Ideas On How To Advance The Affiliate/Advertiser/Network Relationships

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I think communication is the key. If the advertiser is saying a particular publisher's traffic is not backing up, then publisher should communicate with his network AM to find out from the advertiser how much of the traffic is not backing up. Then work out a deal with the advertiser to see 1) if cutting down on the traffic will help the advertiser meet their margins, or 2) may be scaling up on the sub_ids that are working, split testing more offer creatives to see if that will work, etc.
 
strikernr said:
I think communication is the key. If the advertiser is saying a particular publisher's traffic is not backing up, then publisher should communicate with his network AM to find out from the advertiser how much of the traffic is not backing up. Then work out a deal with the advertiser to see 1) if cutting down on the traffic will help the advertiser meet their margins, or 2) may be scaling up on the sub_ids that are working, split testing more offer creatives to see if that will work, etc.
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I agree, communication is the key for just about everything. As an affiliate, I would rather drop my "non converting" traffic if it lowered my scrub rate. Then everyone wins.

The problem is, I have no idea about my traffic quality.
 
You should be talking to your AM at least once a week about your traffic. Build a relationship with your AM....Look at your AM as a partner in your business. We are there to help you make money and keep you informed of any changes.
 
MarcoFlux said:
You should be talking to your AM at least once a week about your traffic. Build a relationship with your AM....Look at your AM as a partner in your business. We are there to help you make money and keep you informed of any changes.
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In the previous thread he stated he was keeping communication, he double checked if everything was ok and still got screwed.
 
I both agree and dis-agree, my thoughts are that yes communication is a very powerful component here however I also feel that having to contact your AM once a week or once a day and have them get in touch with the advertiser continuously to make sure things are on the up and up is a slow process.

By including more tracking or giving more transparency (While still keeping things secure) could greatly speed up the process for all parties.

For instance if we had something to look at which would give us a more immediate idea of how the traffic is doing for the advertiser we can adjust more rapidly in our campaigns.

This also works for the networks since it can give them a little more fighting power if they know via a tracking method that 10% or 5% or 50% of the traffic is truly meeting the end goals of the advertisers.

I've made suggestions in the past which say that the advertisers can also just let us know there end goals so we can work it into our campaigns, so for instance if they are running a dating lead submit lets say there end goals are to turn that lead into a paid sign-up.

Right now we have no real clue that is there end goal, we can make the assumption but 9 times out of 10 we ignore it because we only need to be focused on our conversion goal (Of getting the lead) but if we knew we were going to loose the offer if we keep pushing the type of traffic we are then we can adjust to keep the offer going strong instead of just getting one random email out of the blue saying the advertiser isn't happy we are pulling this offer from you.

Again if you continually check with your AM it won't be so much as a surprise but when running multiple campaigns with multiple networks it can be very time consuming to go through the steps of continuously checking with your AM that the traffic is on the up and up.
 
I know this may sound crazy, but if your network asks you to show your LPs or Campaigns (PPC or whatever), do it. They are obviously doing it for a reason. Too many people complain about doing this because they don't want the network to "steal their stuff". Any reliable, decent sized network wouldn't give two shits about your campaign, and i am sure most legit affiliates wouldn't care either. If you thinking about, the bigger networks pull in $100k+ daily revenue wise, why would they care about your $2k/day campaign?
 
TFLNetwork said:
I know this may sound crazy, but if your network asks you to show your LPs or Campaigns (PPC or whatever), do it. They are obviously doing it for a reason. Too many people complain about doing this because they don't want the network to "steal their stuff". Any reliable, decent sized network wouldn't give two shits about your campaign, and i am sure most legit affiliates wouldn't care either. If you thinking about, the bigger networks pull in $100k+ daily revenue wise, why would they care about your $2k/day campaign?
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Because your affiliate manager making $35 000 per year sure as fuck would love to be making the kind of money you are.
 
