'Net Features : affiliate marketing

Fraud Fears Loom, but Performance Marketing Booms

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:31:00 GMT

The affiliate/performance marketing space has always been one that the entire Web seems to look down its virtual nose at – and sometimes for good reason.

While the vast majority of affiliate marketers seem to be fine, upstanding Internet professionals, there remain a few that continue to abuse the model. Two well-known affiliates (Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning), who eBay is claiming bilked them of millions of dollars using nefarious tactics such as cookie stuffing, are the latest accused perpetrators of fraud in the affiliate space.

Hogan and Dunning are far from your normal affiliates, but companies which still engage in the performance marketing practice (Internet retailers and online advertisers) likely won’t be dissuaded by this event or any event of that nature in the future. Why? Well, it works really well from a performance standpoint – particularly for those with limited budgets or those that are fed up with CPC and display advertising, social media and email. And the affiliate marketing space is booming.

Performance marketing agency Experience Advertising released an infographic recently which highlighted the popularity of this particular tactic over the years and what advertisers and merchants should expect in the future.

The infographic revealed that affiliate marketing spending in the U.S. increased by 256% in 7 years (according to the U.S. Affiliate Marketing Forecast (2009-2014) by Forrester Research) growing from $1.6 billion in 2007 to $4.1 billion (estimated) in 2014. And according to the IAB Affiliate Marketing Council, 77% of advertisers increased their affiliate marketing spend this year, while 71% expect to grow their spend in the future. And this growth occurred despite pervasive fears of fraud.

Interested in learning more about the digital world of affiliate marketing? Check out Website Magazine's Affiliate 360 book, a practical guide to ethical performance marketing for brands both large and small.

Affiliate Marketing, In-House vs. Network

Administrator — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Affiliate marketing is a great way for a business to expand its reach into the online arena. Simply stated, an affiliate program is another way of saying reseller or introducer. You allow those signed up to your program to offer your products and service to their site traffic and in return you pay them on certain types of activities. This can be done on a low-cost and low-risk model.

There are two main ways to create and run an affiliate program.

1. In-house: You build an affiliate tracking platform for your business or you buy an off-the-shelf package to manage your affiliate program. All you need then is to go out and get affiliates.

2. Network: You sign up to an affiliate network that has all the tracking software already running and also has affiliates all ready and waiting to join your program.

As you can see both options pretty much do the same things and both have pros and cons.

In-House Option

Pros: Cheaper to set up; gives you full control; builds a private network; and with no network fees, this allows to you pay affiliates more.

Cons: No affiliate network and can take longer to start to see results.

Network Option

Pros: Built-in affiliate network; access to wide variety of affiliates; and can see sales quicker.

Cons: Higher setup costs and higher pre-sale fees due to overrides.

In summary, you can see there are benefits for doing both; it does really come down to expectations, budget and how quickly you want to see a Return on Investment (ROI).

Once you have decided which route to go down, you then need to think about a few more things. The first big one is remuneration.

Remuneration

There are a number of ways to pay affiliates:

Cost Per Click (CPC): You could pay affiliates on a pay-per-click basis to drive traffic.

Cost Per Lead (CPL): You would pay for a completed validated lead. Tends to work in B2B or insurance.

Cost Per Action (CPA): Again, similar to a lead but could be a survey, quote form, newsletter signup or guide download.

Cost Per Sale (CPS): Pay affiliates a flat fee per product sale or a percentage of their basket value. This works well in retail and travel.

Whatever payment type you choose, you need to make sure the numbers work for you as a business before you publish rates. Nothing kills a program faster than having to reduce commissions in week two because you missed something or tried to pay away too much.

Recruitment, Incentives and Communication

Once the program is up and running, it will need maintenance and work - even on a network you can't rely on them to be proactive for you. You need to make this work.

Actively go out and look for a potential affiliates, use Google and forums to find these guys and reach out directly. With current affiliates, incentivise them, run contests to drive more sales. Above all, make sure you communicate regularly. After all, these guys are your sales force. You wouldn’t go into a sales meeting without the proper product details, so make sure your affiliates don't. Affiliate marketing is a great way to drive sales and diversify your online income or traffic streams but it does take planning and effort to get it working for you.

