Remember my PPC Display URLs and Affiliate Direct Linking Are Interconnected post two months ago? In it — being guided by Google AdWords policy — I argued:

Permitting “direct linking” (or Direct-To-Merchant (DTM) paid search bidding), however, implies that affiliates are allowed to link their paid search ads (through their affiliate links, of course) right to your website.

Yesterday, however, we spotted the following affiliate ad on Bing:

This was an affiliate agreement violator and brand hijacker (as Halloween Mart prohibits paid search bidding on its trademarks, URL, and variations thereof), but, as it is obvious above, they are — or, at least, they may think they are — not as bad of a violator as some others. The “keyword” they are using is the merchant’s full URL. They are also using it (twice) in the ad copy. But when it comes to the display URL, they went away from the actual merchant’s URL, and added the word “store” (in)to it… Apparently, Bing doesn’t require the display URL (the website address that the searcher sees on a PPC ad) to match the domain of the destination URL (the page on which they land upon clicking the paid search ad).

Minutes after my tweet about the above situation, a well-known super affiliate and affiliate marketing advocate Scott Jangro tweeted:

Google started requiring for the display URL to match the landing page URL in early 2008 [more here]. Apparently, Bing still doesn’t.

Affiliate program managers must be aware of this tactic, and treat my Display URL and DTM Linking post in light of the above exception (at least, until this gets addressed by Bing).

Yesterday I have once again touched on the subject of affiliate compliance with rules, and how merchants are or aren’t policing it. As I wrote in my FeedFront article:

…to begin with, you want make sure you have an affiliate program agreement in place. Not to be confused with the affiliate network agreement, it is basically the contract between you and your affiliates. I won’t pause much on this here, but if you need a sample, I have one for you at www.amnavigator.com/TOS.html.

Now, just having that affiliate program agreement in place doesn’t safeguard you. It gives you grounds to enforce the rules.

If you don’t have the rules, there’s nothing to enforce… But even in the rules (or program “policies”) merchants are frequently confusing. Here’s an example I’ve caught just the other day:

The AdWords policy is:

The display URL in your ad must match the domain users will land on when they click on your ad. [emphasis mine]

Permitting “direct linking” (or Direct-To-Merchant (DTM) paid search bidding), however, implies that affiliates are allowed to link their paid search ads (through their affiliate links, of course) right to your website. If the use of merchant’s “display URL on any PPC engine is prohibited” (as in the above example) then there’s no way they can direct-link their PPC ad to you; and you want to mark that DTM field “No” (not “Yes”).

When, however, merchants (or affiliate program managers) word their agreements, policies, or rules, in ways which may point to their lack of knowledge about a particular field, rogue affiliates easily spot that. And then don’t be surprised about “violations”.

An affiliate has emailed me the following situation and question:

I’m fairly new at PPC, but I’ve already had some luck with it. A few days ago I started promoting [merchant name here]‘s program  on CJ. Sent over 150 clicks to them spending over $30 on it already, but haven’t had any sales yet. Their EPC range on CJ is $18-$24. Should I start worrying?

In a nutshell, the answer depends on a number of factors, but if you’re new at paid search, and already aren’t 100% sure that what you’re doing is right, start analyzing and tweaking things right away.

I’ve pulled up this particular merchant’s info, and here’s what I see:

It seems that you’re concerned because your current CPC (cost per click) is right around $0.20, and you see that the maximum you could expect from this program is $24.68 for every 100 clicks, but, more than likely, this number will be 30% lower, as over a longer period of time (3 months vs 7 days) this merchant’s program has been registering an EPC (earnings per 100 clicks, in this case) of $17.87. As mentioned above, your current situation may have good reasons for concern, but only if you aren’t 100% certain about the traffic you’re sending to them (how targeted is it? are you actively using negative keywords to sift off the folks you do not want?). Yes, (a) you’re already spending  quite a bit on each click (but that’s fine as long as the ROI is there), and (b) overall program’s EPC is like an average body temperature around the hospital, hence, not good grounds for basing your CPC decision on [more here]. Having said all of this, if your budget allows for it, and you’re certain that you’re sending highly targeted traffic to this merchant (i.e. the traffic that is meant to convert into a sale, and not merely to find out information on their product), it may be too early to jump to conclusions. The reason for this being that this particular merchant’s AOV (average order value), or average price tag seems to be in the vicinity of $400 (which, by the way, with their 14% commission rate, should convert into a good average payout), and higher ticket items generally take longer for the customer to decide.

