It appears that while I do my best to take note of positive news and developments in the industry it is when I blog about problems (read: a negative news/issues) that I get most interest and participation from my readers. And unfortunately this is natural… But today I’d like to focus on the good — especially so since there are some really good news and developments to report. Here are the three that have really impressed me over the past few days:

AvantLink Pioneers App Market

Don’t know what took affiliate networks so long to start something like this, but glad to see it finally happen — AvantLink has launched an Affiliate Marketing App Market, “allowing developers from around the world to add functionality to the network” [source]. The idea is, actually, pretty simple/straightforward: (i) developers create apps using AvantLink’s API, (ii) affiliates use them for free (no additional fees; “you keep your entire commission for any sales made using any app”), and (iii) every time an affiliate sale is made using the developers tool, he/she also gets a commission or “20% of the network’s commission for every sale generating through the app” (yep, they’ve actually structured it as an affiliate program). Good development, and kudos to AvantLink for creating the platform and the good motivation to empower affiliates.

Skimlinks Introduces Real-Time Affiliate Marketing

Remember when Skimlinks acquired Atma Links this summer? Immediately following it I asked Alicia Navarro, Skimlinks’ CEO, if she can give my readers a “sneak-peak into what other new features they should expect from the combined Skimlinks+AtmaLinks solution”. She replied that the combined solution wasn’t in too distant of a future, and said: “what I can share now is that their technology specialises in highly accurate, multi-vertical product identification and matching” and “we can apply this to a number of our existing products (particularly EveryFeed – our aggregated product API) as well as other publisher tools we offer our customers”… Well, they’ve just rolled the combined technology out, calling it SkimWords 2.0. The new creation is being characterized by an “unparalleled accuracy and speed as it analyzes page content to recognize product references and deliver in-text affiliate links, and optionally show product and price comparison information, all in real-time” [more here]. I am particularly fond of this new development, because it is linguistics-related (and, while not many know it, I’m a linguist by first education). SkimWords 2.0 is supported by AtmaLinks’ computational linguistics and semantic algorithms. They match content/text with tens of millions of products, creating real-time in-text affiliate links. Amazing development!

7ThingsMedia Exemplary Communication/Management

Yesterday, 7ThingsMedia, a UK affiliate program management agency, has sent out an “Apologies for the mistake” email to all Agent Provocateur‘s affiliates. Here’s the core of the text:

I just wanted to email you personally to apologise for the email sent regarding an admin error that occured on Commission Junction this afternoon regarding the Agent Provocateur affiliate programme.

The programme was accidently deactivated today at 15.56, the mistake was noticed straight away and the account was re-activated at 16.11. All affiliate links are working and commissions will be rewarded.

If you have any questions about this then please do email me on [email here] or give me a call on [phone number here].

I don’t know about you, but this is the first time I’ve seen an apology sent out for a 15 minute downtime which has probably not even been noticed by the majority of the affiliates in the program. All of this spells out one very important word — integrity. Kudos to 7thingsmedia for doing it right! This certainly gives affiliates hope that there are affiliate managers out there who know how to handle things right.

Important Disclaimer: None of the above news coverage were in any way “sponsored” by anyone. They reflect my sole personal opinion.

Less than a week ago in an intro to this post, I blogged how pleasing to my (and I’m sure every affiliate marketer’s) eye it is to see new developments at different affiliate networks. Now, in addition to ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and LinkShare, we have AvantLink with their February news!

Yesterday they announced their very own (and a very robust one too) WordPress plugin. So immediately I have reached out to them to get a better idea of how it works, and how bloggers can/will benefit from this launch. This is how this post was born…

The AvantLink plugin for WordPress basically allows quick and simple integration with a number of the network’s integrated Affiliate tools & scripts. Once the plugin is installed and activated, there are several things to note within your WordPress admin panel.

1. Plugin users will see a “AvantLink WP” link in the admin sidebar, under the “Settings” section. Clicking that link opens the “AvantLink WP Plugin Settings” page, which includes four tabs that allow the configuration of several functions, including a product search engine via the AvantLink API (see image below).