About the Author:

Jason Hulott is Director of SpeedieConsulting and helps merchants globally grow their affiliate activities via SpeedieAffiliates.com.

Contact: Jason Hulott, Director of SpeedieConsulting. Tel: 01843 831088 / 07940 521056, email: jason@speediepr.co.uk

Manage All Your Websites in Google AdSense

Michael Garrity — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:35:00 GMT

Good news for affiliates that use Google AdSense to monetize their websites. The service is looking to make monitoring the revenue performance of all your websites (and their respective AdSense campaigns) significantly easier.

That is the basis of the new beta release of Site Management, a feature in the Google AdSense console that allows AdSense users to categorize their various ads by website. They simply have to add websites to their list in the console and then set site-specific actions for each one. Actions can include things like blocking a specific ad from showing on certain sites.

Both domains and subdomains can be added to site lists, but Google warns users that it’s very important to use the correct, complete URL when adding a site to make sure the selected actions work appropriately. So, if a user wants to block actions across an entire domain, they should add them to the list without the “www.” prefix, as subdomains that take that spot won’t be applicable for the rule change.

Have you started testing the Site Management beta feature yet? If so, let us know what you think about it in the replies.

The Stipple Effect and the Growth of Image Tagging

Michael Garrity — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 18:45:00 GMT

Image tagging services make it possible for content publishers to monetize their pictures by making them more interactive, and as social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook make it increasingly easier to share images across the Web, marketers are growing more interested in finding ways to advertise or even sell products from inside their photos.

Stipple is the industry leader in image tagging, boasting a roster of major clients that includes Zappos, Nike, Nordstrom and L’Oreal. It’s also the only service that has been able to accurately tag images at the enterprise scale without relying on gimmicks. Currently, the company estimates that it will have tagged and made “monetize-able” over 100 million images with 100 percent accuracy by the end of 2012.

This extreme growth hasn’t gone unnoticed, and just yesterday it was announced that Stipple had received an additional $3 million in funding from Sands Capital in order to “accelerate its growth and product innovation.”

Just last month, Stipple was responsible for tagging an impressive 12 million images, but that would quickly be overshadowed, as now the company is on pace to tag over 80 million photos by the end of December. When asked about what has helped propel this surge in image tags over the last year, CEO Rey Flemings said the company’s success was all about providing its clients with the ability to scale to tag a lot of photos accurately so that those tags follow the images as they get shared across the Web. Moreover, it doesn’t hurt that Stipple is the only image tagging service to have attempted (and succeeded at) such a feat.

“At the end of the day, the challenge isn’t in helping people tag photos,” says Flemings. “It’s all about distribution.”

As part of the company’s push for greater distribution, it recently integrated with Twitter to bring its interactive images to the social network’s content stream, which could be one of the first steps towards unlocking in-stream commerce on Twitter.

Much of Stipple’s success can, and has, been attributed to its ability to scale to meet the image tagging needs of all of its clients. When the company launched, it wanted to help “solve the image problem,” and now it has done that for some of the largest brands in the world. Some of its clients have thousands, if not millions, of images that need to be tagged, and Stipple is able to help them do that not just with a streamlined, automatic process, but also with 100 percent accuracy across distribution channels, which his of utmost importance considering how often images are shared on the Web.

“[Stipple] builds a bridge between our product images on others’ websites and our own, with no human interaction, unprecedented accuracy and at scale,” says Greg Colando, President of FLOR.

Now with a significantly fatter wallet, Stipple is looking ahead to 2013 and hoping to build upon, and increase, its impressive numbers from 2012. That means growing its current database of images and expanding its client base to include even more enterprise-level brands. It also means hiring more staff members, particularly engineers and sales representatives. That is on top of the two big hires the company just announced: Darr Gerscovich (formerly of LinkedIn and Yahoo!), who will run Stipple’s marketing organization, and Stephanie Palmer, who will be in charge of working directly with the company’s growing network of publishers.

It seems safe to say that affiliates and advertisers may want to keep an eye on Stipple in 2013, particularly if they’re looking for a way to turn their images into money. And who wouldn’t like to do that, right?

Google's Affiliate Ads Cross the Pond

Michael Garrity — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 18:45:00 GMT

Earlier in 2012, Google launched Affiliate Ads through its Google Affiliate Network for Blogger users in the United States. The program was such a smashing success that the company has decided to ship Affiliate Ads across the Atlantic for Blogger in the U.K.

