affiliate programs

eBay Affiliate tracking broken for 2+ weeks

Marketing Fan — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:56:36 +0200

eBay’s Affiliate tracking mechanism was broken April 7 and is still to be fixed on April 23 !

last message from April 18 states

ebay on April 18 wrote:

The eBay US team has been working to solve the tracking issue that began on Saturday April 7th.

A fix was implemented over the weekend and early data is pointing to an overall improvement.

Additional data is required to confirm that the fix is complete. We will update you as soon as we have confirmation that tracking is fully restored.

At that point, we will assess the full impact of the partial outage and calculate the make good.

This means they’ll just credit an arbitrary amount of money, based on your past performance… you could as well have referred that $80,000 sale and would not get money for it.

AuctionAds which was invented by ShoeMoney and is now run together with TLA is actually based on the CommissionJunction based AffiliateProgram of eBay – and they sent out a not so happy mail two day’s later

AuctionAds on April 20 wrote:

began on Saturday April 7. These issues affect revenue share and ACRU performance. The exact scope of the issue is not fully known by eBay. When the notification first went out eBay thought the fix was going to be forthcoming. We communicated with eBay and made the decision to wait to notify our users until a fix was completed and the lost revenue credited. Unfortunately the tracking issue still hasn’t been fixed, and it doesn’t appear that a fix will be in place shortly. As a result, the credit can not be determined until the problem is resolved.

We understand your frustration in this matter and while it is not a problem with AuctionAds we are extremely frustrated as well. We fully understand that receiving a bonus credit is never the same as knowing what your real stats are. [...]

Now, technical probs happen – shit happens anyday – but how broken can a system be, that a major corporation like eBay is not able to just FIX IT within a couple day’s time?

I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that the archived TERABYTES of clicks need to be migrated, but that wouldn’t take THEM from registering new commissions…

Having been in the software development and OLTP business for more a decade I REALLY do not understand what the eBay guys are messing around here… I feel it’s a big mess!

Affiliate Marketing: Easy Money?

Marketing Fan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:12:48 +0100

Is Affiliate Marketing the way to Easy Money?

Web merchants are always looking for good ways to market their products. The best marketing tool right now is high placement on Google with a heavily-searched term. But secondary yet most imporant to that is marketing to customers who are interested in their products on other websites; this is the core of affiliate marketing.

For instance, if you were a seller of discount vitamins and dietary supplements, your website would be perfect for selling diet books or books about natural cures and herbs. But what incentive do you have for selling someone else's products? You would rather have all your customer's money, not take the chance that they'll spend their small budget for your website on someone else's product.

Amazon.com was the first major online business to see the possibilities in this sort of marketing, and they pioneered online affiliate marketing to take advantage of it. Instead of hoping people would come to their website instead of just going down to the bookstore or visiting the new sites Barnes and Noble and Booksamillion put up to compete, they instituted a profit-sharing program.

If you became an affiliate marketer and sold books of your choice from your website, Amazon agreed to give you 15% of the book's selling price.

This had an enormous impact on the small online marketplace back in 1997 and 1998, when they started doing it. Today, affiliate sales are a normal and expected part of doing business online; in fact, many web businesses depend on it.

Affilate Marketing Today

Affiliate marketing today may reward host sites for selling products, or they may reward hosts for sending visitors to the selling site (a practice similar to the custom of finder's fees).

In the broadest sense, much online advertising is affiliate marketing, with compensation or commission paid to the host site for visits (pay per click), for registrants (pay per lead), or sales (pay per sale). It's a win-win; the host gets money he or she would otherwise not have gotten for plugging the same product, while the merchant doesn't have to pay for otherwise free advertising unless there's an actual sale from it.

Besides the famous Amazon affiliate program, third-party intermediary affiliates include ShareASale , Commission Junction, ClickBank , and LinkShare.

Profit Margins from Sex to Books

As you might expect, there are wide variations between the profit affiliates bring in depending on the industry. Sex, as always, drives the Internet; without online porn, many visual and digital technologies may never have been invented, and many of the cutting-edge online technologies and techniques are driven by the needs of pornography sites.

It's not surprising, therefore, to find that pornography sites have long provided the highest profit margin in affiliate sales. Most sites making money from this operate a gateway site with their own free images. They make money by selling subscriptions to other, pay sites, and by running pay-per-impression advertising. Gambling sites also tend to pay out generous affiliate commissions for signups.

