Archives for October 2010

Affiliates were asked “Please feel free to share any complaints, ideas, suggestions or opinions you have regarding affiliate marketing. It’s your chance to tell affiliate managers what you really think” for the latest Affiliate Summit AffStat Report.

Here are their responses…

• Please give us advance notice of new products where possible, it makes all the difference
• Own up to your company mistakes – even if it costs you money.
• My biggest complaint is that companies that the average person haven’t heard of you always seem to get automatically accepted, and the brand name companies you always seem to get rejected. What’s up with that? My web site is called Brand Name Depot, I will only put Brand Name companies on my site. The whole purpose of my site is to offer my visitors convenient one stop shopping with companies that we’re all familiar with, and to offer them as many choices in each category so they could do their comparison shopping all within one site. When I keep getting rejection notices, it make the possibility of easy comparison shopping for my visitors, and takes away a little of my site credibility. I can’t help but wonder, are these companies afraid of a little competition, competing with companies already on my site, on the same level as them? Something to think about. My filling out the applications, I do to go through the motions to get affiliated with them. Also, what I am really doing, is inviting them to be on my site. Are they always that gracious in accepting invitations?
• Need more input from affiliate managers.
• Cookie based programs are designed to benefit Advertiser and Networks not the affiliate or publishers.
• Many times Networks are walking my money back and forth for weeks but not finished reaches my bank account. – These situations only lead to loss of confidence in affiliate networks and advertisers.
• Update with new promos regularly, and make me aware of them. Also think critically about the quality of your feed. Lousy feeds are a waste of everyone’s time.
• We as affiliates do not like it when affiliate managers pull shady stuff, like allowing certain publishers to break the rules. If you piss us off enough, all it takes is one phone call to the CEO of the advertiser that you are working for and we can let them know exactly how they can save hundreds of thousands of dollars (in some cases, millions) by dumping your ass. (and reversing the commissions of your buddy who happens to be in the affiliate program breaking all of the rules) Play fair, or face the vindictive wrath of the publishers! Just remember, we got the exact same eyeballs on you, that you got on us.
• Pay attention to your affiliates and what’s happening in our industry.
• It would be really nice to have easier access to product codes.
• Update your tools and creatives often to keep up with the changing look/feel of the web.
• Run more Promotions, where you can earn a bonus if you reach a given goal.
• I dislike it when an advertiser is overly restrictive of keywords that can be used. For example, there was a company trying to sell wood chips for fuel, but they won’t let you bid on wood chips as a keyword? What’s up with that?
• Link Networking. Link Networking. Link Networking. Nothing else matters except backlinks to your web site and that takes link networking.
• It should be easier to reach affiliate managers or at least know who is managing programs before signing up.
• I appreciate quick responses to questions about affiliate programs, same day or quicker. Thanks!
• Affiliate managers rarely make any effort to respond to my problems, complaints or request for help.
• Prompt email response time is always a plus, but that’s a given.
• Be clearer about what levels/tiers need to be reach in order for commission level to be increased. This way, less wasted efforts can be placed on programs/campaigns with stricter budget and less flexibility.
• Need more video across the board; YouTube-like video, clickable.
• Please don’t terminate poor performing advertisers. I had a site which was slowly gaining in traffic, but the affiliate manager terminated the agreement, due to lack of sales. So I signed up with their competition, and as the traffic finally hit, I made money from the new program. I think some manager just didn’t like the look of his report, so they trimmed out the underperformers, to make the report (and their efforts ) look better. The underperformers are not hurting anything, you never know when the search engine algorithm will be tweaked to favor certain on or off page factors.
• Performance Incentives are a must for any serious affiliate program. While top affiliates can always attempt to contact the affiliate manager, having an automatic tiered system for different levels of affiliate is key to continued affiliate satisfaction.
• Never, under any circumstances, lie to a publisher. If you don’t an answer to a question admit that and either move on, or find out. Making stuff up will have me going elsewhere regardless of payout
