Every time I buy something I try to do it through an affiliate link (my modest attempt to ensure affiliate marketing does grow to $4 billion by 2014). That is why you’ll often see me tweeting out requests for an affiliate link to this or that merchant… So, prior to placing an order I (a) check if the merchant has an affiliate program, and then (b) see if any of my affiliate friends or followers have a link for me, and (c) once I receive the link — buy.

Since between steps B and C there’s frequently a time gap of a few minutes, I like to spend this time giving the merchant’s program a little closer of a look. I look at their program’s stats, creatives, program agreement, past affiliate newsletters (when available), etc. But out of all it always the merchant’s agreement and policies that are always of most interest to me.

Not too long ago I blogged about a confused merchant who prohibited the use of their URL for the paid search campaigns display URL, yet “allowed” direct linking. Today I’d like to give you an example of a merchant who knows exactly what they’re doing:

Those more experienced in affiliate marketing can quickly tell that the above merchant runs their affiliate program on Commission Junction (CJ). Those readers who run (or have ever tried setting an affiliate program up) on CJ, know that to host your full affiliate program agreement on CJ you’re charged an additional (substantial, in my opinion) fee. Having said this, CJ does give you an opportunity to spell out your specific affiliate policies in a concise form, and this merchant has utilized this function very well. They’ve covered policies related to paid search, domains, content, coupons, and CPA-network/subaffiliate — and all in just 161 words. While some of their policies may not be right for all merchants, this is definitely a good example to consider while working on your own affiliate program rules.

On Monday, August 8, Pace Lattin of Performance Marketing Insider has drawn the industry’s attention to a lawsuit filed by Reese Richman LLP, the subject of which is “questionable and possibly illegal behavior … by hijacking search queries.” Pace wrote:

Using a technology by Paxfire, supposedly DNS redirects from searches on Bing, Yahoo and Google would lead consumers directly to the page of certain brand and credit the ISP’s affiliate account with any possible commissions. [more here]

ZDNet picked up the story and elaborated on the problem:

Paxfire proudly proclaims itself to be the “proven industry leader in monetizing Address Bar Search and DNS Error traffic for Network Operators. Through our carrier-grade technology, we generate millions of dollars a month in new advertising revenue for our partners by enabling them to participate in the booming $20 billion a year search advertising market.”

In other words, what Paxfire does is it intercepts your searches. Then, if their proxy servers find a match in their advertising databases, they’ll send you top search results from their affiliate marketing programs rather than what your search engine would give you as the best results. [source]

Apparently, the four International Computer Science Institute (Berkely, CA) researchers — whose study reveled that around a dozen of ISPs were using the technology — have put together a blog post on the subject where they’ve mentioned the major affiliate networks that were affected (Commission Junction, LinkShare, and Google Affiliate Network), as well as two tools that affiliates should find of help in spotting traffic hijacking threats:

Why do they do this?

In short, the purpose appears to be monetization of users’ searches. ICSI Networking’s investigation has revealed that Paxfire’s HTTP proxies selectively siphon search requests out of the proxied traffic flows and redirect them through one or more affiliate marketing programs, presumably resulting in commission payments to Paxfire and the ISPs involved. The affiliate programs involved include Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, and Ask.com. When looking up brand names such as “apple”, “dell”, “groupon”, and “wsj”, the affiliate programs direct the queries to the corresponding brands’ websites or to search assistance pages instead of providing the intended search engine results page.

What can I do about it?

If you want to know if the network you’re currently on is subject to this type of traffic redirection, you can run a Netalyzr test. And the best protection against the privacy and security risks created by this type of hijacking is to visit sites using HTTPS rather than HTTP, which can easily be achieved using EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension. [more here]

Yesterday (August 9) Commission Junction suspended Paxfire from the network explaining to ClickZ:

We had no knowledge of this reported activity until last week. At the time, Paxfire was in fact a publisher in the CJ network. We have taken immediate action — Paxfire has been deactivated pending further investigation, and we are continuing our investigation of this matter. [source]

Well, Paxfire is “deactivated”, but there are other similar players — and we’ve discussed this in comments under this 2009 post of mine — who cooperate with ISPs on very similar terms; and who are still active on major affiliate networks (e.g.: working with ISPs “replacing DNS and HTTP errors with relevant advertising” [source]). This has been going on for years… Of course, the problem with Paxfire is different in the fact that they also have “an optional, unadvertised, and more alarming feature that drastically expands Paxfire’s window into users’ traffic” whereby “instead of activating only upon error, this product redirects the customers’ entire web search traffic destined for Yahoo!, Bing, and sometimes Google, to a small number of separate web traffic proxies.” [more here] Either way, whether another affiliate’s cookie gets overwritten in the process or not, together with the traffic affiliate commissions get “hijacked” as well.