The Google Affiliate Network allows affiliate marketers to earn money from their blogs with ads that pay based on conversions. Affiliate Ads come in the form of a gadget that bloggers can easily insert into a blog post. Then, anytime a visitor clicks on the link, goes to the advertiser’s site and purchases something, the publisher will get paid.

Among the advertisers included in the program are Cheapsuites.co.uk, Crooked Tongues, eFlorist, Diamond Manufacturers, Bestbathrooms.com, The Snugg, Hudsonreed.com and Perfume Click, though Google is apparently hard at work adding new advertising partners every day.

U.K.-based bloggers can being using Affiliate Ads tody by simply signing into AdSense and going to the “Earnings” tab in Blogger (of course, they’ll have to sign up with AdSense first, if they haven’t already). Once they’ve clicked the “Get Started” button, they should see the “Advertise Products” gadget appear when they go to write a new blog post. They can go ahead and search for and select a relevant affiliate ad from the gadget, insert it into their post and then publish it. All they have to do next is wait for the money to roll in.

It should be noted that right now the gadget is only offered to “select” bloggers in the U.K. (and U.S., for that matter) whose blogs match the ad categories that are currently available.

Turn Your Pics Into Profits

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 19:06:00 GMT

Images are all the rage on the Web these days. This trend was probably inevitable, as it is an easy way for publishers, bloggers and marketers to satiate the desire of the average Internet user with quick bursts of content that can be easily digested and then set aside, while still spreading their message.

The problem with images is that once they’re out there, the average Web professional doesn't know how to maximize their potential. However, the ability to make images more engaging and interactive, and eventually maybe even monetize them, is one that is the focus of many industrious developers, and the result is a number of solutions aimed at helping publishers and marketers make the most of their image-based content.

The basic premise of these various solutions is the same; publishers can add tags or “hotspots” to one of their images, which means they select a certain part (or parts) of the picture, and then when users scroll over the picture, these areas are highlighted. When the user clicks on these tags in the image, they’re provided with additional content related to the picture. This can include everything from other relevant images to links to text to audio or visual content and beyond.

For publishers and marketers, these solutions present great opportunities to increase engagement (and thus interest) in their images, inspiring users to stop and interact with the picture, rather than just look at it and move on. Plus, these images can easily be shared on social networks like Twitter and Facebook to extend their reach – some of the products even come with social sharing tags. But they also offer more than just general engagement; customers can also utilize these as an e-commerce and advertising tool that can directly translate into cold, hard digital cash.

By making images “shoppable,” users are able to click on the tags and be sent directly to a site where they can buy the product shown in the picture. Or, customers can link to products with their own affiliate links. Either way, when users click the link to the product, it will send them directly to the product page on the retailer’s e-commerce site, and that allows publishers to get paid in the same manner they would for posting affiliate links in other types of content.

If you’re interested in making your image content more engaging – and profitable – check out one of these solutions:

Luminate allows publishers to use images to engage their audience, add incremental revenue, improve session times and increase traffic, while advertisers can drive relevance, provide a focused brand message and engage consumers. Users can add “positional sharing” apps that let users choose a “specific point” on an image, comment on it and then share it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. It also has an app that lets consumers browse and purchase products similar to those showcased in the image, and an Amazon Music app that lets them preview the music of the artist in a picture. It also comes with apps for YouTube Trailers, Netflix Videos, Wikipedia and much more.

Taggstar increases engagement with photos by an average of 40 percent and lets users earn money with e-commerce integration. Plus, it features robust analytics that provide real-time insights about how many and which people are looking at the pictures, and the images will remain trackable and monetized even when they’re embedded from the customer’s site to another one. And best of all, it’s totally free.

Thinglink works on a variety of popular website and blogging platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla and others. Users can add media tags from a number of platforms, such as huge names like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Spotify, SoundCloud, Wikipedia, iTunes and Vimeo. There’s also integration with MailChimp for email campaigns, Etsy for displaying craft products, Eventbrite for promoting events, Best Buy and eBay for linking to products and more. And with Thinglink, users are able to import images from Flickr or Facebook, upload them from their hard drive or even copy the URLs of images from the Web.

