Affiliate Programs

[viajeria]

Greetings,

I am new to this board, and I'd like to request some help with developing a survey on how affiliate managers and affiliate networks monitor the practices of affiliates. The purpose of the survey is for use in my academic research at ESADE, Barcelona, Spain, and the goal is to develop an understanding of best practices in the monitoring of affiliate marketing programs in order to create a transparent relationship where the goals of publishers and affiliates are aligned. Primarily, I'd like to get some feedback on this issue so I can develop the survey questions.

Of course, affiliate programs are extremely efficient at tracking visits and sales, and are an extremely cost-effective method for customer acquisition. However, illegal or inappropriate activities on the part of affiliates could negatively impact a retailer’s brand in the eyes of current and potential customers. This risk is increased by one of the aspects that helps to make affiliate marketing so effective - namely, the autonomy that the affiliates have in creating content such as ppc ads, web page content, email newsletters, etc.

My basic question is: how do retailers ensure that affiliate marketers act in the best interests of the retailer in their affiliate marketing activities? I think you can separate the response into 4 areas: contracts, incentives, partner selection, and monitoring.

I have a few questions to begin with:
1. What additional incentives do you offer besides the standard commissions (e.g. tiered commissions, special access to marketing materials, contest for top affiliate per month, etc., VIP commissions).

2. What strategies do you use to accept/reject affiliates who apply to your program? What are your criteria?

3. What strategies do you use to monitor affiliate actions (e.g. review conversion rates (frequency?), review affiliate websites (frequency?), etc.

Please feel free to either respond to this board or contact me directly at pfox98@yahoo.com, whichever you feel is more appropriate. I would welcome any possibility to have a longer discussion if possible. Of course, I will share any and all results with the participants.

Thanks very much.

Paul Fox
pfox98@yahoo.com

[kgun]

Originally Posted by viajeria

Greetings,
Of course, affiliate programs are extremely efficient at tracking visits and sales, and are an extremely cost-effective method for customer acquisition. However, illegal or inappropriate activities on the part of affiliates could negatively impact a retailer’s brand in the eyes of current and potential customers. This risk is increased by one of the aspects that helps to make affiliate marketing so effective - namely, the autonomy that the affiliates have in creating content such as ppc ads, web page content, email newsletters, etc.

If you are a serious student, you can start by diving deeply into this matter:

Affiliate link hijacking.

The last story I read about this estimated that about 30 % of every affiliate dollar were stolen. May be that has decreased.

If you write a thesis about this, I will gladly look through your report. You find my background in the lower left corner of my blog. I have adviced a lot of students through my life.

[viajeria]

Dear Kjell,

Thanks for your comment. I've been reading everything I can about these kinds of issues - blackhat SEO, AdWare, Link Hijacking, etc. I am interested in the topic as background for this research. However, the main topic of the research survey is, given that affiliates engage in activities which, intentionally or unintentionally, are not consistent with the interests of the Merchant, how does the Merchant control the program.

I'm looking at four areas which I think cover the range of controls: incentives, contracts, partner selection and monitoring. So, what positive reinforcement in terms of incentives are offered by various affiliate programs (tiered commissions, contests, etc.); what restrictions are explicitly stated in the contract as to what the affiliate may or may not do (bidding on trademarks in search engines, email marketing, separate affiliate landing pages, etc.); what criteria are used for selecting affiliates (volume of traffic, geographic location, product categories offered, aesthetically pleasing web site design, etc.); and, last but not least, in light of the restrictions and incentives in the other categories, how does the merchant monitor affiliates to ensure they're acting consistently with what the merchant wants (periodically reviewing affiliate websites, setting up Google alerts for trademarks and restricted keyword phrases, subscribing to affiliate newsletters, etc.)

The goal is to produce survey results which are both descriptive (what are merchants doing?) as well as prescriptive (what should they be doing?)

By the way, when I say merchant, you can probably substitute (merchant/agency/affiliate network) since, depending on the program, these responsibilites are shared between the three.

Hope that helps clarify the issue, and I renew my call to anyone who'd like to help with the research, and/or has comments on what I've stated above.

