3 Comments

Say Goodbye to BeFree / Reporting.net

Mar 15, 2006
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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provide a way for your affiliates to see where old links are coming from when they continue to drive traffic to your out of date programs?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.

    • Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
    • Jonathan (Trust)

      My advice to the BF merchants is don't migrate to LS or you'll give your affiliates even more future headaches. Such as having to change out all your links when they move to the new ones and they won't track the old ones like CJ does:

      http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=62172&…

      Also, you won't be stuck on one network. I think CJ is the better option (until Buy.at shows it's head) and a CJ/SAS combo is very nice, give your partners options in partnering with you. More avenues to revenue :)

    • Jonathan (Trust)

      You can delete this comment, but it's showing all in bold, makes it a little harder to read.

    • http://www.revenews.com Jim Kukral

      Bold issue fixed.