Stipple lets publishers connect images via URLs, their websites or blogs, social networks like Facebook and Instagram or their online stores, and they can also upload them directly from their hard drives. Then, they tag those images with videos, other images, product links, locations, social media profiles, audio, notes or links. Stipple tracks the image to show the user where it “travels” to and how many people interact with it, providing them with the most accurate view of the picture’s reach and engagement numbers, including what content inside the image fosters the most interaction.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but thanks to the Internet (and these tools), it could end up being worth a thousand bucks, too. So, if you’re interested in monetizing your images, now may be the time to look at one of these great solutions.

The Ripple Effect: Track Trends & Find Friends on Google+

Michael Garrity — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:53:00 GMT

Google+ has had its fair share of problems differentiating itself from other, more established social networks, and because of this, it hasn’t exactly skyrocketed in popularity. However, it turns out that by ignoring Google+, marketers are actually missing a great opportunity to find out what content is most likely to trend and how that happens, as well as identify the biggest influencers in their niche.

This ability is presented by a rarely discussed (and probably even less utilized) feature known as Google+ Ripples, an interactive graphic visualization attached to content or a URL posted on G+ that charts the series of a events that take place after it’s shared (in other words, it shows the post’s viral ripple effect – get it?). The chart follows the post from person-to-person, displaying all of the shares and illustrating who shared it and where they found it.

What makes Google+ Ripples neat is its visually appealing, zoomable and interactive interface that lets users quickly scan and study the life cycle of a viral post. By hitting the “Play” button at the bottom of a Ripples page, users can see an animated version of the same graph and watch the post get shared from the time it was first posted to the present, which lets them see the scale and speed of how it spread.

Every public post on Google+ that has been shared will feature its own Ripples page, which can be accessed by simply clicking on the arrow in the top right of a post box to bring out the drop-down menu. From here, you can just click “View Ripples” and it will open a new page with the visualization of the post’s share history.

Benefits for Marketers

This sounds interesting and all, but what’s the real benefit of actually bothering with this feature?

Well actually, there are two. See, Google+ Ripples is a quick and easy way to spot what type of content in your niche is most likely to foster engagement, and who the most influential people are in terms of getting it seen (and shared) by the most users. Basically, it presents a visual representation of the life cycle of content in your niche, and the people who interact with it.

While simply looking at the number of shares can give marketers an idea of what topics or types of content are most popular within their niche, Ripples can help them visualize how quickly and among what type of users it is shared. What they may find is that some posts spread fast, but die down after a few hours, while others take off more slowly and thrive a lot longer. Or, they could discover that some topics are more shared among business professionals, while others are all the rage with consumers. All of this information can give marketers a better idea of what kinds of content to post (both on Google+ and other places that they reach their niche audience) and who to target with that content.

But the real beauty of Ripples is that it shows which users were most influential in helping to spread it across the social network. Those users who shared the content from the original poster, and then saw a lot of other users share the content from them, are more than likely going to be important, major players in that niche. And Ripples not only helps to identify these folk, but also provides users with an easy way to automatically connect with them. Marketers can use this information to network and get their name on the radar of these key people in their industry.

Who knows? If you impress them enough, they may even start sharing your content. So the next time you’re on Google+, it might be worth it to check out Ripples.

LinkTrust Saves Best for Last

Michael Garrity — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 16:15:00 GMT

It's officially fall, and with the pumpkin spice lattes and the reappearance of our sweatshirts, also comes the end of LinkTrust’s Summer of Love, a summer-long series of Webinars.

However, LinkTrust, an affiliate management and tracking software provider, is ending the season and its series with a bang, announcing it is now offering the ability to utilize additional landing pages, hide click referrers, manage all traffic caps in a single report and clone creatives from existing campaigns. These fresh features were added to help both affiliate networks and merchants optimize their traffic and tighten affiliate security, in an effort to increase their profits.

Many of these additions were included with an eye on the mobile Web, as LinkTrust found that an increasing number of campaigns are being optimized for smartphones and other mobile devices.