Best Regards,
Paul Fox
ESADE Business School
paul.fox@esade.edu

[kgun]

Originally Posted by viajeria

The purpose of the survey is for use in my academic research at ESADE, Barcelona, Spain, and the goal is to develop an understanding of best practices in the monitoring of affiliate marketing programs in order to create a transparent relationship where the goals of publishers and affiliates are aligned.

My bolding.

Originally Posted by viajeria

Dear Kjell,

Thanks for your comment. I've been reading everything I can about these kinds of issues - blackhat SEO, AdWare, Link Hijacking, etc. I am interested in the topic as background for this research. However, the main topic of the research survey is, given that affiliates engage in activities which, intentionally or unintentionally, are not consistent with the interests of the Merchant, how does the Merchant control the program.

I'm looking at four areas which I think cover the range of controls: incentives, contracts, partner selection and monitoring. So, what positive reinforcement in terms of incentives are offered by various affiliate programs (tiered commissions, contests, etc.); what restrictions are explicitly stated in the contract as to what the affiliate may or may not do (bidding on trademarks in search engines, email marketing, separate affiliate landing pages, etc.); what criteria are used for selecting affiliates (volume of traffic, geographic location, product categories offered, aesthetically pleasing web site design, etc.); and, last but not least, in light of the restrictions and incentives in the other categories, how does the merchant monitor affiliates to ensure they're acting consistently with what the merchant wants (periodically reviewing affiliate websites, setting up Google alerts for trademarks and restricted keyword phrases, subscribing to affiliate newsletters, etc.)

The goal is to produce survey results which are both descriptive (what are merchants doing?) as well as prescriptive (what should they be doing?)

By the way, when I say merchant, you can probably substitute (merchant/agency/affiliate network) since, depending on the program, these responsibilites are shared between the three.

Hope that helps clarify the issue, and I renew my call to anyone who'd like to help with the research, and/or has comments on what I've stated above.

Best Regards,
Paul Fox
ESADE Business School
paul.fox@esade.edu

My bolding.

We live in the digital age where 10 seconds is a long time. A bot may crawl 100's of pages in that time, and you may compare two sites on design and ranking.

I shall comment from an affiliates point of view:

1. Some providers think they are the most important company in the world. They constantly send out emails (you can block them, but it takes seconds and minutes). Some big Norwegian change colours and design of their banners. The worst change the banner size of the code you use. The correct procedure is to introduce new banners and keep the old ones.
2. If you have 50 sites, you need to be accepted on every site. Why do you think Google AdSense is so popular? If you are accepted as an ad provider, you are accepted on all of your sites and you can use the same code on all of them. If you break the Google TOS on one, you may be excluded from all. It is the digital age and developement goes faster and faster.
3. Invalid (not validating code). No provider cares as far as I know.
4. It is all about traffic and magnetic content. You may ask once and be declined once. It is the digital age, where seconds are important. There are millions of providers.
5. Who "destroys / degrades" brands? My experience so far is that (see 1 and 3 above) merchants are much worse than advertisers. How many companies do you think care about design, valid code etc. if an advertiser can offer millions of visitors / month. There is one company that has understood that we live in the digital age where the speed of light is a metric whereby part of industry performance may be measured. I am not talking about investment. (What is investment?)
6. Payment by cheque in 2007, where half of the amount you have earned is taken by your bank, at least if you get paid by cheques below USD 50 and you live in Norway. Wake up providers and affiliate networks, we live in the digital age and the digital revolution is transforming the way we do business.

"While that ultimate goal imagined by Wales for Wikipedia has not yet come to fruition, there is no questioning the breadth and usefulness of Wikipedia. Those who refused to believe that a user-generated encyclopedia could compete with the monolithic, traditional encyclopedia written by experts and organized by professional editors, were no doubt shocked when Nature magazine published a 2006 article comparing Wikipedia to the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica. The article concluded that Wikipedia articles were comparable in accuracy and thoroughness to those of the older, paper encyclopedia".
Source: Wikipedia: What Is It Good For?

The customer (read online shopper and surfer) is the boss. Below him the shareholder that has asked for positive long term return on his investment.