The best profits aren't necessarily going to come from those affiliate partners with the highest percentage payout, however. Instead, they'll come from the affiliate programs you can best sell on your website. You can't do much with gambling or sex if you have a website on the language of flowers, but you'll probably sell romance novels and flowers pretty well. Your hardcore sex site will probably do gangbusters as a pornography affiliate.

There are few studies online that talk about how profit margins work on affiliate sales, and most of these work through hearsay. But if you check out http://www.affiliateguide.com/, you can find hundreds of sites that do affiliate sales and a short description of each. The highest paying commission for any website as of this moment is a gambling site that pays 50% for each signup.

A Critical Issue: Tracking Your Sales

If your affiliate sales partners don't know you're the referring site for a new customer, they won't pay you a commission. That's the core of the next problem: how do you track your referrals? There are some complex methods for doing this using session cookies, which are often blocked by spyware and adware. But by using older technologies that predate cookies, you can circumvent this problem.

In most cases, click tracking is based on information stored in your web logs, the data that tells you how much traffic you're getting along with other useful data. If you have it set up properly, one line in web logs gives the referring URL for people visiting your site.

But how do you know that the site you're affiliated to is crediting your referrals properly? It's harder to track from your site than it is from the site you sent traffic to, but you can still do it by installing a script in your cgi-bin; you can find details here: http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1998/05/perl/.

Once you know how many referrals you sent a site, your analysis of click-through sales becomes intuitive. You don't know how many sales have been completed, just the number of people who have visited the other site from yours. It takes time and tracking, but by comparing data from different affiliates, you can target the ones with lower sales per click-through ratios. If you're suspicious of sales being credited improperly, you can always make a small purchase yourself using your affiliate banner and see whether you are credited for that sale.

If you are being cheated, you have little recourse but to drop that affiliate program, though you can also do a Google search for the banner (using the lines of code specific to the site URL) and notify other webmasters that they should look into their own sales – NEVER accuse, only let them know they should check.. This is tedious, but you may find it worth it.

One-tier Affiliate Programs , two-tiered or even Multi-tiered ?

Many Affiliate programs also come in tiered marketing programs, where if you recruit affiliate marketers to refer sales, you receive your own affiliate sales commissions plus a smaller percentage of your recruit's.

This is potentially very lucrative. If you do get involved with affiliate sales of this sort, you should obviously get in at the lowest tier possible. That means it's actually Multi-level marketing (MLM) which has a bad taste for many - but not necessarly a bad thing for affiliate programs.

The big payment processor PayPal recently even refused to issue payments for affiliate programs that have a multi-tiered marketing structure.

Is it better to get involved in a multi-tier scheme? That's all dependent upon the product you're selling. In fact, the most important consideration in affiliate marketing is whether you are affiliated with products compatible to your web site.

In a small niche market, it can even be detrimental to get involved in a multitier affiliate marketing program. The more people who are referring, the fewer referrals who are likely to come from your site. In large markets, it doesn’t matter so much.

Conclusion

Marketing Affiliate Programs is everything but easy money! But if you are able to combine a multitude of talents from technical, design and business perspectives it can sure pay off... but remember... things that 100,000 others do won't work your you , just like for 99,990 others as well - so find your niche affiliate program !

Clickbank Stats viewer tool

Marketing Fan — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:56:34 +0100

Those enganging in selling clickbank products can use this little tool called
Clickbank Quickviewer which sits in the tray and scrapes the clickbank stats page automatically...

of course if you are doing affiliate marketing with a dozen or even a hundred of companies that all have their own stats reporting tool, that doesn't help you out too much :-)

I remember there was one software vendor who promised to support 100s of diff. merchant stats tools - but they charged quite a bit without offering a trial version, so I didn't try that.

Affiliate Sites get DMCA complaints for using sales images?

Marketing Fan — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:38:00 +0100

It has come to my attention that a consulting company is sending out DMCA complaints on behalf of Alpine to sites that are Amazon affiliates and carry their products - just as Amazon does... for using their sales text and product images :-) ... can you believe it?

To me this looks like just a cash-generating thing for the company that's doing some copyright and DMCA issue management for the vendor.

( I know their name, but I'm not sure if I want to write it here - they could imply that it's a DMCA issue as well and want me to remove the post :-)

But anyhow, it's obvious that no human person performed a review on the nature of an affiliate site that is built to increase sales for a company that created those product sales copies and images to help Amazon and it's 100,000s of affiliate drive sales.

I wonder if I should mail Alpine about that?