For instance, now LinkTrust customers can create a rule that redirects traffic that contains specific device names in the user agent (e.g. “iPhone”) to a specific, optimized landing page. But these unique additional landing pages aren’t only for mobile, as customers can also make pages that display based on the user’s operating system, browser, non-mobile device or some other user agent attribute. These additional landing pages are a great way for LinkTrust clients to prepare and optimize their sites to be more useful for all of their traffic.

The ability to hide click referrers was put in place to prevent affiliate poaching. This can be done before the consumer traffic redirects to a merchant’s landing page so that the traffic is not interrupted. Any clicks and conversions that take place are still recorded by LinkTrust, but merchants won’t see the click’s referrer to see where they came from.

LinkTrust is also introducing Traffic Cap Reports to assure new advertisers, that want to work with an affiliate program, that they will get quality traffic. Additionally, traffic caps allow advertisers to vet a program’s traffic and protect the relationships between affiliates and their advertising partners. LinkTrust traffic caps are set on an individual affiliate/campaign basis, or simply across an entire campaign. Being able to monitor caps in a single location lets advertisers make informed decisions quicker by letting them see which caps have been met and the affiliate’s progress with the others.

For security purposes, LinkTrust is including new affiliate fraud enhancements to prevent the sale and transfer of affiliate accounts. Clients are now able to restrict affiliate login based on the users’ country or IP address.

The Affiliate Center is getting a bit of a makeover, as well, with a couple of new additions, such as the option to hide or show campaigns by affiliate group on the Request Offers page, the ability to re-agree to terms and conditions, a custom stylesheet for pop-out pages and a feature that lets clients add an “http://” to their website URL.

The Summer of Love finale also comes with the ability for affiliate managers to: update global pixels from within the Affiliate Center, filter by affiliate group on commission and performance reports and more. There is even an option for a new type of creative, called “File,” for any creative image package, PDF, zipped files, externally hosted data feeds and others.

Re-Stumbling Upon StumbleUpon for Affiliates

Michael Garrity — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 19:24:00 GMT

Social discovery engine StumbleUpon has been a major driver of traffic for many websites for a while now, particularly interest-specific sites (like those run by affiliates). But for some reason, its full potential as an online advertising tool has never really been exploited. StumbleUpon, of course, wasn’t content with this, which is why it has given its Paid Discovery ad program a bit of an upgrade to help it better compete with other social media companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Paid Discovery is a product of StumbleUpon Labs – where the company develops its new features – that promises to deliver the “right traffic” straight to a user’s website or content without making users click ads or links to get there. It guarantees 100 percent engagement 100 percent of the time – a lofty claim, indeed.

Affiliates simply have to submit their desired URL to Paid Discovery and target the users they want by selecting specific demographics and interests. Then, they’ll be able to reach a new and larger audience (StumbleUpon users currently stumble over 1 billion pages a month as a collective) that is actively seeking content in their specific field or fields. StumbleUpon will even highlight the most engaging content directly and frequently.

StumbleUpon Paid Discovery comes in three different pricing plans. The Standard plan for those looking to engage their target audience costs 10 cents per engaged visitor and offers priority serving in content streams, targeting (by interest, location, demographics and device), advanced reporting features and integration with Google Analytics. After that is the Premium plan, which costs 25 cents per engaged user and offers most of the same features (except for device-specific targeting), as well as guaranteed top serving priority in content streams. And for marketers looking to make more of an impact, the program also offers an option for a customizable plan.

The benefit for affiliate marketers should be clear. By submitting their affiliate sites to StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery program, they will be able to drive some of the most relevant traffic on the Web in a way that feels organic to the visitors. These users are going to be more likely to engage with a site and click on ads, because they were specifically targeted to stumble upon that site’s content.

Since Paid Discovery intentionally works like a typical organic stumble for the end user, especially considering that paid pages are inserted in a user’s stumble trail in-between other actually organic results, it helps affiliates attract relevant visitors based on their interests. The downside is that although the clicks are relatively inexpensive (when compared to, say, Google AdWords), the visitors are also less focused on conversions when they arrive, meaning affiliates will have to make sure they create engaging content that will hold their interest and keep them on the site.

Though new changes to the ad system are primarily cosmetic, marketers are given an improved way to view and manage their account activity. This includes a new dashboard, a consolidated graph for campaign information and options for both active and archived campaigns.

