Archives for March 2005

Affiliate managers talk about two percent of their affiliates generating ninety-eight percent of transactions, as if that makes sense.

It’s time that you trimmed the fat off your affiliate program. According to data that I collected recently for the AffStat 2005 Report, thirty percent of affiliate managers downsized their affiliate programs in the last year.

While the prevailing mindset in affiliate marketing has been quality of quantity for years, there are still lots of people that talk quality and keep quantity.

The Kindest Cut
Why bring down the size of your affiliate program? After all, Amazon touts a base of nearly a million affiliates. First of all, you’re not Amazon. And second of all, just because they are doing it doesn’t make it right.

Amazon sells Sea Monkeys. So does that mean you’re going to start selling Sea Monkeys on your site?

But seriously, folks. Having a gigantic number of affiliates may dazzle the MBAs in your office, but it’s a liability to carry extra weight. Think about it, how well can you monitor potential fraud, shady adware, CAN-SPAM compliance, and your brand when you’ve got tens of thousands of affiliates?

You can’t handle those very important issues properly with a big, gangly affiliate program.

Less is More
Yes, I know the party line. You are risking the chance that you might throw out a diamond in the rough if you remove affiliates from your program. That’s a myth, but I’ll play along.

As a first step in removing the non-producers, slice out all of the players that are running their operations from free sites (Angelfire, GeoCities, etc). If they are not willing to invest $8 in a domain, they are not going to be diamonds this year. This is strictly Cubic Zirconia territory.

If you have been accepting affiliates on auto-approval, and that is nearly a quarter of you, according to the AffStat 2005 Report, your affiliate program is probably well populated with these sorts of sites.

Oh yeah, there’s the argument that it doesn’t cost anything to keep the dormant affiliates in your affiliate database. Well, if you are doing your job and monitoring your affiliates, they do cost something.

They cost you time to monitor them. It’s easy to catch the scammers that go overboard and drive astronomical stats. They’re greedy and rarely succeed. The real pests are the affiliates with junkyard sites that lie under the radar and do a little bit here and there to see if you’ll catch them. They cheat dozens of programs at a time, and their take can be substantial in aggregate.

Affiliate-land Security
After you’ve dumped all of the free sites, take a look deeper at your affiliate base. You’ve got to look for affiliates that have anomalies in their profile. This is a lot trickier, but important.

These are affiliates that might have seduced you into clicking the Approve button, because they pretended to represent a big time site. If you have Yahoo.com or Forbes.com in your list of inactive affiliates, take a closer look.

Do these accounts say to make the checks payable to Joe Smith and a Hotmail email address? Probably. These are affiliate sleeper cells. They join up with lots of programs, sometimes with real information stripped from WHOIS records, and later update their profile to collect their ill gotten gains.

Usually I’d wince when talking about a net loss, but in the case of an affiliate program, it’s a good thing to optimize and minimize as time goes by. Otherwise, you could be leaving yourself wide open to shysters, spammers, and tricksters. Staff up or cut down!

Missy Ward is the Director of Marketing for CPAEmpire.com and Shawn Collins is the President and CEO of Shawn Collins Consulting. Both are co-founders of Affiliate Summit – the leading Performance Marketing Conference held annually.

Today is anything but a Good Friday for 180solutions. For the past week, 180solutions has faced ongoing virtual crucifixions by affiliates on message boards.

This came about after an announcement sent out by LinkShare to merchants with 180solutions in their affiliate programs that they “have concluded invalid activity in the account(s) of” 180solutions.

The LinkShare announcement resulted in hosannas from the affiliate community, as well as a terse challenge to CJ by an affiliate manager regarding their position on 180solutions.

Just as 180solutions was licking their wounds, Wayne Porter has invited them to a mano a mano regarding their practices, and it seems they have accepted.

