 | Parannoyed - An Affiliate State of Mind |
Parannoyed - stemming from paranoia and annoyed, the state of mind of an affiliate who is unsure whether sales they are making are being untracked by the network, or something else has caused a sale they know about to go awry.
So, why is one currently parannoyed? Here’s why!
A mobile offer was recently distributed to affiliates. It was an offer so good, that it was posted to users on our forum with a link to the merchant homepage. “Great offer” one user shouted, and before long a sale appeared on the stats. The phone has arrived - everyone is happy. Hooray!
Then a second user shouts “great offer - my phone is coming on Friday!”… but hang on, there’s nothing in the stats now. Did we change anything? Well, yes - the first link added was the home link (and that’s where the first sale originated from), however, that was then replaced with a deeplink to the offer.
Cue state of parannoya! The first reaction is annoyance, no sale suggests that the sale hasn’t tracked. Then the paranoia creeps in, the user could have used cashback, deleted cookies, looked at the offer at work and then bought at home! Endless possibilities that without contacting them, asking for a sale number, then contacting the merchant/network to check for the sale id, the answer will never be known. Hence, leading to the state of being parannoyed.
The problem affiliate’s face is that most of the time, unless they are a cashback site (so the person reports they’ve not received cashback) or know the person making the sale (e.g. friends and family using your links), they will never fully know whether their links and promotions lead to a sale and that that sale is then being tracked and properly reported.
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on February 9, 2007 at 10:12 am Clarke wrote:
“they will never fully know whether their links and promotions lead to a sale and that that sale is then being tracked and properly reported.”
Correct, even Networks don’t fully know. Sadly Affiliate Marketing is about trusting the Merchants, then the Network and then the Affiliate any one of these can be up to allsorts of funny business.
Also cash back sites are not bullet proof, you have people that use cookie blocking software trying to work out why the cash back site not working for them. Or want to be fly guys who log on to 2 or 3 cash back sites click all the links in hope of getting commission on each.
The thing is many a time you just know something is not right but you can’t always prove it so what do you do when that happen.. Simply save the grief and go promote one of the competitors, no point in moaning about it unless you have got hard facts (often difficult to come across without recording and doing a transaction yourself).. Move on = Happier life.
on February 13, 2007 at 2:30 pm James Avery wrote:
We had a lot of suspicions last week with a major tour operator (see A4u forum post), but ultimately, it can just be down to conversions rising and falling from one week to the next.
The case you highlight above looks more suspicious, but as you’ve already said, there could be loads of other explanations.
Rather than just canning the merchant, I’d look around to see if other affiliates have highlighted similar problems, and see how well their overall EPC / EPM compares with other merchants.
As Clarke says, it ultimately has to boil down to trust. There will always be some merchants who will try and duck out (sorry, a weak pun I know) of paying their dues, but the majority understand that proper tracking = more sales = more traffic = even more sales, and so on
on February 22, 2007 at 1:31 pm The Firebox.com Affiliate Blog » Blog Archive » Honesty- is it really that rare? wrote:
[…] Affiliate blog One Little Duck (written by Jason, who runs the Loquax site), I came across this post and it got me thinking about some recent issues we’ve had with […]