If you haven’t looked at StumbleUpon yet as a way to improve the relevancy of the traffic to your affiliate site, now may be the time to do it as the company makes some changes to the program. After all, it’s easier to engage interested users that are sent directly to your websites or content than it is to try to get them to click on your website first from an organic SERP, so the investment could very well be worth it in the long run.

Don't Affiliate with Strangers!

Michael Garrity — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:55:00 GMT

Affiliate marketing does not have to be a lonely venture. While it may seem like a solo effort on the surface, there are actually many potential opportunities for affiliate marketers willing to get out there and make some friends.

As a publisher, it can be hugely beneficial to your business if you get out there and network to find other successful affiliates with whom to share knowledge and ideas with (and maybe more). Attending conferences or trade shows, sending emails or instant messages or even using social media to meet new contacts, are all great ways to establish communication with others in the industry and, hopefully, gain valuable insights.

It’s nice to have friends, but you may be wondering just how attending Happy Hour at an affiliate marketing conference can help you in the long run. So, you may be wondering, “Why network?”

The thing is, the ever-growing affiliate marketing industry is becoming more diverse by the day, and often affiliates will specialize in specific areas, such as SEO, PPC, email marketing and others. And since it is improbable that any one affiliate is an expert in all of these areas, making connections with other affiliates or affiliate managers, who have this specialized knowledge, can offer a great way to improve one’s own understanding of a topic, along with adding a resource that he or she can turn to whenever a question or problem arises.

But it’s not all about just meeting other affiliates. Anyone operating in the affiliate marketing field represents a potential goldmine of new and useful information based on their unique experiences, which could aid in significantly improving your own practice. Plus, the more people you know, the more indirect connections you’ll be making thanks to all the people they know, which is a great way to quickly extend your circle, and your potential resources.

Being an expert networker is also a great way to add content to your affiliate site, as well as increase the number of backlinks you accrue. For instance, if you meet affiliates in your niche (or a similar industry) you can ask them to submit a guest post or sit in on a podcast to share their expert advice with your audience, which is beneficial for both of you and can provide links for both sites. This kind of exchange presents a multitude of opportunities. It’s also much easier to ask someone to swap links or share content if you’ve already built a solid relationship with them.

Of course, like any good relationship, an affiliate network partnership relies on give-and-take from both participants. You should also be able to offer up actionable, worldly advice and engage in a dialogue with your contacts. Brainstorming and sharing ideas is the best way to help everyone involved get the most out of your networking efforts.

Educate Yourself on These Back-to-School Affiliate Programs

Michael Garrity — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:30:00 GMT

As the summer draws to an unfortunate close, merchants are scrambling to bring in the rest of the back-to-school shoppers out there preparing for the upcoming academic year. Here at Website Magazine, we’ve already looked at some of the best online marketing practices of e-commerce merchants for this school shopping season, but that leaves out one crucial element of the Internet advertising landscape – affiliates.

A Commission Junction study from earlier this year looked at how back-to-school shoppers use the Web to make their purchasing decisions and determined that affiliate marketing channels are “well-suited” to help marketers reach these consumers. With the school shopping period’s sales peak coming up in the fourth week of August, it’s now or never for affiliate marketers to partner up with one (or more) of these hip affiliate programs to bring in some of that back-to-school cash.

Walmart

Walmart is unquestionably the leader in the retail industry, and it is bound to be the go-to destination for many consumers looking to purchase school supplies, clothing, electronics, dorm room furniture, food, cosmetics, vitamins, chewing gum and a multitude of other goods needed to start the school year off right. The retail giant runs its own affiliate program and offers partners banners and text links, data feeds, RSS feeds, a link generator and more.

Urban Outfitters

This chic clothing retailer offers fashions (as well as fun books and knickknacks) for young men and women from high school through college. Boasting hip apparel that appeals to such a wide range of back-to-school shoppers makes Urban Outfitters an ideal merchant partner. Plus, it will even provide you with reports that track your traffic and earnings, so you can keep up with the performance of your campaign.

Best Buy

Yeah, yeah, I know, Best Buy isn’t exactly doing great right now, but the faltering electronics retailer has at least one more big back-to-school shopping season left in it, and that means that students will inevitably flock to it to purchase new laptops, iPods, home theatre appliances and other accessories. The Best Buy affiliate program pays its affiliate partners based on how much the visitors they direct buy from the site, and helps them out by offering text links, banner ads, widgets and its Best Buy BBY Open API that provides access to the entire Best Buy product catalog. They’ll even throw in weekly newsletters and special announcements highlighting special products, promotions and services.

