The Affiliate Watchdog
Affiliate Manager Email:
Dear Affiliate,
We have noticed that you have stopped sending traffic to our site 4 days ago. What seems to be the problem? We have had a great month and record traffic and sales. Everything is going really well. You are one of our top affiliates and we value your traffic.
Affiliate Response:
Dear Affiliate Manager,
We noticed about 7 days ago that your website conversions have dropped dramatically, and after 3 days of making losses (we drive costly paid traffic from paid search engine) we decided to stop the campaign. Please can you investigate and see what the problem could be, but we cannot continue, unless the problem is fixed. It may have to do with the new changes you recently made to the website, without notifying us. We subsequently focuses on other better performing campaigns in the meantime, and will relook at yours once we are comfortable that the issues have been resolved. We did notify our account manager at the respective network about the problem and I believe he will be contacting you shortly as well.
Sounds familiar? In the past 2 weeks, this has happened to us 3 times! And in all cases, the initial reponse is that everything is going great and their website is doing well. In all three cases, after further investigation by the merchant, they discover that they have a problem across the board, in one or more of the following categories:
1. New Website changes were not adequately tested and subsequently dropped conversions.
2. Affliate tracking codes were not implemented properly in new website, which leads to good conversions for the merchant, but none for the affiliate.
3. Stock/Inventory changes which were not communicated back to the affiliate.
4. Website was down for a period of time during which the affiliate was not notified.
In the scenario depicted above, affiliates act as a watchdog for the merchant, notifying them of problems, even before the merchant knows about it, because the affiliate marketer watches his bottom line like a hawk. Merchants do not always reciprocate, but some do give compensation for lost revenue – which is why we only work with select merchants for our programs. In many cases, our ops team notifies us and automatically pauses campaigns when the merchant site goes down, only to have us in stitches laughing at the merchant in-house paid search teams adverts get higher visibility and land on a “Site Under Maintenance” page.
That in essence is the difference between an in-house paid search team, and an affiliate marketing paid search partner. In theory, your in-house team should work within the same boundaries that you give your external affiliate partners – the same CPA, or Rev Share. In reality, this is not always the case, as some merchants tend to think that they should pay the affiliate less. the problem with in-house teams is that they don’t really care – it’s not their money. If they lose it, they have excuses, if we lose our money, we have less money for next month – reality bites.
The funniest thing I see these days is merchants trying to implement “Bid Caps” on Google to try and keep a lid on their affiliates pushing up prices. They obviously don’t realise that they Google does not display the prices – so even if affiliates outbidded them, how would they know? I don’t actually know what’s scarier: Implementing Bid Caps, or having efficient affiliates outbid merchants with higher internal margins for paid search!
This article could probably go on forever, so I’ll just end it of by saying that Affiliates do play a vital role in assisting merchants with monitoring the pulse of their business, and the merchants that understand this and compensate them accordingly with disregard for inefficient internal teams, will be the merchants that constantly are in the top 5 affiliate programs year on year.
