Planning For Affiliate Christmas

If you are running something Christmassy (and we are doing some stuff over on Loquax) then a few hints and tips never go amiss. Over on A4U they’re publishing hints and tips for affiliates from networks (Part 1, Part 2). That’s all well and good and very useful, but from an affiliate point of view should you be dropping everything in favour of the festive promotions and umpteen incentives that will be falling into your inbox.

Well I don’t think so… and rather than rewrite a whole new blog I’ve located my Planning For Affiliate Christmas blog from 2009. Hopefully it gives you a few useful bits of advice about jumping aboard Santa’s Sleighful of Incentives and Promotions for Affiliates (or Performance Marketeers).

Some Top Tips

The most important tips I can offer are be wary of the distraction Christmas can bring, be organised, and don’t be tempted to deviate too much from what you know. The endless emails of incentives, promos and commission chops and changes can be incredibly distracting – try and view them rationally and sensibly. A trip to Dubai might be a nice incentive, but is trying to win it at the expense of the last 11 months work? Just think about it!

By the same token, if you promote Widgets and Merchant X has been doing bumper Widget sales for you all year – now’s not the best time to test out Merchant Y and thrown Merchant X to the side. You might well find that Merchant X may offer you 5% commission and you get sales but Merchant Y may tempt you with 10% but sucks at conversion. Of course Y may just be a surprise – but if so why have they waited until now to get your business?

Organisation is also key to this time of year. To be honest Christmas Tips in mid-November is a little bit late in the day. Most affiliates looking to cash in will already be up and running (e.g. Quidco have had a Christmas countdown since the start of November – and that doesn’t organise itself overnight). You can still jump on board but try and fit Christmas in to what you do day to day.

Merchants, We Still Want Your Christmas Promos!

For us it’s not all bah humbug and Scrooge! Plenty of merchants run competitions around this time of year and if they get in touch with us with a little bit more detail then we’ll happily feature them on our blog – as we’ve done with John Lewis. It fits in with our site, has something that will interest our users and is great content. A perfect combo for us as an affiliate… and to be honest has more chance of generating a sale than if we spent the next few weeks updating Xmastime!

Any merchants/networks/AMs who want to know how they can get on to our blog then just get in touch… as long as there’s a competition angle we can use it!

Now I’ve not played Football Manager for some years now. To be honest Sensible Soccer on Sega Megadrive was the pinnacle of my football gaming ability so any games more complex tended to be quickly forgotten. That, and the fact that Southampton on these games were always crap (how things have now changed).

Anyway, Kelvin’s talk didn’t inspire me to get back in the Football Manager hotseat… it inspired Jude! Shortly after ThinkVis she was at the helm of Newport Country and frequently offering updates about overpaid footballers not doing what they should. She also kept asking me for advice on formations, who she should buy and whether these stats were good or bad. Like I would know! Anyway for a time I was “Director of Football” of Newport County … but that wasn’t exciting enough.

So before you know it I’m manager of Gateshead of the Blue Square Premier League and on course for becoming an SEO master (maybe). Season after season and hour after hour passed and before you know it Gateshead have made it to the Premier League care of a Johnstone Paint Trophy victory, a few Play-off near misses and just one relegation.

The FA Cup followed as did European Football, but the Premiership remained an elusive goal. In fact, it wasn’t until the 29th season when things started to unravel. Selling the England Captain for an astronomical fee to Arsenal unsettled the squad, they all got grumpy and just 8 months before Football Manager would retire me for being “too old”, the ungrateful Gateshead board fired me.

I’m still bitter about that!

Unfortunately all the above took up such a lot of time that blogging was shunted aside. I’m not even sure I know anything more about SEO. In fact I think my brain cells have been destroyed by the lack of sleep, the worry about players who were unsettled and trying to devise a plan to win the Premiership.

One thing that did resonate though was the strategy I adopted during the game. That strategy was to spend as little as possible and see how far things would go. Initially that was easy because the Gateshead Board didn’t have any cash. No players were loaned in for the entire game, and it was only until the final season when I blew £15million on a grumpy Scottish midfielder who’s tantrums contributed to me being sacked.

Now with Loquax the strategy has been quite similar, ok barring spending £15million on a midfielder – no idea what we’d do with him unless he knows SEO. But, you could say that doing silly things that may be outside your comfort zone is something to watch out for when doing stuff online.

Despite being slightly more affluent than we were in 1998, we’re still cash conscious and spending out a load of cash in search of glory may not result in taking honours. Perhaps there was a lesson in Football Manager after all?