Well i mean it goes back to the reliability of the network (and communication of course), in your own definition. I guess the smaller networks would pull some shit like that, but i couldn't imagine anyone from COPEAC or even my AM from Hydra (Van) doing that.
 
I think this will be a tough sale to advertisers. They hold all the chips currently, including the ability to not pay because they feel the traffic is questionable with no real proof of anything .. which is horse shit.

What motivation would they have to change the status quo?

What's the benefit to them if they get 1000 leads from 1 affiliate? By getting the same 1000 leads from 20 affiliates, they can not pay 3 of the 20 and boost profits.

If they get outed, ooh well >> new company name & start the scam over.

My point being, there's always another sucker who just signed up for the money tree waiting to take the place of the recently banned affiliate. As long as networks keep pushing the bad advertiser's offers, the industry will continue to go downhill.

I think a max scrub limit & minimum of X days before they can pull the offer (exception: fraud) will probably be more beneficial than any kind of tracking IF all networks play by the same rules.

In theory, the advertiser tracking idea is more revolutionary than 202 ... in practice, nobody wants to give up any more data than they have to.

Disclaimer: I don't think all advertisers are evil, but there are some. I'm simply stating the obvious.
 
Its a real chicken and egg problem to be sure. I guess the answer is, it all comes down to clear communication of the risk. I also think networks need to force their merchants to be more lenient when their offer is asking you to collect X, Y and Z data points and they are judging your quality on A, B, X, Y and Z.

Kind of like the EPN system right now...they have their quality score which is based on a lot of factors that you have some vague insights around, but no solid metrics of way of measuring it, so you go blindly flailing around hoping you do well. Its lose lose for everybody in the long run as it pisses off the affiliates who actually know what they are doing and would likely adapt if you actually gave them the metrics to do so.

In my day job, I do lead-gen for a b2b software company and right now I'm all into content distribution networks that charge on a CPL basis. If you pick the right ones, you can determine usually up to three or so qualifiers that someone needs to fill out to download your content.

At that point the onus is on you to be smart about how you are qualifying your leads. Sure you might get one or two junk leads which the CPL networks typically refund, but at the end of the day, its not their fault if we are pulling in leads for mom and pop shops when we need to be getting leads for $50mm+ companies. It means we fucked up the qualifiers and need to address that.

So coming from that side of things, I feel like the merchants are fucking over the affiliates because they don't want to take responsibility for the shitty design of their affiliate offer/program.

If I'm an affiliate on a lead-gen program, it is NOT my fault if:

  • You can't figure out how to convert them on your site once you have the lead
  • Your email marketing sucks balls and you don't segment your list
  • You fail to collect the proper data through your lead-gen campaign that would facilitate either the above
  • You have a shitty/scammy product and are surprised when you see a high level of chargebacks from the leads you do manage to convert
Frankly I'm sick of being held responsible for that shit as an affiliate which is why I no longer do those progams. If merchants want highly qualified leads, they need to start paying for that shit.

There's a reason why the highly-qualified b2b leads I get from various CPL content distribution programs cost $40-$50 a pop.
 
Full disclosure on the advertisers part- The networks would have a system in place that is transparent reporting that AM's can view. Conversion reporting that is open on the network/am side, not just the advertiser side.
 
The only reason the advertisers do it, is because they can. If they wouldn't be able to get away with it, you would see some sort of change, be it a simple email/note or a more advanced system. It comes down to the networks, as long as they will let the advertisers get away with it, they will continue doing it. It is not hard to track/check quality on the advertisers side, and it doesn't take anywhere nearly as long to judge the quality as some would make you believe (on average of course).
 
Makes you wonder how many affiliate programs would still be able to exist if they couldn't get away with all this shady shit. I'm certain quite a few of them have their business model depending on getting away with crap like that.
 
TFLNetwork said:
Well i mean it goes back to the reliability of the network (and communication of course), in your own definition. I guess the smaller networks would pull some shit like that, but i couldn't imagine anyone from COPEAC or even my AM from Hydra (Van) doing that.
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I hate to say this but size of the network has nothing to do with the ethics with which it conducts its business.
 
