Keep your website close and your offers closer
One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows us all to exchange information easily. You and I can exchange emails, we can surf the web, have discussions in forums, argue in blogs and chat in real time over messenger services. With this right their is a responsibility – understand that everything becomes public almost anything you say or do can, and may well, become public property. Once you put something online it becomes viral, it can spin out of control and once you lose control of your information its hard to recover from this position without damaging your position online in some quarters – someone will be offended by the way you try to limit their access and use of this information.
Affiliate marketing is a prime area where information will be distributed as far as possible. Any way an affiliate can drive traffic to a merchant to make a sale - they will do.
Voucher Codes - the new pariah in Affiliate Marketing
One affiliate marketing technique was to publicise merchants sites by providing with ‘voucher codes’ - so when you go to a booking form or booking engine you input a code and get a discount. These help you get more sales as they reduce the level at which ‘price anxiety’ kicks in. You know that sensation when you think that paying £35 for a toaster seems too much but paying £100 for a pair of up to the minute sneakers is worthwhile. The value a consumer places on an object is unique to them but pricing is based around finding your true value and promoting at it. So the 20% you could get at your regular hotel chain is no longer an expense - it’s a bargain.
Affiliate websites, on occasion, have been publishing these discount codes on their site and driving traffic to merchants where said codes are used. Merchants see this as a double hit on their online profitability - discount & affiliate commission. So they get the sale but their return on investment for that sale is reduced.
Voucher Codes - Good or Bad
The main part of me is that the merchant may well not have made the sale in the first place and the use of the promotional code made them a sale, a sale that didn’t go to their competitors and is all money into the revenue pot. Another part of me feels that if a small affiliate can reach consumers and promote offers on a merchant’s site how bad is their internet marketing! If you cant connect with your appropriate online market it’s about time you got yourself a new online marketing agency and addressed the core reasons why your strategy is failing.
To stop this they’re now tightening up the terms and conditions on many programs to limit the ability of affiliates to use voucher codes within their material.
The voucher code is just the latest target by merchants in affiliate marketing: First it was brand in the domain being disallowed, then it was brand bidding restriction, then it was no direct PPC traffic to a site, then it was brand mentions in URL and now we have voucher codes. At every stage merchants want affiliates to make them money but reduce the affiliate’s ability to actively promote these products online.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
For a while now I’ve been debating with myself as to whether affiliate marketing is really a valuable sales channel or just an excuse for inhouse marketing departments to shift the blame and sit back and read there magazines for the rest of the day. I do believe that most affiliates are lower than a snakes belly, if they can’t use the brand terms for ppc or the brand name in the url they don’t seem to interested in working with that merchant. Anyone can generate sales using the brand names of merchants on affiliate programs. To this point I should point out that I’m on a lot of affiliate program myself, but of late have stopped promoting them as the industry of few of snakes. I’ll go along to A4U SES snkae festival in London this October to see if they can change my mind.
If a merchant really wants to protect there brand terms on search engines before joining an affiliate network then they should get some brand protection. Brand protection is provided by several agencies, Web Safe Solutions and us at Eqtr (Shamless plug please shoot me!)
Comment by Boydie — August 22, 2007 @ 10:51 pm
Just so everyone knows I stuck in the links in Boydies’ comment. as I thought it would help people looking for things online.
My reply to the central point of Colin comment - Affiliate marketers are lazy is something I agree with. I do some affiliate promotion and nothing in it is PPC led - to get enough visitors to make it economical I need to get plenty of visitors and I aint paying no one for them. Most affiliates who make money rape PPC programs looking for the high yield low cost terms - which are generally brand or derivations of brand.
That said often affiliate management agencies don’t help affiliates enough to actually make the investment in an SEO led site viable in the short and medium term. So many agencies rather than going to network shin digs and getting pissed should be sitting down and working out what would make a program work harder. Simple things like if a client is selling something give and affiliate a form to plug into their site to give a direct interface to their booking engine - the affiliate convinces of the reason to buy and the affiliate agency/merchant should make the integration to sale as easy as possible. Some other stuff could help - if you’re going to change promotions make a dynamic banner where the message can be changed at network level and is then automatically on all affiliate sites (dunno if I just gave away one of the projects we’ve been looking at hopefully some network will take note).
I guess its simply time that online companies sit down and have a look at what they’re doing and start evaluating not just the money they want to make but the likely compromises their brand is going to have to make. Viral sounds sexy but if you only sell holidays in Newcastle your target market is limited, if you do email how exact is your information and do you target your siloed users accurately, does your SEO leave you open to new markets not within your traditional demographic and do your affiliates respect you and your brand or are they simply leeches.
Sorry about the post length comment
Comment by Mercury Thread — August 22, 2007 @ 11:18 pm
As an update on this issue there is a thread going on at:
http://www.stephenpratley.com/tesco-hypocritical-over-voucher-controls/
Where tesco have been hitting up affiliates about this apparently they sent out an email which read “Tesco.com decided to make a change in their policy with regards to affiliates. Tesco.com no longer allows for its voucher codes to be communicated by its affiliates, be it on a website, newsletter or otherwise.” Gonna be a fun policing job for their affiliate agency
Comment by Mercury Thread — August 23, 2007 @ 4:44 pm