Below are some of the questions being asked by Porter:

1. There have been many reports of 180’s software being stealth installed on people’s computers. How did this situation happen? Are there still stealth installs going on? What is 180 doing to stop these stealth installs?
2. What happened to all those older nCase installations? Did 180 upgrade them to the 180search Assistant? If 180 did that, did 180 notify those users first? If so how?
3. Could you describe the advertising that 180 displays on people’s
   computers? How is that advertising labeled?

4. Are you getting taken out of anti-spyware (security) programs so that they don’t detect your programs any more? If so, which ones?

I eagerly await the responses from 180solutions.

18% of marketers say their conversion rates on affiliate marketing programs are 0.5-1%, while 14% cite rates greater than 5% and another 16% say they don’t know the conversion rate, according to a new study from Shawn Collins Consulting.

26% of the study’s respondents reported that 20% of their affiliates generated at least one click in the past month; 14% said 2-5% of their affiliates generated at least one click; 14% said they didn’t know how many affiliates generated at least one click.

Complete article at http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=14480

Let me start by saying that the overwhelming majority of affiliates are nice, honest, hard-working people. However, there are the occasional shysters out there which stand ready to take advantage of unsuspecting affiliate managers who are not monitoring their affiliates’ activities constantly.

Over the years, I’ve encountered just about every trick in the book that said scammers, have tried to pull – from the traditionally unmistakable monkey business such as forced clicks, bogus leads, fraudulent credit card usage etc., to the more creative and well-executed cons such as posing as webmasters of high-profile websites and changing their name and address just before the affiliate checks are issued.

Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, some clown comes up with something new.

Fraud is time-consuming, expensive and can seriously jeopardize an entire affiliate program’s business model. In my role as Director of Marketing for CPAEmpire.com, I am afforded the ability to speak with dozens of affiliate managers and advertisers each week. At some point during almost every conversation, the topic of fraud usually comes up as many of us enjoy sharing the names of the “Most Recently Busted”.

While there is no magical doodad that can prevent the fraudsters from applying to your affiliate program, there are certainly a number of measures you can take to avoid letting them in.

One of the greatest, most powerful tools that we use at CPAEmpire.com to prevent the swindlers from getting through our front door is… “The Almighty Phone”. It is this magical device that when used as directed can eliminate nearly 100% of the crooks from getting through the gate. (And I have the CPAEmpire.com Case Study to prove it!)

We have assigned one of our affiliate managers to contact each and every one of our applicants via telephone, evaluate potential traffic, offer campaign suggestions and let them know about our special affiliate promotions available to them. The “Welcome Call” has always been received as positive and has strengthened the relationship between our affiliates and their respective affiliate manager.

If the applicant is not available via phone, the affiliate manager leaves a message letting them know that for security purposes, we are required to speak with the applicant before we can approve their application. The affiliate manager also follows up with an email stating the same. Affiliates with wrong numbers, disconnected phones, etc., also receive a similar email.

Should we not receive contact back within 3 business days, we will deny the application and a subsequent auto-responder email is sent. Serious applicants, who treat affiliate marketing as a business and recognize the value of a good partnership between themselves and the respective programs that they are promoting, will contact you back after receiving the denial email.

We’ve noticed that applicants that do not respond to our calls or emails usually fall into one of two groups:

• Group 1: Affiliates that are not cost-efficient for us to maintain in our program due to the high customer service standards that we like to adhere to.
• Group 2: Scammers that we just prevented from their chance to bite us in the buttocks.

Occasionally an affiliate may state that they don’t have the time to talk to their Rep via phone, moving forward. In this case, we will gladly provide communication using alternative digital means.

While some affiliate managers have said to me that undertaking this type of time-consuming task to contact every applicant is not economical; to that I say… “Give me a Webmaster referral link to your program; I can use the extra bucks. I have some applicants I just denied that need a home.” 😉

Seriously though, when it comes to the subject of fraud, subscribing to the belief that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure will keep your affiliate program going in the right direction!

Missy Ward is the Director of Marketing for CPAEmpire.com and Shawn Collins is the President and CEO of Shawn Collins Consulting. Both are co-founders of Affiliate Summit – the leading Performance Marketing Conference held annually.