Truffles said:
Makes you wonder how many affiliate programs would still be able to exist if they couldn't get away with all this shady shit. I'm certain quite a few of them have their business model depending on getting away with crap like that.
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I hope this post doesn't veer the thread too much off-topic, but I think it's important to address what Truffles has stated.

Based on my years of experience in this industry, I've seen that for the most part, merchants are honest, follow ethical business practices and are looking to operate their programs so that everyone in the affiliate-network-merchant relationship can profit.

Yes, there are bad merchants who screw over affiliates and merchants. I've had the unpleasant task of trying to deal with some of them and the horrible issues their behaviour causes with the relationships I have with affiliates. But they are truly in the minority. Unfortunately though, these bad merchants will get 10 complaint posts for every 1 thanks post a good merchant will get. So it appears that ALL merchants are shady scumbags that will do anything for a buck.

The reason I think it's important to bring this up is because you will need merchant participation to implement any of the performance measurement tools that will be discussed here. You'll never get that participation if they have the perception that it's being put in place solely to keep them honest.
 
erect said:
I think this will be a tough sale to advertisers. They hold all the chips currently, including the ability to not pay because they feel the traffic is questionable with no real proof of anything .. which is horse shit.
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I haven't been in the business very long. Maybe someone who has can comment on the long term trends, are advertisers getting no better?

I would think if everything was great on there end and they were making gobs of money by scrubbing our leads and not paying more advertisers would crop up and start to compete and bring things more in line.

Just like it appears some big time affiliates started up some amazing networks and raised the bar won't some people be stepping up and becoming advertisers and raising the bar?
 
For any system that is put in place, here are the immediate issues I see that would need to be addressed:

1- Technical skill level of merchant. For some merchants it is difficult to just them to place a single pixel. So trying to get them to place a series of pixels and/or measurement points will be significantly more difficult.

2- Overcoming affiliate mistrust. As I eluded to in a previous post, there seems to be a general mistrust of merchants by affiliates. Warranted or not, how would these affiliates be convinced a more complex system wouldn't be gamed by merchants?

3- DirectTrack. Over half of the networks/merchants out there currently use DirectTrack. They'd need to buy-in to the concept and update their software to handle quality scores for affiliates. From my perception of DT, change is not something they're quick at doing.

4- Non-immediate quality measurements. Some quality measurements take days, or even weeks to figure out, which do not lend themselves to simple pixel/cookie/callback implementation. This complicates the solution as not everyone will be able/willing to load batch files.

5- Merchant buy-in. Some merchants will not want to distribute this information as they consider this information proprietary. They might also feel that it will lead to having to have rate negotiations with many of the affiliates of the network, which is something they try to avoid by going to the network in the first place.

6- Fear of "lock-in" by merchants. If a merchant uses formula X to determine quality scores, then a few months later want to change to formula Y (for legitimate reasons), they might be hesitant because of the potential backlash from affiliates whose quality scores go down.

7- Shady merchants. Yes, they do exist. If they're willing to shave leads, they won't think twice about gaming this new quality score system.

I don't want to seem negative, because I think this idea has merit. I'm just trying to outline some issues that will come up.
 
MaxSteve said:
The reason I think it's important to bring this up is because you will need merchant participation to implement any of the performance measurement tools that will be discussed here. You'll never get that participation if they have the perception that it's being put in place solely to keep them honest.
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Steve, interesting point. I guess the question I would have in response to that is...if advertisers are putting all these measures in place to keep affiliates honest, to the extent that it makes it ridiculously difficult for good honest affiliates to do their job well, why SHOULDN'T they feel like this is being put in place solely to keep them honest? It IS!

I think it goes without saying that when all parties can trust each other more, everybody profits. So I guess if a merchant objects to these simple things that would help us affiliates trust them more, that raises a red flag with me.
 
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