Affiliate Marketing Archives

Amazon announced starting May 1st, they will no longer pay affiliates for sales sent to them via paid search. That means any leads through search ads on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter and other search ad programs. The announcement read:

After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines. As of May 1, 2009, these paid search Associates will not be paid referral fees.

Why did they make this decision? Amazon said, "decision is based on our review of how we invest our advertising resources." In other words, they did not like competing on the paid search side with SEMs who were sending the same traffic to their site.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion over this announcement, where affiliates try to understand why Amazon would change their policy on this matter. Most people think it is about not wanting to compete on keyword bids with all their affiliates. Some feel it is a good way to rid themselves of affiliates, to reduce the management fees of regulating these affiliates. Others feel it is a branding issue, where Amazon could not fully control how ads looked like that were pointing to their site.

Do note, that Google has been wanting to rid themselves of affiliates in some ways. In the past, Google released a new affiliate policy that required (in some cases):

We will only display one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL. This means that if you're an affiliate advertiser, your ad may not show for a query because another affiliate or the website that runs the affiliate program also has ads using the same (or a similar) domain in the display URL.

Maybe, this is another way for Amazon to mess with Google, if you remember history. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There are two different threads at WebmasterWorld that show publishers, advertisers and affiliate's concern over a new proposed tax law in California.

The law, as understood in the thread, would potentially tax any seller who using AdWords to market their product or service. Moderator, incrediBILL, explained:

The conclusion I drew after reading the law is that since AdSense directly refers customers via links, as do the AdWords ads showing in the SERPs, it's therefore theoretically possible that anyone using Google as an advertising vehicle could be subject to CA tax.

If people advertising in Google are suddenly subject to collecting and paying CA tax then people will most likely stop advertising on Google.

You can see the details about this tax proposal named AB178 and the hearing won't be until April 13, 2009.

Some are very skeptical over the bill and they are not worried too much about how it might impact them.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: 5 Star Affiliate Blog has very good coverage of this concern. Well worth a read.

Commission Junction, the largest affiliate management company, is changing from allowing affiliates to use any type of link to only JavaScript links.

The option to view and use Legacy links will only be available for publishers with relationships that were formed PRIOR to June 23, 2006. Any publisher-advertiser relationships formed after this date will only provide JavaScript links.

Full details at http://cju.cj.com/publishers/lmipub_en.html, you will need to login to view the contents of this page.

This can be bad news for SEMs.

The threads are already hoping at DigitalPoint Forums & WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Watch Moderator, 5starAffiliatePrograms, started a thread she named Affiliate Commissions $6.5 Billion - SEM $5.75 Billion showing a MarketingSherpa.com Affiliate Summit 2006 Wrap-Up Report that says that affiliate "Commissions to Reach $6.5 Billion in 2006."

That is a lot of money when compared to a SEMPO study showing that "Search Engine Marketers Spent $5.75 Billion in 2005".

Keep in my SEM & Affiliate Marketing are very intertwined.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Unless you are a damn good spammer, as DaveN says, there is no such thing as overnight affiliate driven success. As grasshopper says, "having spent my fair share of time recruiting, developing and managing affiliates, i have never seen any "formula" that guarantees success with affiliate marketing."

Marcia composes a very nice list of "criteria for choosing good [affiliate] programs."

1.Products that are in demand by consumers so there's a good chance of picking up plenty of targeted traffic.
2.Merchants and their AMs need to be fair, honest and trustworty - those who are develop a following.
3. A decent commission rate needs to be offered.
4. A decent number of return days need to be offered, so that commissions will be paid if visitors continue to shop around and then come back to buy.
5. Reliable tracking of impressions, clicks and sales.
6. Merchant site needs good usability and should be one that can convert well for the traffic sent, and have a record of good conversions
7. Commissions need to be paid regularly, and on time.
8. NO PARASITES! Some defend them if the BHO's and applications can be opted out of or uninstalled at will. Not so, chances are those are merchants or AMs who are parasite friendly rather than affiliate friendly. Parasites over-write affiliate cookies and steal commissions rightly earned by affiliates - they are NEVER ok.
9. NO LEAKS! Leaks can be 800 numbers displayed without phone tracking for affiliate sales, LivePerson or LiveHelper chat windows that grab visitors at the point of sale, even when visitors arrive when being sent by clicking on affiliate links. They take the orders - no commission for the affiliate who sent the customer. Another leak is Adsense running on the merchant site. No one needs to send traffic to another site to click on Adsense when visitors can click on *their* Adsense and they get paid for the clicks.
10. Cooperative attitude is important - when affiliates need tools or special links, providing them increases income for both the affiliate and the merchant.

There's a lot more, but that's what comes to mind right off the top of my head, just for starters. Most important: HONESTY and TRUST factors.

And you wonder why Marcia is one of the most respected forum contributors out there? :)

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is an interesting WebmasterWorld thread named Affiliate ID's removed from the urls on serps. In that thread, the affiliate describing how he achieved top rankings for a merchant. The listed URLs were to the merchant's domain name, but appended to the URLs was the affiliate's ID. Then recently, the affiliate IDs were scratched out of the Google SERPs and the affiliate was no longer getting credit for sales.

The affiliate asks was this something Google did or something done by the affiliate? It is hard to say for sure without having more detail. I would assume that if Google dropped the affiliate URLs, the rankings would drop as well, unless Google did a wide spread affiliate URL bashing. It is more likely something done on the merchant side.