• Affiliate managers need to take a more public stance on industry issues; many are all too silent on critical issues including parasites, toolbars, and merchant good standards and practices. I also believe that the affiliate -merchant TOS needs to become more balanced and protect affiliates more.
• Why aren’t more marketers offering PayPal as a choice for payment?
• Not all of us have programming capability, so programs or networks that provide me the ability to display multiple products in one place with minimal effort are preferable to me – SAS has this and AvantLink also, with options to create product displays in HTML or JAVA – programs that only have banners are just too hard to promote these days. More tools, more communication, more ideas shared help.
• I believe before a company can reverse a commission they should give a specific reason why not only to prevent it from happening in the future but also as a courtesy to the affiliate so that we know what is going on.
• I would like to hear from my affiliate managers if they discontinue or change an item. This could be a monthly email newsletter.
• Cookies should last forever.
• Commission should be distributed as long as customer retains the service and remain with the advertiser.
• This industry is the worst example of fairness in compensation! Internet sales have gone up and up while publisher commissions have gone down and down over the years. Something’s not adding up, and it is frankly insulting to see that ad networks think so little of their publishers’ ad space. Ad technologies virtually take over the viewer experience, and the presenter is left with lost audiences and nothing to show for it. Ad networks need to start compensating fairly, or they will run their network dry.
• Most affiliate managers do not respond in a timely manner. Most often commissions are not tracked or paid in a timely manner.
• Need more apps for bloggers
• I don’t have TIME to be replacing offers all the time. I have a content site. Ads are secondary. I need the ads to take care of themselves.
• I understand the need to have minimum payment thresholds, but if I never make the threshold, then I should still get my money that I earned from below the minimum.
• Some companies need to make their image links easier to use — some of the images appear extremely small or extremely large on a website. In addition there are times that you can click on the same image two different times and each time it takes you to a different landing page — e.g. one time it goes to a landing page for the product. The next time it goes to the home page for the company.
• These people need to be fired: Affiliate managers who do not respond to emails, who expire publishers without warning or explanation, who will not help a publisher with a problem concerning an advertiser, who treat publishers as second class citizens.
• Offer up the best method for promoting your product based on what you have seen. video, twitter, Facebook, PPC, mailing lists, etc.
• Weekly payouts please.
• Policies are too fuzzy most don’t understand the difference between bidding on a trademark (TM) or a TM + specific term, like TM review, TM deals etc. They don’t understand that in the second case search engine customers are not looking for their site.
• Am frustrated with merchants who refuse to place my Google Conversion code on their thank you pages (even though I consistently generate at least $5K/mo revenue for one in particular). Also, paying out only once per month is difficult for programs that I promote solely via PPC.
• I think that publishers should get paid twice a month. Allowing this will give participants faster time to reinvest their advertisers.
• I would like to see better and more honest reporting, better uptimes.
• Learn my nickname. I hate being called my full name. If I’m going to bring your company $20k/month in sales, you can at least afford to learn my preferred name. That’s all I ask.
• Reach out. More information is better than no information. Don’t be afraid to email us often.
• I wish there was more emphasis on quality over quantity of affiliates. I also wish there was more emphasis on ethics and building long-term trust.
• It’s annoying when program managers spam my Inbox with useless stuff! I tend to ignore those that email me too often. On the other hand, I DO appreciate information that is actually useful to me and sent ONLY when it’s actually warranted. Don’t know the difference? Send me ONE email and ask me to subscribe if I want more.
• I’d like to see more banner ads with African American models. I run a Website that’s focused on the African American community but I’m having a difficult time getting my audience to click because there a few ads with people that look like them.
• I have had affiliate managers quietly implement changes to their keyword policy without notifying me and then reverse my commissions when they catch me violating the TOS. This practice is unprofessional and unethical. This has personally cost me over a thousand dollars in ad expenses and several times that in commission in just the past 3 months.

Over eleven-hundred and fifty affiliates were surveyed on their methods, preferences, and strategies for the 2010 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report.

More details on AffStat at affstat.com.