Upon reviewing a good number of different top brands’  affiliate programs recently, I have been really surprised to see how many of them do not deep-link. It is isn’t at all unusual to see a merchant of the Top 500 Internet Retailer List caliber have specific text (e.g.: “Save up to 30% on Timberland boots”) linked not to specific pages, but to the homepage of their website. C’mon, merchants! If you want your affiliate-referred traffic to convert, do something to help it convert! Deep-linked creatives a great way to start.

Over 3 years ago in my A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing addressing the question of the best-converting text links I wrote:

The answer is simple: those that are narrowly deep-linked. Nielsen Norman Group’s studies of e-commerce usability show that getting from the homepage of the website to the correct product page accounts for over a quarter of all failures. NNG also measured that improved linking — and by extension, enhanced e-commerce site’s usability — can double an online merchant’s sales! It is obvious why generic affiliate links seldomly convert as successfully as the deep links. Website’s homepage is just one of the ways to enter the website, and its content may sometimes not fit the individual needs of any given affiliate. Deep-link, deep-link, and deep-link again. Treat deep-linking as one of your main responsibilities. Remember two things: (i) text links convert 8+ times better than banner links, and (ii) deeply-linked text links convert 2 times better than those that are generic.

The phrase “text link” consists of two semantic components: “text” and “link”. Affiliates may always improve the quality of the first one (the “text”), but they may not always be able to improve the quality of the second (the “link”). Provide them with as vast a selection of a deeply-linked text links as possible, covering as much ground as possible. If you have a website with a total of 10 sections and 49 sub-sections, you should have at least 70 text links: one for each section, one for each sub-section, one for the homepage, and ten for each of your bestsellers (leading to specific product pages). [pp. 49-50]

Oh yes, it’s a lot of work! But it’s a work that’s important to be done, and one that immediately contributes to the success of your affiliate program.

If you do not deep-link yet, make it your goal to put together at least 20 deep links by the end of the week. Your affiliates will appreciate it when you announce it in your next newsletter.

Oh, and by the way, when you provide them with a list of bestsellers, do provide them with affiliate links to each too.

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 sales in the past 30 days”:

On the one hand, displaying data like EPC and conversion rate may seem to be an extremely valuable thing to do. In reality, it isn’t.

The problem with link-specific performance metrics is that they are nearly always skewed. Over 7+ years of my affiliate program management experience I have been observing how many affiliates just pull the affiliate tracking code from the first text link they see, and then link the rest of their campaigns through it. This is precisely why in the above case with Volusion’s affiliate program among the merchant’s best-performing creatives you’ll find 3 text links (see their EPC measurements circled above).

Affiliates, do not let link performance data (as reported either by an affiliate network, or an in-house affiliate program software) guide your decisions. When it comes to deciding which links perform best, you want to be experimenting and measuring by yourself.

The same advice applies to merchants as well. I know that most affiliate networks (even those that don’t make such info public to affiliates) give merchants the info on their “performance” of their links.

When online businesses (in further text: merchants) just discover affiliate marketing, and get really excited about the way everything works, and the opportunities that open up, it is very common to witness some of them express interest in acting in the capacity of affiliates in addition to running their own affiliate program. Naturally, the easiest place for a merchant to start is their own website.

Just yesterday, the following question came to me from a merchant who has just started an affiliate program:

I was thinking it probably would be beneficial if I became an affiliate for other businesses as well. I was thinking of placing the ads in the blog section. Is this common that I would be displaying ads for one of my affiliates as well?

It’s good this merchant has asked. Many don’t.

Short answer: No, it’s not a good idea unless the website where you will be featuring your affiliate links (the merchant’s blog in the above-described scenario) is disconnected from the website to which your affiliates are sending their traffic.

Long answer: Affiliate links on merchant websites are a type of a leak, or a door through which affiliate-referred traffic can easily leave the merchant’s website without bringing any benefit to the affiliates. If a visitor referred by an affiliate clicks one of the affiliate links on the merchant’s website, and makes a purchase (or puts through a lead, or performs any other commissionable activity), it is the merchant who will receive a commission/payment for this activity, but not the affiliate who sent the visitor to the merchant’s site in the first place. For more information read my “5 ways affiliate traffic can leak” post here (it’s the 5th type I mentioned there). If you do want to try yourself in the the capacity of an affiliate, start a separate website for this. Also, make sure there is no reason for your own affiliates to suspect any conflict of interest (e.g.: promoting your own website as an affiliate, or the unlikely scenario of you promoting your own competitors on that affiliate site).

In continuation of my earlier posted thoughts on the effectiveness of blog reviews, it seems appropriate to now turn to the Federal Trade Commission’s plans to monitor blogs for paid/biased reviews.

On Sunday, the Associated Press wrote that blogging, which continues blooming, “has taken on characteristics of community journalism — but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media”. Journalists who work for newspaper and broadcasting companies “are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them”. Up until now the blogosphere has not been regulated by any such rules. FTC is about to change this, and the new regulation may come into force by the end of Summer 2009.

CNET News commented that for the first time ever, FTC will seek to enforce guidelines that would “ban deceptive or unfair business practices”. CNET continues:

The rules could be quite strict, even extending to the practice of affiliate links — for example, a music blogger who links to a song on Amazon MP3 or iTunes that earns an affiliate commission in the process.

Izea.com’s sponsored conversations are brought up as an example of a website that offers its contributors incentives — such as “free trips, products, gift certificates, or outright payments” — for coverage (see Ted Murphy’s reply here).

We are once again back to two questions: (i) that of disclosure, and (ii) that of authenticity. The question of disclosure was touched upon in earlier discussions about dropping affiliate links on Twitter (see “Damn Marketers. Affiliate Links in Twitter” post by Scott Jangro, and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Link Disclosure Manifesto” post, and comments under both of them too). I blogged a bit about authenticity (and how it’s connected with trustworthiness) earlier today. While there will be a need for policing, it seems that the end users are already doing a great job deciding who to trust.

Is the disclosure necessary, and will it help? Richard Koman, a lawyer and technology writer for ZDNet.com, believes it is and it will. He writes that, in reality, “the solution is simple enough: ‘If you buy this book through my site, Amazon pays me a few cents.’”

I do not view this FTC’s move as a potential cause of any major trouble for decent affiliates. There is nothing to be unhappy about. After all, the aim is “to crack down on false claims from bloggers” (italics mine). The subjects of (a) how exactly to word the guidelines, and (b) how to implement the effective policing do leave room for discussions, but overall, the FTC’s concerns are proper and this is a good move.

Other interesting discussions and articles on the subject may be found below:

• FTC Going After Bloggers = Epic Fail (SEOBook.com)
• FTC Is Ready to Pounce on Dishonest Bloggers (PC Magazine)
• Are Paid Bloggers Guilty of Ad Fraud? (ibid)
• FTC Eyes Blogs for Conflicts of Interest (PC World)
• FTC to go after product reviews bloggers who accept freebies (ZDNet)
• Adding an Amazon or Apple Affiliate Link to Your Blog? The Feds Want to Know (All Things Digital)