AffiliateFairPlay.com Contextual Advertising Case Study

I recently came across the Impact of Contextual Advertising Adware in Affiliate Marketing: A Case Study by my friends over at AffiliateFairPlay.com on contextual advertising and it’s effect in affiliate marketing, primarily the Zango (180Solutions) adware application. It is a great case study that is well done, thorough, and provides some intriguing and surprising information. Here are some tidbits:

- They tested 785 domains from the Top 500 Retails Web Sites as designated by Internet Retailer. (some merchant sites had parent sites that they tested).
- 1070 separate tests were made on those domains.
- 39% of domains experienced Zango pop ups.
- 42 affiliate networks had popups going through them.
- 37% of popups resulted in the same url being displayed in the pop as the site it was poping up on.
- Over 78% of ads were from affiliates either using their urls or their affiliate tracking urls.
- 63% of all pop ups resulted in a forced click and many multiple forced clicks

“In our testing sample, it is obvious that affiliates are responsible for an overwhelming amount of the pop-ups delivered by Zango. They were responsible for 78%, or 238, of the pop-ups we received during our tests.” You heard that right. 78% of the pop-ups they received came from affiliates!

“Since basically any affiliate who is willing to do so can open an advertiser account with a third party contextual adware company, this presents unique challenges for compliance teams. While many networks and merchant preclude such practices in their Terms of Service, it would seem apparent that the industry has yet to adequately address their detection, monitoring and enforcement policies.” Have we addressed this effectively so far?

There are many professionals outside of our affiliate niche that look down on affiliate marketing. They regard this area as the wild wild west and have made statements, or repeated others who have said that affiliates aren’t driving new customers and that they merely piggyback on orders that the merchant would have received anyway. Have you heard that argument before? After reading this report, I can see where some of this comes from.

Do you think of affiliatemarketing like that? I can’t stress enough to you how wrong that is. A well managed program with top notch affiliates can definitely be an important, and profitable part of your acquisitions toolbox.

This can’t be good for the industry. I know thousands of affiliates that do not do this and drive incremental sales and new customers to the merchants they work with. Example after example can be shown. They provide a value added service to the customer and to the merchant. This sort of stuff really rots the whole barrel of apples, ultimately hurting affiliates, merchants, OPMs and the entire industry.

AFP says it well: “It is obviously not enough to just say that a practice is unacceptable. We do not feel, given the information presented in this report, that our Industry can be apathetic towards the issues and impact.” Merchants need to watch out for this in their affiliate programs and their own media buying. 37% of those pop ups were shown on the urls that they were showcasing in the pop ups. What value does that add to the merchant or the customer?

Networks should be doing a better job of identifying this sort of stuff when it violates contracts. Affiliate managers need to be more educated to identify this and put in place processes to test for this and not be afraid to lose sales temporarily, which can often be the case. Knowing that your affiliates won’t hang around if you have other affiliates overwriting clicks and forcing clicks should be motivation enough.

You can read the entire report here, and I encourage you to do so. Kellie and her team did a great job and I look forward to seeing more studies like this from AffiliateFairPlay in the future.

What are you thoughts after reading it?

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