Actually there’s another one – a more obvious one – and that’s be your own boss, because after sweating your nuts off for 29 years and delivering success above and beyond expectation there’s no grumpy board waiting to sack you without any warning.

Now! About this SEO stuff????

For the rest of the affiliate world it’s business as usual though and that means fantastic merchant emails – like the one from Toys R Us who have announced “changes to their voucher code strategy”. From now on they will be working with a selected voucher code partner. That partner has already been selected!

This decision aims to strengthen their programme in the long run and aim to “reduce the amount of discount messaging on the Toys R Us brand”. It will also enable them to better manage the discount sector.

The email goes on to say that “voucher code sites will be removed from the programme on the 1st September 2011″ And that Toys R Us are happy for you to remove yourself before this date. Nice!

The suspension will apply to websites with the words “voucher”, “Coupon” or “Code” within their url and websites who’s primary function is to publicise and communicate discount codes.

What a load of utter nonsense!

This is what will happen! The SERPS for “Toys R Us + Vouchers” and similar connotations will remain pretty much the same. The affiliate, lets call him Billy Top Dog Voucher Code Dude, with the discount code will be laughing their heads off, whilst all other affiliates will be redirecting their traffic to other toy retailers, perhaps using Skimlinks (or similar) or adding adsense (or similar).

Content site affiliates will still lose out because when you go to checkout on Toys R Us you are invited to enter a coupon code. The savvy shopper – especially as we get into that Christmas Toy Shopping period – will possibly go off and look for a coupon code and perhaps get the one from Billy Top Dog Voucher Code Dude. Lucky them, eh!

One way for other affiliates to combat voucher codes is to actually include them on their sites. But if you’re for example a toy blogger you no longer have that luxury in your arsenal. I guess that could mean less focus for Toys R Us from those affiliates? Good news for other toy retailers perhaps?

On the plus side Toys R Us do say that they “will be sending a separate communication to all those sites currently on the programme that we deem to fall into this category and will be willing to review this with individuals”. I guess if you’re generating a lot of sales then Toys R Us aren’t going to pull the plug?

And with that in mind it’ll also be interesting to see whether the cashback sites get culled! After all they’re offering a discount in the form of cashback. One even ranks in the top 10 for “Toys R Us Vouchers” which probably means they’ll be Toys R Us Vouchers Happy unless they get Geoffrey’s hoof up their backside alongside other code, coupon and voucher sites!

A simpler solution?

Give Billy Top Dog Voucher Code Dude his extra special voucher code to promote – as many merchants do – and give all others a basic code to use (if available). Or ask voucher sites to take a dropped commission, no, actually a better idea offer non-voucher sites (e.g. bloggers) a higher commission.

Or perhaps merchants could drop the coupon boxes altogether and just indicate the current offers that are available to shoppers so that they can take advantage of them. Or perhaps something even more radical – offer the products at the discounted prices to start off with! That’d be novel!

Whatever is done though is doesn’t change one frustrating issue…

The focus on affiliate marketing these days seems to be one of “you can’t do this” and “you can’t do that” alongside restricting current affiliates and making it impossible for new ones. There’s often very little to encourage people to make any effort with merchants and these kind of culls just make affiliate marketing a less exciting proposition.

Put simply, the door can’t keep shutting on opportunities for all affiliates – large and small – within this industry!

Some operators are so fixated by landing pages that they completely ignore their affiliates (or in this case affiliate). It seems like they’re blinkered or that the only agenda for the affiliate manager is “must have landing pages”. Perhaps I’m blinkered in the other direction – i.e. “must be able to get to website” but there is reason for this….

Here’s just a few of the things that landing page designers forget…

1. Not Everyone Will Be a Newbie!

Some merchants seem to just want new business. They don’t want repeat visits or old players returning. This is true because their landing page won’t have an escape route for anyone other than a new player. The only way is “register now” and that’s it.

2. Not Everyone Will Be a Player!

From a content writing point of view it’s also a pain. Checking affiliate links is a useful exercise in itself and something that is done on a regular basis, but trying to get from Affiliate Site to seeing what’s on offer at a merchant’s site can be a battle and a half. If an affiliate struggles to get to the merchant site, so must a lot of users? Surely?

3. Not Everyone Uses Internet Explorer

A couple of times this month I’ve had a “look at out great new landing page” email sent to me with issues mentioned above taken into account. “Our players can now go straight to the site”! Well, they can if they have IE – if they have any other browser they can’t. You do wonder if people check these things out?

