It’s not a secret that one of my companies publishes affiliate websites. We utilize what I consider an evolved method of building affiliate sites and monetizing them primarily via affiliate marketing.
And creating evolved sites means trying to find evolved affiliate programs to work with so you can make the most money possible.
If you’re a merchant with an affiliate program (or an affiliate network), you’ll find some tips below for making your affiliates lives easier, and thus your sales volume higher.
Allow deep linking to any page
There is nothing worse than having an affiliate program only offer you links to predetermined landing pages. Not long ago, I had an issue with a merchant (who is a household name) that only offered affiliate links to their homepage and “special offer” pages – which changed often. My site only focused on one of their services and we only had the ability to send traffic to their homepage and users would then have to find the section that offered the products they were interested in (the ones my site focused on). This dropped conversions for both myself and the merchant. After repeated badgering, we finally got the merchant to give us a deep link to the specific product offering we needed and we watched conversions quadruple.
As an experienced affiliate, I know what will convert on MY site, so give me the ability to specify ANY page on your site as a landing page. You’ll watch your conversions increase and you may even end up converting affiliates away from your competitors by making it more lucrative to work with you.
Allow extensive tracking options
Most professional affiliates run multiple sites and/or link to affiliate merchants from multiple places. By allowing us to append an alphanumeric code of our choosing to the end of our affiliate links (SIDs, CIDs or whatever you want to call them) you allow us to learn more about what converts and what doesn’t. Coupled with the ability to deep link, it makes a profound difference. Armed with that information, we can tweak our site designs, link/ad placements and site copy to improve conversions and both of our bottom lines.
Allow advanced reporting
Once you give us the ability to deep link and and track our sales sources on a granular level, you need to have a way to let us segment and dissect all that information. Allow us to view and sort transactions based on what product sold, what landing page on your site made the conversion and what tracking code we appended to the URL of the generated sale. If you’re feeling really generous, allow us to also download that information in spreadsheet format so we can compile it in any way we’d like. Smart affiliates are tracking things from their end as well and will be able to determine the conversion rate of each individual link and use that to increase revenue/sales.
Properly size images in your datafeed
If you offer a datafeed option, make sure the images you offer within it look good. By this, I mean make sure that all the images are uniform in size and don’t appear pixelated or “smooshed”. There is nothing more annoying that getting a datafeed where one product image is 600X800 and the next is 75X75. Smart affiliates already have to take the step of converting the images to be hosted on their own site with unique naming conventions – please don’t further complicate the process by giving us 900 product images all in random sizes. Robust datafeeds are an awesome tool and good bait for attracting new, powerhouse affiliates – make yours as painless to work with as possible.
Make “sales increase” bonuses actually attainable
About a year ago, a gung-ho new affiliate manager for one of our programs decided to run a contest to increase sales by current affiliates. The problem was that he went with a one size fits all methodology. I received an email that proudly told me that all I had to do was double my sales and I’d get a commission increase for the month. Now, for an affiliate who sells 3 of their products a month, this was probably met with great excitement. For us, one of their top affiliates doing six figures in sales for their program a year, doubling our sales volume at the drop of a hat wasn’t even a remotely realistic option. Instead of motivating us to make more sales, he made us feel punished for being a high volume producer.
When you put together an affiliate bonus incentive or contest, you’ll need to look at your top producers in a different light and create a separate program that makes sense for them that will actually do what you intended, and motivate them to increase their sales by making the bonus attainable in realistic terms.
About the Author
Rae Hoffman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Outspoken Media as well as the author of the often controversial Sugarrae Blog.
Get social with Rae at Sphinn | Twitter | WebmasterWorld
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Rae,
This post is excellent. Nothing bothers me more than datafeeds with different size images or images with text overlaid.
On the reporting note, I can’t stand it when I have commissions in my account and then discover chargebacks from fraud etc. An explanation of what kind of fraud would be very helpful for an affiliate… after all, they are the ones making the sales and can’t stand to be in the dark.
All great ideas; I hope someone is paying attention.
I don’t do a whole lot of affiliate stuff (yet) but one thing that *really* ticks me off is when a particular offer doesn’t include ads in all the standard IAB sizes. Yea, I can send an email and usually get them made up for me, but it was a while before I even realized I could do that. Why not make it *easy* for people to place your ads? As a longtime PPC Chick, I always make sure my image ads are available in *all* sizes. It’s just common sense.
Good points.
The geist seems to be that merchants tend to hobble affiliate marketing, so it doesn’t compete too hard vs their in-house SEM efforts. And if they feel they can get away with offering a 2% comm on revenue, then why not?
It’s funny how their in-house teams might have sophisticated tracking and analytics tools, while affiliates often get some rudimentary barebones system and have to waste time fighting their way out of a paperbag.
Cookie lifespan is another grouse. One major book-based retailer has a 24 hour browser cookie. Their other big competitor has a 7 day cookie and think they’re ahead on the curve. I guess we can throw most email followups and other forms of CRM out the window for this class of merchants.
Good stuff.
Your last point really struck home with me. I see a lot of affiliate bonuses in the niches I’m in and so many of them give me no incentive whatsoever. More people need to realise they actually need to offer an incentive that will motivate people.
One bonus I remember was for selling an extra hundred copies of their product. Now it had a decent payout, but the bonus was only worth a couple of sales. No one capable of making 100+ sales is going to care about that…
Thanks,
Sean
I am not an affiliate though, but I will be adding affiliates to my blog as soon as possible. This post was worth the effort. I believe that tracking is the most important. The better the tracking ideology and concept, the better statistics and result.
I have to say the point on linking is great. People need to learn that sometimes sharing a few links deeply is well worth it just like in your case. No business should be to selfish on link giving.
Excellent post.
I manage datafeeds for several merchants and it amazes me how merchants still not understand how good datafeeds are for their affiliate program. Most merchants give me an product export file from their shopping cart and I create optimized feeds for comparison shopping sites and affiliate programs. I have seen pretty ugly datafeeds with mispellings on the product names, foreign characters and bad descriptions. As a datafeed consultant, I make sure the feed loads and is usable for all affiliates.
One thing left out is that affiliate networks do not exercise any quality assurance and only require merchants to pass basic fields. The end result is lots of datafeeds with missing fields and not properly formatted that are stale.
@Rae: Great points; especially the one about setting realistic goals for bonus qualification. I spoke about it at ASE09 in the “How to Motivate Affiliates” session.
@Marifer: I agree, but I would not generalize. Some networks are more diligent than others… The bigger problem with merchant data feeds is absence of any categorization whatsoever (when you have 30k+ products, but not a single category).
All five are great points and the detailed explanations really help, especially being new to managing an in-house affiliate program. This kind of details and information help me to make sure our program is heading in the right direction.
The tip about bonuses is a great one. I had a merchant offer a general bonus for sales figures… on day 1 I hit the first tier, and by day 10 I maxed out. Bonuses should be specific to the affiliate, or at least to levels of affiliate activity.
I agree with you great helpful tips, I especially agree with you about the comment for holding more contests for affiliates. It’s a win win situation for both involved. Your affiliates will work that much harder for you, and the website owner or product owner that the affiliates are promoting for will make that much more money! And the landing page tip is very practical and makes a lot of sense, I can see where that will increase conversion!
Seeing as this is an affiliate wishlist, it would be nice to see language characters properly transformed into their asci equivalent.
The amount of time I spent correcting crappy affiliate feeds because the basic principles are being forgotten. Actually I think that as an affiliate program manager part of your remit should be to create a website using the feed you supply to your affiliates.