Reversals happen. They happen to merchants, and by extension, they hit affiliates too. Of course, affiliates love programs with “no reversals” policies, but if you, as a merchant, aren’t ready to offer one, I strongly encourage you to at least stick to the following 3 best practices:
1) Locking Periods — Set the locking period in [...]
Continue reading about Best Practices for Affiliate Commission Reversals
Almost immediately after posting my 9 affiliate fraud prevention tips on Econsultancy I have received the following question from a merchant:
If we do detect a fraudulent affiliate, do you think it’s standard/best practice to remove him or her from the program without paying out the commissions they’ve “earned”?
“Earned”? I believe “stolen” would be a much [...]
Continue reading about How to Deal with Fraudulent Affiliates
A friend and fellow affiliate marketer, Mark Welch, writes that “the single most important source of successful affiliates is a direct invitation from the program manager to the site owner or advertising manager” (source: Affiliate Recruitment Strategies and Practices post). I fully concur with Mark here.
Interestingly enough, out of all available methods of direct contact, [...]
Continue reading about 3 Types of Direct Contact for Affiliate Recruitment
A merchant, who is launching an affiliate program, has emailed me the following question:
How effective would very well produced videos be as creatives? We were thinking of possibly having some videos made and wanted to know how well these tend to pull in traffic and sales vs banners and text links.
Great question, especially with the [...]
Continue reading about Effectiveness of Online Video: CTR, Conversion & Other Data
In the beginning of this year, while replying to a completely different question, I wrote:
The responsibility for conversion of affiliate-referred traffic is always a shared one: (i) affiliates should work on making it a targeted traffic, while (ii) merchants should ensure that their own websites actually convert. I have seen affiliate programs with zero conversion [...]
Continue reading about How Conversion Optimization Increased Performance by Over 50%
Having analyzed how affiliates see links on 5 affiliate networks — Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network, and AvantLink — I have noticed that 2 of these 5 (CJ and AvantLink) offer data on link performance.
Commission Junction shows link’s 3-months and 7-days EPC:
AvantLink, in their turn, displays link’s Conversion Rate “calculated from click-throughs and [...]
Continue reading about Affiliate Link Performance Metrics are Misleading
About a month ago, I made a blog post on the 3 signs that tell you to decline an affiliate application. It was an international (i.e. non-US) affiliate, and an Ireland-based search and affiliate marketer, Dave Davis quickly commented:
Wow, awesome seeing the “other side” of the applications. This example is an absolute shocker.
Would love to [...]
Continue reading about Good Affiliate Application or What Affiliate Managers Want to See
A merchant which already has a pay-per-sale affiliate program in place, and is considering tapping into pay-per-call advertising, has emailed me the following question:
Do you think affiliates are commonly motivated to build affiliate marketing campaigns for the promise of lead-based commissions on phone sales?
We’re slightly dubious of this idea. Why would they choose a pay [...]
Continue reading about Pay-Per-Call and Pay-Per-Sale or Synergistic Affiliate Marketing
Based on various polls and surveys, we can confidently state that around one-fifth of affiliates are using affiliate program directories to find programs to join [more in my Are Affiliate Program Directories Dying? and Effective Affiliate Recruitment Through Affiliates' Eyes posts].
The only logical question to follow this data is:
What are the top affiliate program directories [...]
Continue reading about 10 Affiliate Directories to Submit Your Program To
A merchant has emailed me the following text:
I would like to know what is the range of percentage paid out in the affiliate program? Someone told me it is between 3% to 25%. Is that right? What is the lowest rate you have seen so far? the median? and the highest?
Actually, the range is much [...]
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