Meanwhile, the above-quoted class-action lawsuit (against an ISP and Paxfire itself) is already filed; and we’ll keep monitoring the situation for you.

Yesterday Matt Swan of Affiliate Window has published an Econsultancy.com post with some interesting data on the changes in affiliate promotional methods they’ve registered at Affiliate Window apparently predominantly in the UK.

Having analyzed the top 20 affiliates in their affiliate network, and relying on affiliate self-categorization, they have noticed the following:

In January 2005 13 of the top 20 affiliates were classified as PPC affiliates. By January 2011 only three affiliates listed in the top 20 stipulated their primary promotional method as PPC.

Conversely, vouchercode sites did not generate a significant amount of volume until 2006. By January 2007 three vouchercode affiliates were listed within the top 20 across the network. Similarly, the increase in the number of sales through cashback sites has seen the number of affiliates in the top 20 more than triple from two in Jan 2005 to seven in Jan 2011. [source]

Interesting post and data (and certainly some interesting comments under it too), but yesterday after tweeting about this article, I liked this train of thought:

So today I took my time to analyze data on the top 30 publishers within a well-established Commission Junction-based affiliate program, and here’s the chart I’ve arrived at:

A bit of clarification: I looked at the period of 10/1/2010-1/31/2011, and this merchant is an Internet retailer who sees a significant revenue boost in pre-Christmas and post-Christmas sales. So, the numbers for other types of advertisers may be somewhat different.

Also, as you can see, I added one more category to the Affiliate Windows’ ones — datafeed affiliates (or those who build websites based on merchant product datafeeds).

Finally, as I was performing my brief analysis, I couldn’t help but take note of the following observations:

1. Many of these affiliates cannot be classified as one pure type. For example, there are some that offer both coupons and cashback, others that produce content and employ feeds (or coupons), yet others who use both datafeeds and coupons.
2. At least one-quarter of these top affiliates run their PPC ad-to-affiliate site campaigns. How do we categorize affiliates that run their own content, coupon, or datafeed-based websites, but rely heavily on paid search as well?

What do you see in the affiliate programs you manage (if you’re a manager) or across affiliates that operate on your network (if you’re an affiliate network rep reading this)? Do you think the tendency for coupon-oriented affiliates to take the majority of the pie will continue to develop? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Please use the “Comments” are below for this, and many thanks in advance for your participation.

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:

If you run an affiliate program on Commission Junction you should have noticed a new sub-tab appear in your “CJ Account Manager” a week or two ago — the Flex ID sub-tab:

I am surprised no one has blogged about it yet (maybe Commission Junction itself should start a blog where they could announce new features like these), but it’s a really cool addition. Here’s how CJ itself describes it:

The Flex ID sub-tab (Manage Publishers>Flex ID) enables you to assign an ID of your choosing to a publisher CID. This advertiser-assigned ID can be passed to your site on the click, from the respective publisher. The ability to assign unique identifiers to your publishers via Flex ID offers a variety of benefits, including:

• Retaining publisher IDs used in a previous network.
• Determining what vertical certain traffic is coming from by assigning an ID to select publishers only, such as loyalty publishers.
• Passing an exclusive coupon code to a publisher.

This is a really useful addition that will help technically-savvier advertisers/merchants improve their internal tracking, reporting, and, as a result, their overall program monitoring and management.

Before Flex IDs merchants could tell affiliates apart only by their unique 7-digit CID (“Company ID”), which added an extra step of going back to their CJ account to find out what exact website/campaign referred this or that visitor or sale. Now, with Flex IDs enabled (and set up) the process can be streamlined by picking this data up right from the URL query string.

I’ve contacted my technical contact at CJ about Flex ID mapping and how it works, and here’s what he had to say:

The Flex ID allows you to create a custom value for any and all publishers you are partnered with. There is one important question you will need to ask your Tech Department before you take the effort to create a Flex ID for each of your publishers.

You will want to ask your Tech Department if you can accept parameters in the query string of the URLs on your website.

If you can accept parameters in your URL query string, please let me know how you would like to receive the FlexID. The “FlexID” or the name of the parameter, can be anything you would like it to be. Some suggestions for the name of the Flex ID could be “Ref”, “AccountID”, “PubID”, “ID”, or just “FlexID”. If you choose “FlexID”, it would be passed to you as “FlexID=XXXXX”, where “XXXXX” would be the value you choose for each publisher.