4. Content Goes Out Of Date

One of the big problems I have with landing pages is that quite often the content is time limited. Does the content change? No! Do my links redirect to the most up to date page? No! Which leads on to…

5. New Landing Pages = New Links!

Every time there’s a new landing page foisted upon me, there’s also a link change. Then there’s different links for different campaigns and different this, that and the other. So I have to make changes – when in reality I’d much prefer one universal, one size fits all link.

6. Tracking!!

Landing pages with tracking issues? Oh yes! Pages need to be checked, checked and checked again before being made live. This month one merchant we promote made link changes and our registrations dived. A switch back to old links and they normalised. The reason? The landing pages are wrong.

So What Would I Like?

I often get asked by gaming affiliate managers “what would you like”. Well, one link that never changes, that tracks properly, that tracks across multiple channels (poker, casino, bingo, sportsbook) and that lands on that channel’s home location.

If a landing page is a must, then yes I can compromise…. but I want one link to a page that’s future proof (e.g. showing the latest casino jackpots or current poker games), that will get newbies registering but also that allows returning players to return (the clue is in the title). Oh, and it needs to track properly too!

Not too much to ask now is it?

So, which cashback TV advert is the best? There’s only one way to find out… erm, by taking a look at them (“fightttttt” is so last year lol).

In the Quidco corner, we have the “perfect family” (both parents, one boy and one girl) in a BolegBro Apprentice-esque style advert . The Quidco brand is emphasised numerous times (Quidco Happy, Qudico Good and Quidco Smart) but the advert goes more for “money back savings” as opposed to daring to mention cashback.

Actually the advert would have been so much better if all four family members had been “fired” by a Lego Lord Sugar at the end.

At first glance Top Cashback’s ad reminded me of one of those “buy electricals now but pay 50p for the next 600 years” type adverts. It features the “perfect family” living in a nice tidy house. It’s like The Stepford Wives meets 2.4 Children with hilarious consequences.

The advert’s main message though is clear that earning cashback is free and everyone in the family can do it. Hooray!

What is intriguing is the final strapline of “well, you’d have bought it anyway”. For the consumer that might be great – I was going to buy it anyway, but hey now I can save a few quid.

But, I do wonder if Mr Merchant watching this advert ends up thinking “hey, if these guys would have bought my products anyway, why the heck am I spending this money with this affiliate milarky”. If you take away the option for folks to get cashback do you really think they’ll stop shopping?

Going back to David Fiske, he’s wondering where have affiliate marketers gone then? Well, I think what’s left of them are probably all on the way to London! In recent A4U news, yes someone does read that section, it’s reported that TopCashback and Netvouchercodes have set up bases there.

I guess having front line access to networks and merchants is key and having a presence in The Capital is now vital for affiliate businesses? Whether having a small screen advert presence is at vital remains to be seen – but could there come a time when every advert in the Coronation Street break features a cashback or voucher code site?

And would they all feature the “perfect family”? Still, it’s probably better than using Frank Gallagher from Shameless on his laptop proclaiming “I can’t get my ******* cashback, the ******* sale hasn’t tracked you ********”. A missed opportunity. Scatter!

Banners also don’t seem to cut the mustard when it comes to sales. Most certainly we’ve found that search boxes and the like do a better job. Some merchants already kindly provide clever creative such as gift finders, hotel finders and offer of the day. For example there’s this cool little idea from Sky TV (which won’t centralise on this blog).

Outsourcing widgets seems to be the vogue for affiliate marketing. There are third party content providers such as Easy Content Units and various feeds from Fusepump (as the one above is). There are also Coull videos and perhaps a whole bundle of other stuff I don’t know about.

However, there’s now a new site – just launched – which could be worth a look, especially if you’re a travel affiliate.

Affiliate Widgets “offers a wide range of contextual widgets and banner advertising for travel affiliates looking to get the best performance out of their websites”. It’s provided by Adnet Media, a travel advertising platform.

At the moment there are just two merchants – Gap Adventures and easyJet Holidays. This I expect will expand rapidly! The site also says they’ll be looking into other sectors. In some ways I hope that they focus on travel and provide tools just for that sector. Trying to do too much for too many across multiple areas doesn’t always work.

Anyway, despite just the two merchants, I was quite impressed with the quality of the widgets and the options.

For example, easyJet Holidays you can create a Product Carousel, a Trip Widget and a Mini Directory. You can either have the ads as contextual or fix the location yourself. For example here’s a Product Carousel widget

It’s nice, clear and (hopefully) once installed on a site requires no changes. The best part for me, at least in this ad’s case, was that I could resize it! It usually comes as a 300×250 – which in a 500px space looks horrible. The resizing doesn’t effect the content or the look. Furthermore, it was easy to pick up and paste on site. Perfect!