2. Plugin users will see an AvantLink icon in their post editor’s kitchen sink. Clicking the icon will open a dialog box that allows affiliates to select any pre-configured ad type/unit (banner, text, video, etc.), from any merchant the affiliate is active with. It will also allow affiliates to create custom tracking links to any merchant URL they choose (see the two screengrabs below)

3. Plugin users will notice several new AvantLink WP widgets in the “Appearance” area of their WordPress admin. These include

• • AvantLink Product Ad Widget – Easy integration of any AvantLink Product Ad Widget (PAW) subscription that has been configured and saved.
  • AvantLink Product Search Form – Quickly enable an on site product search engine, using data from AvantLink merchants.
  • AvantLink Related Products – Display related products from AvantLink merchants driven by custom keyword searches.

It’s important to note that once the AvantLink WP plugin is installed and activated, an Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) subscription is enabled by default on a site-wide basis. The ALE uses JavaScript to convert direct-to-merchant links to affiliate-tracking links on the fly, and within the end user’s browser. This of course can be deactivated via the settings page, if that’s preferred.

Several integrated tools and scripts from AvantLink offer unique and exclusive functionality free of charge to qualified affiliates, and now WordPress CMS affiliates can easily utilize these ad tools and subscriptions with simple, easy to configure widgets. Very nice development!

There has been much talk and worry about the ‘Do Not Track’ legislation proposed by Federal Trade Commission in early December 2010, and now that Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox both have plugins/features to block certain types of third party cookies (and we also know that Internet Explorer 9 is gonna have it too) the worry has built up even more.

Over the past two days I’ve spoken with folks in nearly every major affiliate network (namely Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, and AvantLink), and none of them could confirm that such brower plugins will have a negative affect on affiliate tracking. The major reason being is that the focus of the ‘Do Not Track’ proposal is actually on very particular type of tracking. Reading the original FTC’s proposal we see that they are looking to establish “a uniform choice mechanism for online behavioral advertising” which would make the practice of personalized behavioral advertising visible and transparent to consumers who are being tracked to be served “targeted advertisements” (pp. 12-13). With this in mind, they propose that consumers should be able to “control the collection and use of their online browsing data”, considered specifically in light of “targeted advertisements” and “behavioral advertising” (p. 14) [underlining mine]. Page 16 continues:

…the Commission supports a more uniform and comprehensive consumer choice mechanism for online behavioral advertising, sometimes referred to as “Do Not Track.” The most practical method of providing uniform choice for online behavioral advertising would likely involve placing a setting similar to a persistent cookie on a consumer’s browser, and conveying that setting to sites that the browser visits, to signal whether or not the consumer wants to be tracked or receive targeted advertisements. [again, emphasis added by me]

In discussing Firefox’s newest “Do Not Track” plugin AvantLink‘s CTO David Clark has confirmed to me that it should not affect their tracking in any way. The focus of the mechanism is just different. It is not affiliate cookies that they’re concerned with, but the behavioral targeting type tracking; and while some affiliate networks do set behavioral type cookies, affiliate tracking isn’t tied to them.

In December of 2010 Lucas Brown of HasOffers wrote:

I don’t think the FTC is really targeting the affiliate marketing industry specifically.  Rather, they are interested in preventing those that control some of the largest distribution channels from mining data and selling it as behavioral user data… The FTC is really more concerned about the abuse of behavioral advertising…

Today an affiliate marketing industry’s veteran, one of the original founders of Commission Junction, and a co-founder of Impact Radius, Todd Crawford told me:

Personally, I am confident that performance advertising will not be impacted by this type of legislation because the companies doing the tracking can limit the data they capture to ensure that they are in compliance.

What do you think?

Coincidentally or not, but 3 of the 6 major US affiliate networks — and here I imply Commission Junction, LinkShare, buy.at, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network and AvantLink — announced holiday deals and offers of their merchants on November 17, 2010. These are:

LinkShare affiliate network (in a blog post):

ShareASale affiliate network (internally through affiliate interface):
[Edit of 1:14 pm: ShareASale has just announced it in a blog post too]

and AvantLink affiliate network (in a blog post):

I haven’t seen Commission Junction announce anything like this. Neither have buy.at or Google Affiliate Network blogged about  anything similar. If they have, and I’ve missed it, please correct me. I know that individual merchants have been sending out notifications of their deals via email, but I haven’t seen those deals bring aggregated anywhere in one place on the latter three networks.