Off to notify a few merchants about this new feature.

On Tuesday (November 2, 2010) LinkShare affiliate network announced its Q3 2010 progress and highlights:

LinkShare in Q3 2010

…more than 110 new advertisers joined the LinkShare Network in the third quarter of 2010, an increase of 25 percent compared to the same quarter in 2009. More than 1,000 advertisers are now part of the LinkShare performance marketing network as the company continues to outpace e-commerce growth. Sales in the LinkShare Network were up more than 30 percent in the third quarter of 2010 compared to overall e-commerce growth of nine percent. [source; underlining mine]

Yesterday (November 4, 2010) ValueClick Inc, owner of Commission Junction affiliate network (LinkShare’s main competitor), has had data on its Q3 results published as well:

ValueClick & Commission Junction in Q3 2010

ValueClick Inc. reported $106.8 million in total revenue for the third quarter, up 1.5% from a year ago, when revenue was $105.2 million. Revenue for its owned and operated web sites, however, declined 13.5% year over year to $35.9 million.

…The company’s affiliate marketing segment, which includes Commission Junction fared better. Affiliate marketing revenue was up 13.3% from $26.3 million a year ago and contributed $29.8 million to total revenue during the third quarter. [source; underlining mine]

Three main points stand out for me:

1. Close to one-third of ValueClick’s Q3 revenue came from its “affiliate marketing segment”
2. While ValueClick saw a third quarter decline in revenue from “its owned and operated web sites”, the decline didn’t affect Commission Junction, which, on the contrary, grew.
3. While LinkShare hasn’t disclosed the actual revenue numbers, it’s quarter-on-quarter Q3 2010 growth seems to be considerably more impressive than that of Commission Junction (~30% vs 13.3%)

Related post:

• LinkShare vs ValueClick in Second Quarter 2010 Results

Having surveyed more than 5,000 affiliates and merchants, and having conducted “dozens of discussions with industry experts and insiders”, Revenue Performance has announced the top ranked affiliate networks in the performance marketing industry. Some of the results may look surprising, others logical, but overall, it’s an interesting ranking, and I am pleased to see that all of my five choices made the top 10 list:

Revenue Performance wrote:

ClickBank is rated the #1 affiliate network… ClickBank didn’t just win the category in terms of the quantity of support they received — that might be expected given the size of their network — but also the quality of their support.

Publishers seem to love ClickBank’s platform and the accessibility that their offers provide. An impressive showing by a long-established network.   Commission Junction came a close second, with levels of support almost matching ClickBank’s.

The two stand-out affiliate networks were followed closely by ShareASale, Affiliate Window/buy.at, and oneNetworkDirect – three networks that attract high levels of loyalty and a great deal of support from the Blue-Ribbon Panel.

More about it here, and in the upcoming issue of Revenue Performance magazine.

An affiliate emailed me the following question about a program run on an affiliate network:

I’d like you to send me a custom text link that I can modify as necessary — the html code in which I can plug in any web address and text.

The answer will depend on the affiliate network. Some affiliate networks have a special affiliate tool to help you create such custom links to merchants’ pages. With others, you will have to work without a tool. Below you can learn how to create custom links on 3 affiliate networks (LinkShare, ShareASale, and Commission Junction):

– LinkShare ——————————————————————————–

Go to Links > Deep Linking > select advertiser and URL to link to [see image below]

– ShareASale ——————————————————————————

Go to Get Links > Create a Custom Link to a Page > select merchant, destination URL, etc [see screenshot below]

– Commission Junction —————————————————————

While this network doesn’t have a “deep linking” tool available, there is a way to create custom links, and that can be done by appending a ?url= parameter to your affiliate URL [thanks for this tip, Kim!]. So go to Get Links > your advertiser > View Links > work with the available links.

If it doesn’t work with a regular link, try it with a product link instead. Sometimes it doesn’t work with the former, but does with the latter.

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BONUS

After Gary Marcoccia’s comment under this post, I decided to also add AvantLink to the list:

– AvantLink ——————————————————————————-

Go to Tools > Custom Link Tool [see image below]

Todd Farmer had just relaunched his AffPlan with a new Affiliate Strategies session:

Good to see the good project being reborn. I still remember greeting their very first podcast a year and 29 days ago.

I’ve just noticed that the AffPlan.com website profiles the top 4 US affiliate networks, listing some interesting information about each:

This info combined with data on their fees, makes a very interesting compilation of information.