Justice

If there’s one segment you really want to reach during the back-to-school shopping season, it’s “tween” girls. Justice is an apparel and accessories retailer that does just that, selling products that are unique to the interests of this particular consumer segment. This program offers up to a seven percent commission payout, and Justice has teamed with the renowned Commission Junction affiliate network to offer publishers third-party tracking, real-time reporting and monthly commission checks.

Barnes & Noble

Okay, so this one may not be as immediately obvious as the others, but if you’ve ever had to buy college text books from a university bookstore, you’ll know why looking for the best book deals online is about the smartest decision you can make. Target these eager (and often broke) young scholars by partnering with one of the world’s premier book retailers. Barnes & Noble gives affiliates a variety of marketing tools, including a datafeed and API, provides personal account support and pays out as much as a six percent commission on their books, music, movies, electronics and NOOK products. And, of course, the company is sure to offer a slew of enticing back-to-school textbook promotions.

Is Your Affiliate Manager Certified?

Michael Garrity — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:47:00 GMT

Both weathered veterans and affiliate marketing newbies may occasionally require some assistance in their endeavors. This is why many affiliate networks or programs hire affiliate managers – individuals assigned to help affiliates generate sales, track purchases, send commissions and more.

But how does one know which of these managers he or she can really trust?

Renowned affiliate marketing network Rakuten LinkShare may have the answer, as the company recently launched the first testing and certification program for affiliate managers run by a major network in the industry. Affiliate managers in the Rakuten LinkShare network will be tested for their proficiency and knowledge, and the program will provide advertisers with the education necessary to become “experts” with the ability to drive results and show significant growth.

Among the topics covered in the program are: basic affiliate marketing knowledge, best practices and strategies that can be used to maximize sales. It will also include information that is unique to the LinkShare network. Plus, participants are granted access to special tutorials, webinars and even live events hosted by Rakuten LinkShare.

Certified affiliate managers will receive a badge that can be displayed on their websites and marketing materials. These certifications are valid for one calendar year, with an annual option for renewal that will address any changes in online marketing in that time.

Currently, the program is only out in the US and Canada, but it should be launched in the UK and Japan by the end of the year. The fee for the initial test is $250, with each subsequent renewal costing $50.

Trendy Metrics for Affiliate Marketing

Michael Garrity — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 13:30:00 GMT

Late last week, affiliate program software provider LinkTrust announced it was including trend reports in its service offering as part of its Summer of Love updates to help monitor an affiliate’s traffic numbers and produce predictive forecasts about his or her performance.

Solutions or features like this have the potential to be very helpful for publishers and merchants, alike. Advertisers can obviously use the data to assess the performance of their affiliate partners and adjust their campaigns to eliminate waste. For affiliates, it serves as both a review of their successes (and hopefully limited failures), and gives them the opportunity to fix problems based on the trend predictions.

But, as always, the way to make information like this actionable (and thus worth your time) is to understand it first. While there are a variety of metrics and trends for you to keep track of, there are some that provide almost universally useful information and have a direct impact on the success of an affiliate marketing campaign.

Here are some of the most important affiliate-related metrics to keep your eye on:

Conversion Rate: I mean, this is without a doubt the most important metric in basically any type of online business or advertising campaign. How many times does an affiliate help a merchant make a conversion, or convince a consumer to complete a desired action. Conversion rate numbers can help parse successful strategies and ensure that those practices are imitated. For advertisers, a massive spike can also serve as an indication of fraud.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR): This is the bread and butter of the affiliate marketing world, and there is no better way to assess performance and predict trends than by observing clicks. Increases in clicks obviously indicate positive performance, while monitoring decreases is the most efficient way to identify a bad campaign and turn it around (or dump it) before it’s too late.

Average Order Value (AOV): After a while, any business is going to have a pretty consistent average order size for the majority of its customers. On occasion, especially around the holidays, this average will see a substantial spike, but at more unexpected times, a big increase can indicate something else, and in these cases it’s important to investigate. One thing it could point toward is affiliate fraud.

