Ad Agencies working with Affiliate Marketing networks

ryanfortin

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Nov 7, 2008
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What does everyone think about an Ad Agency using affiliate marketing networks to help their client out and has anyone had experience doing this?
 


I used to work for an agency where one of their lines of practice was affiliate marketing (traditional CJ/Linkshare model for big brand-name clients), and also had a media team that not only worked with banner buys/email publishers, but also ran those offers in CPA networks. There's even a case where the agency for a large brand-name client contracted this other agency to put offers out in CPA networks, so the real chain is Advertiser -> Main Agency -> Second Agency -> CPA network -> (perhaps another CPA network) -> Publisher. The payout on that offer that I get straight from the 2nd agency is almost double what I see the offer for in most CPA networks, and the agency I get it from is already taking a 20% fee from what they're paid per lead.
 
Yeah Tons..its a total PIA but if they are a name brand and open to making changes to their page (cause chances are if they are an agency, they have never done CPA advertising and their page is about as action oriented as a billboard) you can kill it. Also never give it out to the whole network blindly cause one mistake can kill the campaign....like a pub hitting the CEO's inbox 3 times in one day with his company's offer.
 
That is part of my concern that some of the affiliates will get out of hand with how they choose to promote the offer. Whats the best way to restrict your campaign so affiliates dont make any blunders like what you mentioned above?
 
Its really important to know your publishers. That may seem like a broad statement and extremely obvious but it needs to happen. If you know that a pub of yours mails to the same person 10 times a day, you know that it may not be the right venue for a name brand offer. For emailing, I would set a limit on how often people can be mailed in a week. There are a few other precautions you can take too. It will ultimately hurt the volume but if you have a sick client that is new to Aff marketing (and there are TONS out there) people would be willing to go the extra mile to make sure they dont lose the campaign...like..say Best buy came out with a lead offer for a newsletter paying $4 per lead for name and email...the good pubs would know that one mistake can fuck the whole thing up..the ones that you can trust would be the ones that know that brand names are easily tainted and also they would know making 50k in one day from and killing a campaign is not as lucrative as making 30k a week (dropping twice to the same person over the course of 7 days) for an unlimited amount of time.

Big advertisers love the thought of CPA advertising but they also heard of all the shit that can happen. Move slow, dont be greedy and it will be fairly easy to get the big guys over to our world.
 
Assuming you are talking about adding OPM services to your current offerings? I took a look at the agency you work for, so I'm assuming this is the case. I don't really want to talk about this out in the open. Feel free to PM me.
 
I used to work at an interactive agency and their specific policy was not to use networks because they viewed them as "second class citizens". To much turnover employee wise, too may complaints quality wise and too much fraud. For those reasons, they would never let us work with a netowrk...period
 
Everything Chris Pink says is right on the money! But then, he's ex-Hydra ;)

And yes, we work with lots of agencies from the big Madison Avenue type firms to small guys you've never heard of who only seem to exist to farm out CPA offers. I will say that agency interest is growing but it's still a challenge. While they love CPA they are afraid - not without reason - of affiliate marketing. That's why we're working so hard to clean up our network. We want in on those big brand budgets and to bring more of those campaigns to you.

When working with big brand name advertisers, quality control is all essential. So like Chris said, keep it private to start and closely monitor each publisher's traffic.