Ebay Api calls now free

Marketing Fan — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 19:04:08 +0100

already announced on November 14, 2005 when I was in Vegas, eBay Enhances Developers Program by Enabling Free Access to eBay Web Services

LinkShare sold to Rakuten

Marketing Fan — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 13:43:55 +0200

LinkShare - big3 affiliate network and home of hundreds of affiliate programs
Sells for $425M to japans biggest e-commerce player Rakuten

via TW and Affiliatetip blog

Affiliate Program Comparison

Marketing Fan — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 20:00:55 +0200

I was just looking for a really comprehensive directory to compare the various affiliate programs

by industry / sector
implementation criteria like datafeeds / templates
cookie lifetimes and tracking tech in general
commission and tier structure
affiliate support means
search engine competitive metrics for keywords / industry / etc.

But currently there's nothing in sight for what I am looking for...

Most of the sites are simple or more complex link directories with the original affiliate id in them, so the guy that leds you to the affiliate program receives a residual income from your earnings (in 2-Tier or multi-tier programs).

In best case they are structured by industry and sortable by clicks...

However, some nicer sites I found after wading thru a few dozen of crappy ones

Shawn Collins Affiliatetip - BUT no real comparison option, just a top10 based on click-thrus ... and it's notable that Shawn Collin's clients are among the top ranked... coincidence?

AffiliatePrograms.com is a pay-for-inclusion directory which allows you to search at least for the standard business metrics you find in the big networks as LinkShare, CJ, etc. - that are Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Click (CPA/CPC), Tiers levels(single,2-tier,multi-tier, Revenue Share, Payout Frequency and Payout Type (the methods of payment e.g. PayPal, wire, check, etc..)

[...] more to come hopefully soon

For more research you may want to wade thru these lists

Dmoz Affiliate program directory

Or even signup with all the 27 Affiliate Networks that offer separate comparison stats on their programs.

e.g. at ShareASale and CJ you get at least their average click-thrus and EPC values ... but no real qualitative, formal comparison option

ShareAsale Affiliate Network with return days statistics

Marketing Fan — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 02:59:11 +0200

ShareAsale.com one very nice affiliate network that provide datafeeds and have over 2000 merchants waiting for affiliates to promote their programs now offer cookie return day statistics, that tell you how many days after initial visit the deal was closed... that's especially interesting for those that tend to promote more complex products or are just curious how long the period between initial visit and final sale is...

I found one client buying after 15 days... - ok - but most of them got their stuff immediately :-)

Merge of Art.com + Allposters

Marketing Fan — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 22:52:00 +0200

Art.com and AllPosters.com have recently merged. As a combined company they reach a really big audience... very interesting merge.

Even though they are now one company, they will continue to operate both web sites as well as both affiliate programs. No changes are required by affilates.

Both affiliate programs remain exactly the same
Linking, URL's and tracking are not affected
Reporting and affiliate interfaces remain the same

Affiliate Program Unprofessionalism to the max

Marketing Fan — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:00:22 +0100

Just came across this morning: what affiliates REALLY "love"...

Quote:

To our loyal webmasters. We apologize sincerely for the
2 days downtime and we will compensate you fully for all
downtime according to your previous days prior to us going
down. Now for the update

Our main critical drive running as an NFS drive to our load balanced
backend crashed monday morning at 5:00 effectively bringing APC to a
halt. Our host tried for a few hours to grab the data themselves,
then soon realized it was not possible to recover the data without
giving the disk to a certified disk recovery expert. As you can
imagine they dont take many super super rush jobs, but we managed to
get our drive there. It is currently at the center being worked on
and from what I told, tomorrow afternoon (Jan 12) we should be
back and rolling. That is the gameplan as of now.

In the meantime we are working on getting processing up
and our members area active for members, while we wait for full recovery
of the drive. Sorry for the low amount of communication up to this
point we have been as stressed as ever trying to get answers and get
this hard drive issue resolved

We learned a VERY valuable lesson which is to have backup after backup
in place and we will be moving this NFS drive to a RAID array,
which we should have done in the first place but over looked it on
initial setup. Anyway, thanks for your support and once again I would like
to iterate you WILL be compensated for all our downtime.

Important Note: Payout that was to go out on Monday the 10th has not
been processed yet for the fact that when our server went down
we no longer had access to print payout reports to cut the checks.

As soon as we get the drive back up and going, payouts will be made ASAP!
Thanks again for your support!

Oh my god... business data on

a single tape drive
no RAID implemented
no offline storage backup via NAS / SAN

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT - these guys do business on an unsecured, unbacked up server... my emails and weblog are better stored with RAID and offline backup on a $200 business server hosting plan on ThePlanet ....

PS: NO, I won't mention the programs name here...