Number of Sales: Sales are, by nature, made of ups and downs, and paying attention to the events and strategies taking place during both of these periods can help greatly improve the efficiency of a marketing campaign. So, when affiliate marketing is responsible for a big rise in sales numbers, or is a major disappointment, everyone involved should review the related events to see why, and what both sides can do maintain, or improve, those figures. For advertisers, this could mean altering their creative to be more enticing to consumers, and for publishers, it could mean continuing to produce a specific type of content that is driving sales.

Reversal Rate (RR): Occasionally, an affiliate-referred transaction will get reversed (or refunded) by a merchant, usually because the merchant does not approve of it. This means a direct loss of commission for an affiliate, who is probably going to want to stay away – far away – from merchants boasting an abnormally high RR.

Stay Informed About Affiliate Traffic Trends

Michael Garrity — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:30:00 GMT

It’s always nice to have an educated assumption about how well one’s investments are performing. This is why so many people take the time to follow the stock market and keep a keen eye on their money and how well (or not) their ventures are doing.

In the Web world, the same case can be made for affiliate marketing, and affiliate tracking and affiliate program software provider LinkTrust is addressing that very topic in the latest round of features released as a part of its Summer of Love updates.

Users will be able to access an affiliate trends report, allowing them to effortlessly determine which of their affiliate partners are seeing their traffic numbers grow and which of them are declining. These figures are determined using a proprietary algorithm and will forecast a LinkTrust customer’s affiliate trends for the current day, and informing them if they “should be concerned” about certain traffic levels.

Customers can now get mobile and email alerts that provide information about campaign requests, new task and task completed notifications, and tax document updates. Plus, the task manager has been updated to allow them to mass assign tasks, so that they can assign the same task to multiple users at once, and then monitor their progress as they all go about completing it.

Of, course, there is much more. LinkTrust is also releasing the User Agent Black & Grey list to help continue battling against fraud. This will let its customers block spider searches and screen scraper bots before they begin to affect their site statistics.

In addition, it’s offering a new custom sign up form that lets its customers automatically approve affiliate applications that let loyalty sites transform their users into affiliates, and then provide them with tracking links. This is meant to help loyalty, membership, and daily deals sites all maximize the potential of their suite of affiliate management features.

The third Summer of Love update also comes with an account traffic graph, an update of the external transaction modification API, the ability to search all of one’s affiliate partners by campaigns associated with a specific merchant, and other enhancements regarding user information, including merchant performance, merchant channels, new user rights, and response data.

LinkTrust Helps in the Fight Against Fraud

Michael Garrity — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Some affiliate marketers have to spend so much time fighting off fraudsters, they probably feel like Batman. And, like The Dark Knight, they don’t have to worry about taking on these rogues all alone.

One trusty ally in this on-going struggle is LinkTrust, the affiliate tracking and affiliate program software provider that is unveiling a number of new ways to combat fraud as part of a huge feature release coming out this fall.

A part of this new feature set is a Transaction Details API, which will help make everything from marketing analytics to fraud detection a much simpler process. In this case, it works seamlessly with three top-notch fraud analytics and prevention companies, CPA Detective, Fraudlogix and ScrubKit, who can help clients study their traffic to uncover, eliminate and prevent affiliate and transaction fraud. LinkTrust customers only have to enable Transaction Details in their API rights to start using it right away.

The company is also giving its clients affiliate- and campaign-centric ID (CACID) numbers. Assigning IDs on an affiliate or campaign basis (and adding a [=CACID=] token to a campaign’s landing page URL) lets LinkTrust send the ID to an affiliate’s merchant partner. Normally, these merchants have to have their own CRM ID passed back to them in order to track a customer’s purchasing history and facilitate accurate recurring commissions for affiliates.

LinkTrust is also offering new email templates that make communicating with affiliates much faster and more efficient. Clients can create customized affiliate email temples that can be used by everyone within a company, so they can all be on the same page and won’t waste anymore time typing or pasting email messages from files on their desktops.

And last, but not least, LinkTrust is showing campaign groups on campaign performance reports.

Trying to ward off fraud can be a demanding task for affiliates, but with the right tools, and the right partners, it can be a considerably easier. They’ve just got to know who they can trust.