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Edit of 11/20/2010: Commission Junction has just added a visible link to their Holiday Success Center (seen by every affiliate upon logging into their account now):

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Edit of 11/22/2010: buy.at has also just posted a blog entry with Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals available at its merchants:

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.

Not too long ago I’ve given ShareASale credit for a convenient mass banner upload function for merchants. It is convenient, and makes complete sense, saving affiliate program managers a lot of time for more fun things (than banner upload) to do.

Just like the mass banner upload, I personally could really use a mass banner/link editing function. At this time, to perform a simple swap of landing page URLs across a number of banners encompasses a time-consuming procedure of opening each banner/link individually and manually changing that URL for each.

I’ve checked with the following 4 networks, and none of them have a mass edit function:

• AvantLink
• Commission Junction
• Google Affiliate Network
• ShareASale

Google Affiliate Network comes closest to it by giving merchants a “Select All” option (arrow #1 on below screenshot), but unfortunately, there is no “Edit” button to select, and you still have to edit each banner manually (arrow #2 below):

C’mon, networks, we need this function! Give it to us, please!!

If you’re a frequent reader of my blog, you know that I’m constantly on the lookout for new and unique technologies in affiliate marketing.

It hit me the other day that there is an unparalleled technology used by AvantLink that I haven’t really heard much about even though it has been around for 5 years already! They call it Affiliate Link Syndication, and it essentially allows affiliates to offer deals-oriented consumers an RSS subscription to AvantLink-powered dynamic deal feeds (which may be focused on one or multiple merchants); so that any time the customer clicks a link from their feed reader, the affiliate gets a new cookie set.

They also blogged about it last year:

…did you know that in addition to publishing promotional-related (dynamically updated) content on your sites, you can also promote RSS subscriptions to those feeds? Think about that for a second. If you’re site visitors subscribe to one of these RSS feeds from AvantLink that you promote, then your tracking details are embedded in all links within that feed … for the life of that feed subscription!

Fast forward months later, and to that RSS feed sitting in someone’s reader or live bookmarks after the 60 day cookie from the click is long expired. The shopper you enticed to subscribe sees a killer deal from one of our retailers, clicks the link directly from their RSS reader or live bookmark, and there you have it; your Affiliate cookie is set again for another 60 days (or whatever cookie life the particular merchant offers).

This development really does spell out a different level of customer engagement and ownership — one that goes beyond what the standard “click-on-a-website-link -> cookie” path does, as the clicks then come from someone’s personal RSS subscriptions (which they themselves took the time to set up and configure).

I don’t believe there is another affiliate network who offers affiliate tracking-embedded RSS feeds that can be promoted as subscriptions. Belated kudos to AvantLink on this development. I hope it inspires other affiliate networks and/or external tool creators too. After all, competition should breed improvement.

A good question came to me in the email yesterday:

Is there a certain metric you use to predict revenue potential for a site?

I have a potential client with a blog that gets as many as 75k uniques and close to 200k pageviews per month… He can’t understand that he has tons of great content that people like reading and that it could be monetized.

There are indeed ways to put together a tentative projection of your future affiliate earnings. While the accuracy of these projections will always be highly contingent on a number of program-specific metrics (2 through 5 below), as well as on how exactly you are going to market merchants on your website, there is a number of variables to consider prior to starting out as an affiliate — metrics that will tell you how well your website may do with affiliate marketing. Consider the following five:

1. Clickthrough Rate (CTR) — It will be dependent on (a) the targetedness of your traffic, and on (b) the type of linking you’ll be using (banners, text links, product links, etc). Read more about it here.
2. EPC, or Earnings per 100 Clicks — This metric tells you what other affiliates are already making on this program, and while it should by no means be your single criteria (because it’s an average calculated across all affiliate activity within the program), it is a good one to analyze. More in my article here.
3. Average Order Value (AOV) — Average ticket which is calculated as a sum total of all affiliate-generated orders referred over a given period of time, and then divided by the number of orders.
4. Conversion Rate (CR) — The click-to-sale or click-to-lead conversion rate. Analyzing a program-specific CR is easier, especially when it is publicly available to affiliates prior to joining an affiliate program (as is the case with AvantLink-based programs, for example). Analysis of vertical-specific CR is also an option, but won’t be as precise. More on onversion rates here.
5. Reversal Rate (RR) — This is  the percentage of affiliate-referred transactions that get reversed by the merchant. Unfortunately, in many cases you won’t be able to analyze reversal rates prior to actually joining and experimenting with an affiliate program. Some networks, however (like AvantLink or ShareASale) do provide data on this vital metric even before you sign up with an affiliate program.

Plugging all of the above into the originally described scenario (publisher with some 200,000 pageviews a month), picking a merchant who pays 12% commission (comm) on all sales, presupposing a very close niche match between the affiliate and the merchant, and assuming the following:

• CTR = 1%
• EPC = $60
• AOV = $125
• CR = 5%
• RR = 10%

We arrive at the following calculation:

• Traffic: 200,000 * 1% (CTR) = 2,000
• Sales: 2,000 * 5% (CR) = 100
• Earnings: 100 * $125 (AOV) * 12% (comm) – 10% (RR) = $1,350

To arrive at your personal projected EPC you will want to divide Earnings by Traffic and multiply the result by 100. So:

• $1,350 / 2,000 * 100 = $67.50

Comparing our projected EPC figure to the program’s actual EPC ($60), we see that we are not that far off, and our overall projection must be sufficiently plausible.

Finally, a word of warning: remember that things will differ drastically from merchant to merchant. So, take things easy (especially when there are investments involved) not to fall victim to your own incorrect projections.

A few days ago Clarke Duncan, one of the co-founders of Paid On Results UK affiliate network, sent me the following tweet:

Paid On Results (POR) were the first affiliate network to create a deep-linking tool for affiliates, and this was back in 2005 [see the way it used to work]. Ever since then they have been perfecting and renewing the tool, and came up with the “innovative” 2010 version [see demo here].

No wonder why. Other UK networks have similar tools: buy.at launched their FireFox (FF) Deeplink Generator in March of this year (see point #3 here), Affiliate Window has had their FF plugin for generating deep links for some time too, and LinkShare UK offers a tool as well.

POR’s newest version of the Deep Link Generator is probably the most advanced of all. It allows you to do everything in one screen (without leaving the merchant’s site), automatically detects product images, offers URL shortening options, supports all major browsers, and has a number of other affiliate-friendly functions of which you may read here.

Does “any USA network have a tool like” the Deep Link Generator?  Some do indeed offer deep link generating tools:

• AvantLink — Custom Link Builder
• LinkShare — LinkGenerator Bookmarklet
• ShareASale — “Create a Custom Link” tool [tutorial here] + License Plate Links

…but none do it at the level that Paid On Results does now.

It is always good to see an affiliate network come up with a more advanced tool (like the buy.at’s video linking tool too). Competition challenges other affiliate networks to grow, and their development is good for everyone involved: merchants, affiliates, outsourced program management agencies, and the networks themselves. Thank you for the setting the bar high, Paid On Results!

“It is interesting that we do not see much written on affiliate marketing analytics, whereas if there is one industry that relies on analytical data especially heavily it is affiliate marketing” — this is how my newest article starts. It is one of the feature articles in the Summer 2010 issue of the Visibility Magazine.

In the article I look at 3 basic KPIs for affiliates/publishers (EPC, Conversion Rate, Reversal Rate), and 5 key performance indicators that merchants/advertisers should be measuring and analyzing on an ongoing basis (Affiliate Recruited, Activity Index, Activation, Traffic, and Transaction Volume). Visual examples of data presentation on three different affiliate networks (AvantLink, ShareASale, and Commission Junction) are also provided.

The article is coming out in the print version of the magazine, but you may also read it in the digital edition here (on pages 38-39).