Comments on: 5 things that make my affiliate life easier

By: Yawn Webmaster!

Yawn Webmaster! — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:17:32 +0000

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.

By: Jason Orban

Jason Orban — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:18:33 +0000

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!

By: Eric Nagel

Eric Nagel — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:23:08 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 04:08:16 +0000

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.

By: Geno Prussakov

Geno Prussakov — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:10:19 +0000

@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).

By: marifer vergara

marifer vergara — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:26:27 +0000

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.

By: Joseph A.

Joseph A. — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:45:07 +0000

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.

By: Jaky Astik

Jaky Astik — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 03:57:30 +0000

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.

By: Sean Morrissy

Sean Morrissy — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:09:27 +0000

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

By: andrew wee

andrew wee — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:31:28 +0000

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.