At the moment the widgets are totally free. In other words all clicks and commissions are yours. After August 2011 some widgets may have a 1/5 click option on them. Others will be free depending on the working relationship between advertiser and network. It’ll be interesting to see how Affiliate Widgets develop and what else they offer in the coming months, especially given their travel connections.

With all these extra tools on offer, it’s perhaps no wonder affiliate networks aren’t overly worried about hosted banners and their own widgets. Instead they can concentrate on the other things that they do. If a third party can do content units and widgets better than the network then it makes sense to outsource them!

Good quality third party tools can save affiliates a lot of time – and lets them to concentrate on other things. If they’re easy to pick up, flexible and look good then they’re definitely something of interest.

By the way, if you offer tools for affiliates and want to be featured on OLD then just let me know.

Project Cupcake will see a radical change in revenues for many affiliates. Instead of one getting the whole cookie, several will share the cupcake! Of course, because of the nature of these changes it’s not surprising the industry is keeping quiet about it’s forthcoming widespread implementation.

One Little Duck has learnt that a number of merchants have also been involved in the study. The group called Merchants Undertaking Flexible Financials were specially chosen because of their concerns about switching away from last click wins to everyone gets a slice of the action.

The bad news for the affiliates is that after working with the Affiliate Revenue Stream Evaluation group, Merchants Undertaking Flexible Financials have been more than persuaded to come on board Project Cupcake. It moves them away from voucher code dependence and helps reward those affiliates writing content and who are involved in the all important decision processes prior to sale, such as price comparison.

Another group of merchants are looking at using both last click cookie and Project Cupcake. This sub group, Testing Of Several Streams Earning Revenue, will allow their affiliates to opt in for one or the other attribution model. At the end of the month they’ll be told their earnings from one stream versus another in order for them to make choices about their future earnings.

An affiliate agency who are involved with the project are particularly excited about the forthcoming changes: “We need to be proactive here, and this brings a lot of value to the table without impacting the bottom line. It will help us pluck off all the low hanging fruit. It’s a game changing idea that once run up the flagpole will see many people saluting.”

When asked whether it would effect small/medium affiliates they replied: “A few chickens may be pecking round for scraps but at the end of the day it’s all about sustainability, pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box and putting together a value-added proposition to give us all a win-win situation”.

How and when networks will be able to implement Project Cupcake remains to be seen. Just switching it on at the start of month like say April 1st could result in a hefty affiliate backlash. According to my source a number of affiliates have already started thinking about what action they may take if Project Cupcake is put on the table. The Affiliates Planning Retaliation If Link Finances Open Out Losses will specifically look to only work with merchants who stick to the last click wins model.

My source said wryly that under these new proposals networks and merchants won’t be able to have their Project Cupcake and eat it.

The battle for last cookie wins is set to continue….

Anyway, a few weeks back Julie Wood of Affiliate Window sent over a brilliant email – it was a generic affiliate one about an O2/Take That offer. In the email was an explanation of the offer, a link to use, a graphic to use (see below) – all of which could be quickly adapted into something unique and used. So it was use, giving this overworked affiliate some content and the merchant some promotion! It might even have done a sale or two and it did also get us in some Google traffic too.

The question is how do I get more merchants to actually send emails that are constructive? Ideally they’d all be done by Julie – but that’s not feasible. The emails don’t even need to be as detailed as the O2 one was… something like this is useful!

Why? Because in a few seconds the content plus link can be added to our offers forum and then we can do a bit of social media milarkies to get the information out to the world. We get some traffic, which is good news, and the merchant might get a sale (no guarantees, sorry!).

Something like this though is a lot less useful…

This email is just ripe for deleting. The links don’t inspire me, although I might have to watch the video just in case, and time wise content isn’t going to manifest itself in any way based on this email.

Now, I do understand that one email has to fit all affiliates – but do people really get any benefit from emails like the above? Or the ones where they’re loving laid out in a table or graphic but then require extra work and reformatting? I’m guessing they must otherwise they wouldn’t be sent out ad nauseum – the sad thing is they drown out the decent stuff.

So networks – how do I get hold of more emails that we can actually use? Is there any way to tag the emails being sent out? For example [Voucher], [Free Delivery], [Content], [List of Product Links That Aren't Very Good For Loquax].. that kind of thing!

Secondly when are you going to stick a pointy boot up your merchant’s backsides and get them to use the code feeds properly? If a code goes in an email, the code should be in the feed – yes? If free delivery is on offer why isn’t that in the feed? Help reduce the amount of emails coming in by extolling the virtues of the tools you’ve developed.

Please!!