I’ve analyzed return days distribution (or how many days it takes for the customer to complete the purchase) in two of the higher AOV affiliate programs that we manage, and here’s what I see:

I don’t know over what time period you’ve been sending those 150 clicks, and this particular program’s return days distribution may look even more different, but the above should give you at least some idea. It is also absolutely acceptable to request this information from the manager of this particular affiliate program. It’ll help you a lot in your analysis. So, I would definitely do it as a part of your analysis and tweaking.

If you’re a paid search expert reading this, and have something to add, expand on, or correct, please do chime in, and post your comments, ideas and suggestions below.

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.

Nine months ago, when I blogged my 5-step advice for paid search affiliates, I wrote:

Use negative keywords (or keywords for which you do not want your ad to show in paid search results, as they are unlikely to convert into the desirable action)

Using negative keywords not only helps you improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) and quality score of your paid search campaigns, but also prevents ad impressions for irrelevant keyword combinations, and saves you the money wasted on undesirable clicks.

Well, it appears that today the process of compiling lists of negative keywords has become one step easier. 50 minutes ago WordStream announced the launch of “the world’s first” Negative Keyword Tool. The best part is that its completely free. Here’s the video on it:

Affiliate program managers and affiliates alike will love this. Thank you, WordStream!

Earlier this morning, Roxana Patrichi of Avangate published a list of 150+ negative keywords for software selling AdWords campaigns. This reminded me of one of the questions that I was asked in a recent interview to Affilorama. I was asked what advice I would give to newbie affiliates that are getting involved in paid search. I believe that there are at least 5 things PPC affiliates must know at the outset:

1. Educate yourself thoroughly (a good place to start would be a book by Marshall and Todd called “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords”)
2. Remember to constantly test (watch your CTR and work on improving it on an ongoing basis)
3. Don’t rush (you can burn a lot of money overnight, take small steps until you really know what you’re doing)
4. Develop inventories of long-tail keywords (looking at things through the end user’s eyes and using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool)
5. Use negative keywords (or keywords for which you do not want your ad to show in paid search results, as they are unlikely to convert into the desirable action)

Below I am including a list of 90 negative keywords to help all kinds paid search affiliates. Let me stress that this is a basic list to start with. Affiliates want to develop such lists for each PPC campaign they run. Thorough negative keyword lists include hundreds of keywords.

While not all merchants may be willing to share their keyword inventories with affiliates, I believe that sharing the list of the negative keywords is a must. After all, if they burn themselves (and loose cash, with low or no conversion), it is the merchant, who they will eventually stop promoting, that will loose too. So if you are a merchant or an affiliate program manager reading this, compile your own list of negative keywords (the above one will help you get started quickly) and offer it to your affiliates.

It is always a pleasure to see affiliate networks adding new tools and functions for merchants to use. A month ago I blogged about a new technology by buy.at to help prevent the stealing of exclusive affiliate coupons [more here]. Today I’d like to draw merchants’ and affiliate networks’ attention to AvanLink.

For as long as I remember AvantLink, they have been advising merchants against affiliates’ paid search bidding on trademarks and domain name(s) which naturally belong to the merchant. They have been monitoring such affiliate behavior, and even prohibiting it in the network’s TOS. The affiliate network’s CEO and Founder, Scott Kalbach, writes:

From our perspective, this form of advertising provides little to no value to the merchant. Many merchants don’t understand that if they don’t specifically prohibit this activity in their affiliate program terms and conditions, some affiliates will take that as a green light to trademark bid until they are told otherwise. This is the reason that AvantLink.com decided to prohibit this activity by default in our network level terms and conditions. We’re the only affiliate network that has this default policy [underlining mine].

In addition to the above policy, AvantLink has recently announced the launch of an additional tool for its merchants to use. In addition to the “default configuration” which “helps merchants, as well as AvantLink staff, maintain compliance with” the above-mentioned affiliate network’s TOS, the tool also allows AvantLink-based merchants to “monitor whatever additional keywords/phrases they want” [more here].

Kudos to AvanLink, and let’s hope more affiliate networks will borrow this idea.