I contacted the sponsor and I showed him proof of how his listings were showing up for some of the searches targeted. Although it is always tricky to pair a result with ones own efforts, I was able to provide him with information on how the linking took place, during which time period and how his site started to show up originally (under my code) and how it progressed over time. I kept detailed stats on searches as well as screen shots throughout the relevant period.

The sponsor was convinced that he now gets this great traffic due to my effort but has said no word on crediting me for it, specially now that the urls listed have NO partner Id. He must be thinking he is getting mana from heaven without any sweat, my sweat. I went a step further and showed him how Google still lists a url that was read as text, but whose content (and final destination) is actually different. No redirects here, although clicking on that link does redirect.

His excuse is that Google is the culprit. He blames the whole issue on Google. He says -very politely- that he has done nothing on his end to have the redirect listed and not my affiliate link -a flat url with no query strings-. According to him, Google has been undergoing some changes in the last week or so and as a result, they now list the bare urls. In other words, 'swallow it, that traffic is now mine'.

Currently, no one really replied with support that it was a Google action or that it is more likely an affiliate action. I personally wanted to draw more attention to this WebmasterWorld Thread.

News Story: Rakuten, Leading Japanese E-Commerce Portal, to Acquire LinkShare, Leading U.S. Performance-Based E-Commerce Company

Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire LinkShare Corporation, a privately held New York-based performance- based marketing firm, for a cash purchase price of approximately $425 million. The acquisition is expected to be completed within four to six weeks.

We all know LinkShare as a major player in the affiliate space, providing third party tools and services to merchants and affiliates. WebmasterWorld has a more detailed discussion going on about this now, Search Engine Watch Forums just put up a thread on this topic.

SEO Chat Forum members discuss their dislike towards the new CJ reports for the affiliates. Here are some quotes:

The data seems very suspect, my SIDs are gone from my report, and the interface just... sucks.

I agree with you- its very lame. I think they are trying to be more like google- but then again - who isnt?!

I looked at it a few times and then came to realize what I always realize about CJ -- they haven't the slightest clue what their market wants.

I have heard lots of negative feedback about this upgrade from both affiliates and managers.

More discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

There is an outstanding thread taking place at Search Engine Watch for those of you that are deeply involved in the affiliate industry. The thread is about Favorite Affiliate Management Software and is already on post number 11.

Stuntdubl, WMW mod & WeBuildPages SEO, asks about some good choices for affiliate management software. He specifically wants to know which ones pass link popularity and are not too expensive. Linkconnector has a solution for this, but he says that is a bit on the expensive side these days.

Moderator of the forum, 5starAffiliatePrograms, gives some outstanding advice.

UltraLinks - www.ultra-affiliate-software.com claims that they are the only ones that do true direct linking to help link pop. They don't use any type of redirection. Users go straight from the affiliate link to your website. They also don’t tack a query string on the end of your URL. Again I can see some advantages from the ad blocking perspective and also giving affiliates links that don't look like standard tracking links, could improve click through for affiliates. HOWEVER I have never tested this software and am not endorsing it in any way. Just trying to offer an answer based on what I know about. Do your own due diligence.

Another POSSIBLE option - don't know for sure is www.AffiliateClicks.com MYAP's baby brother from Kowabunga. Since Kowa raised the MYAP price so steeply, I need to find out more about this one for smaller merchants. Need to talk to Wade and Todd about the differences.

The thread also gets into a deep discussion about the concept behind an affiliate management software passing link popularity. I'll save that for a separate entry, coming up right now.

T0PS3O sent me a PM about this thread at DigitalPoint forums. The thread uncovers a security loophole in CJ's template repository management system. It was discovered when a DigitalPoint member asked;

When I check my site log stat. I found this dns ace.cj.com with ip address 216.34.209.23. It crawl every pages of my site. Are you familiar with it?

After more digging, one found the issues:

1. They have this machine publicly-accessible (it's not their main web server, somebody actually put in on the outside).
2. This apparently wasn't enough publicity for them and somebody ran/running a crawler on this machine, which identifies the machine to all the sites it's visiting.
3. There's no authentication of any kind for this system.

More information at the DigitalPoint thread.

For all you affiliate nuts, Linkshare just had their Linkshare Symposium June 2005. The awards up for winning included; Innovative Affiliate of the Year, Innovative Merchant of the Year, Best New Affiliate, Best New Merchant, Merchant's Choice Award, Affiliate's Choice Award, International Merchant of the Year, Best Performance-Based Search Strategy, Best Online Merchandising Campaign, Best Integrated Online-Offline Marketing, Best Overall Online Distribution Strategy, and Performance Marketing's Most Vocal Advocate.

The winner list can be viewed here.

Forum thread at Search Engine Watch Forums

Updated: Here is a great write up named Reflections on the LinkShare Symposium.

Search Engine Watch Affiliate Issues Moderator, 5starAffiliatePrograms, posted a thread named Commission Junction to Spotlight Top 200 Affiliates. Basically, he posted information about CJ's announcement Top Tier Publishers Gain Competitive Edge with Commission Junction's CJ Performer. Basically, "top-performing publishers get access to enhanced support and resources, and recognition within Commission Junction's network as a premier publisher."

What is great is that I know about 25% of those 200 are in the SEM community, maybe more.

Marcia, SEW Moderator, started a great thread named Cookie washing and the threat to affiliate income which links to an other forum thread (a forum specializing in affiliate marketing) named The Truth About Affiliate Cookies.

I got to run but the threads are worth checking out.