They’re using the Wildfire App for their competition and usually most companies will put this on their Facebook page. All Up and On though have it on their website which means we can drive them traffic via their affiliate program. Hooray!

Of course this is not a guarantee of sales.

Compers (people who enter competitions) are tarred as a “not buying” group and a recent brand republic article tries to underline this. My views on this article are in the comments by the way.

However, we know people do buy online (or at least so they tell us) but it’s not always whilst they’re in the midst of trying to win some goodies. They may go back at a later date or

With comments on A4U such as “the majority of transactions in the retail sector occur within the user’s session … or within 24hours” – Loquax is probably on a hiding to nothing (not withstanding the fact that some users visit so many sites we do wonder whether cookies can survive multiple network clicks).

Of course things can be improved at the merchant end with better competition landing pages and better “thanks for entering pages“. I’ve mentioned these things before and guess what – not a lot changes. In fact Play.com still have a blank empty space on their “thanks for entering page” – a waste!

But with the competition on their website, All Up and On’s visitors are landing in the right place – and there’s a better chance of capturing a sale or customer on their own website then there is via a limited Facebook page.

But that’s not all…

Another issue that I’ve blogged about on here and on our own Loquax Blog is the problem of automated competition entry services. People pay for these sites to automatically enter them into online competitions. They never visit, they never interact, the never actually know what’s going on…. and yet there are many merchants in affiliate marketing who seemingly let this happen.

The AA, The Body Shop, Treatme, Just Eat, Shudoo, Evans Cycles, La Senza, John Lewis, Phones4U…

It’s something that needs to be looked into by the above – and it’s also something all sites, including affiliates, need to be aware of! Things like CAPTCHA can help, but there’s nothing as good as collecting IP addresses and monitoring your entries. Basic forms and email to enter competition mechanics should be avoided.

Some more details can be found in the Loquax Competition Guide. Well worth looking through if you’re considering competitions as a promotional tool.

All Upwards and Onwards

Last month I blogged “I don’t need a new challenge in terms of starting from scratch as the new challenge is quite simply to make the most of what we have and enjoy it” – well as it happens that has now gone out of the window. As much as I love what we do at Loquax – it’s time for a small change and do something different.

A competition site isn’t always the sanest path to be on business wise. It’d be nice to actually try and do something more affiliate wise. Competitions have taken their toll and for the sanity of all involved duckwise we probably need a small challenge away from this sector. It might not work but it’s something different to try.

Loquax isn’t going away though (it’s business as usual), and that means I’ll still be nagging about sorting out your competitions!

Hopefully in the next blog I’ll be able to report that more sites are listening.

A lot of merchants are doing Facebook promotions these days (actually a lot of brands are doing Facebook promotions these days) and it’s kind of them to tell their affiliates. But merchants aren’t being particularly helpful when it comes down to these things.

Sorry Jones the Bootmakers but you’ve been chosen as my example!

In their email they tell us “We are currently running a competition on Facebook where one of our fans can win this studded bag worth £95″ and give me a link to the studded bag worth £95 on their website. They even give me an affiliate link for it.

They then give me the link to their Facebook page where the competition resides. To enter their “fans” just have to ‘Like’, ‘Comment’ and ‘Share’ the link until 2pm Monday 21st.

From an affiliate point of view there’s no real benefit of this! Yes I can tell my users and they will enjoy trying to win a studded bag worth £95, but there’s no incentive for them to even visit Jones the Bootmakers. That means absolutely zero chance of buying anything – and even if they did it’s unlikely any affiliate cookie gets involved.

So what would be better?

Well what if Jones the Bootmakers had on their studded bag page a link saying “win this on Facebook”, perhaps along with some entry terms and conditions? Or even better how about a dedicated landing page on their site that has details of the competition and some latest offers?

Why is this better?

Well for one I know that traffic goes via an affiliate link and it’ll go to the website. This means the affiliate is happy. Secondly my users are seeing the site that’s running the promotion and they’re being introduced to offers and details from the promoter. Finally it’s better than going to a Facebook page that is currently awash with “win this bag” posts on the wall. In other words little to engage with!

Sticking a competition on Facebook and telling your affiliates is simply asking for free traffic. Think about it a little, create a landing page, create something much better and intuitive. Think about how visitors see your brand and how your affiliates drive traffic.

We know we can send visitors, we know that for the most part converting them to sales is a bit of a Power Driver to crack an Egg situation – but at least give us a bit of a fighting chance by making the point of delivery of users a little bit better than a clogged up Facebook Wall!

Merchants, you have websites – use them a little bit for your competitions (please).

You can enter the competition here!