Free Links to Merchants or Try and Monetise?
Posted under: Affiliates are often asked to put themselves in the position of the merchant (or their agency) and take into consideration what they want from the relationship. For this blog post if you’re not an affiliate, climb into our shoes for a change and see whether you think differently.
Let’s say you have some content on your site. You have a link to Retailer X that you’ve given them for free. You’ve never misrepresented that retailer and you have a (hopefully) decent reputation. The retailer also has never complained about that link and in fact they (and many of their peers) seek you out to use the service you offer.
Retailer X then launches an affiliate program. This means that you can potentially monetise that link on a paid on performance basis. You’ve now gone from officially earning nothing to potentially picking up a few bits and pieces sales wise.
Now, you know that it’s unlikely that big potatoes are going to come your way from this relationship. However now that you’ve got Retailer X as a “favoured link” it means that they get extra promotion, possible newsletter coverage and inclusion in your offers/codes sections as well as, provided you have time and the offer is good, stuck in front of your community.
So the question is this, bearing in mind that your focus is quite simply generating revenue for your business, so that you can continue giving your users the free service they enjoy and offering many sites a free service they enjoy….
… would you leave the link as “free” or stick on the affiliate link and go for the hope to earn from it option?
Now let’s flip that over to the merchant (or their agency). They’ve now gone from paying definitely nothing to potentially paying something for a few sales that they may or may not have gotten from the traffic you’ve sent. Sadly no one will ever be 100% sure.
Should they be upset or bothered by your actions?
Is it right for an affiliate to try and monetise their free traffic to a merchant site?
This is a follow up to my last post – Will Our Conversion Rate Ruin Your Affiliate Program – II and the comments within. Whilst I don’t like arguing with merchants publically (honest guv) sometimes needs must as no one else will fight our battles in AM. In this case a number of interesting points have been raised which are worth exploring, so thanks to those who have commented.
no brainer – if they’ve got an affiliate link – you use it
agreed, have affiliate link, stick it up. it actually helps the agency, as now they can understand they traffic coming from your site and make more informed decisions.
Thanks for the comment Ken – “make more informed decisions” – could you elaborate there? Other than for removing the affiliate how is that information used?
Jason, sure thing, now before i go on i have to point out this only applies to ourselves and our clients, i can’t speak for other agencies.
a lot of our merchants will look at their google analytic and wonder why they get spikes of traffic, then they see its come from an affiliate site, we’re then asked to find out what the results were of that spike, only when we look at the data the affiliate isn’t actually on the campaign, that spike was ‘free’ traffic.
in this instance the client was retrospectively trying to find out the performance of a specific offer that just so happened to get picked up by the affiliate, had the affiliate tracked it we’d have numbers and could have been able to build a case that we should offer this affiliate better commissions the next time a similar offer was deployed by the merchant in order to capitalize on that affiliates traffic.
we could also have used that data to find out if that offer from that affiliate converted traffic on specific products etc which is all useful data for the client to make educated and deliberate decisions instead of finger-in-the-air approximations.
to cite an example we saw loquax come up on google analytics for one of our clients, i wanted to get in touch as it was driving loads of traffic but no affiliate link, then by the time we figured what was going on the promotion had ended and we could offer you anything to keep the link up and make it worth while so we had to keep note of it for the next time the client put out a similar offer.
as far as booting affiliates off a campaign, again this information only serves to inform the decision making process, in the time i’ve been at blue barracuda we’ve only ever performed 1 cull, at the explicit request of the client and for the purposes of eliminating totally unresponsive inactive affiliates it took us two months to complete the cull along with 6 emails and all affiliates needed to do to indicate they wanted to stay on the campaign was generate a click or reply to the email we sent. i think in this context whilst you could argue it was unnecessary, we managed it well without annoying any legitimate affiliates, i think we only eliminated those affiliates who were fake ie. entered in false information, or had lost interest in the campaign. despite how well we handled it this time i very much doubt this is something we’d do unless a client insisted we HAD to do it, and even then they’d get a degree of resistance, i’d personally show them that fateful thread on a4u where i got hung drawn and quartered
Thanks Ken for that explanation – makes sense and nice to feel a bit more positive about these things.
Cheers
IF (yes, big if) you trust the merchant and have a good relationship, how about leave it as a natural link and use their analytics to calculate the ecommerce revenue from the link…