Have you been noticing more and more migrations off of the Reporting.net / BeFree platform? Multiple merchants have confirmed that they are being told that their annual contracts for BeFree / Reporting.net will not be renewed so merchants are stuck with making the tough decision of migrating to CJ or to another network.
Migration can be a pain for merchants and affiliates. Lee Gientke from ProHealth shared their transition from CJ to Linkshare experiences.
From an affiliates perspective here are some of the issues:
Time to migrate? – How much time do we have? For companies who have built large content sites, migrating all of the links can take a long time.
Cookies Anyone? – Will the cookie periods from the old network be honored and how long will the old network continue to track for?
Old Payments – Will prior earned commissions carry forward if they didn’t meet the previous network’s minimum payment threshold?
Link Availability – Does the new network provide the same types of links so that sites can be re-created? I have seen several merchants network without providing the deep linking capabilities that affiliates used on the old network.
Data Feeds – Are you offering a new data feed on the new network? An affiliate who has spent a lot of time and money building a dynamic generating site using your data feeds should be handled with kid gloves to insure their site doesn’t break.
Reporting Issues – Does your old network provide a way for your affiliates to see where old links are coming from when they continue to drive traffic to your out of date programs?
The bottom line is migrations are difficult. Some of your top affiliates might not make the switch if you don’t do it right. Many of your smaller affiliates won’t even know you switched and you will continue to have old links pointing to your site for years.
My advice, don’t migrate unless you absolutely have to. And in the Befree / Reporting.net case where you have to, plan for it well in advance; start talking to your top affiliates early to find out what help they might need to make the conversion happen on their side. Just sending out a blast email telling everyone they have 2-3 weeks to move to a new network is going to leave a lot of people in the dust.
Good luck, and RIP BeFree you will be missed.
About Adam Viener
Adam Viener is the Chairman & Founder of imwave, inc, a leading performance search engine marketing agency. Imwave focuses primarily on building and launching effective pay-per-click search engine keyword marketing campaigns for companies paying commissions on sales and leads generated. In both 2009, 2010 & 2011 Imwave was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held companies by Inc. Magazine. Imwave recently announced they had served over 5 Billion ads for their clients!
Adam, a serial internet entrepreneur, founded one of the first commercial internet service providers (ISPs) in 1993. He has a deep understanding of internet technologies and profitable internet marketing tactics. Adam currently sits on the publisher advisory boards for Commission Junction and the Google Affiliate Network.
Social Media:
