In email today came this good news post “Great news! The GM Platinum Card Affiliate Program tracking has now been updated. GM Platinum Card would like to thank all Affiliates for their patience whilst the tracking was being fixed and apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused.“.

Now, it’s quite possible I missed it – but when was the “we’re sorry but we’re not tracking post sent out”?????

Tracking sales should probably be the fundamental basis of running an affiliate program. Of course problems occur but the attitude of merchants and networks towards affiliates when tracking obviously is not working correctly is at times incredibly poor.

Often tracking problems are picked up by the affiliates, long before they’re noticed by the network or the merchant. This is unacceptable. It can’t be that difficult to monitor sales levels from affiliates on a real time basis and see instantly if there are issues that are causing drops in sales.

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In affiliate marketing circles it’s considered that there are a number of top affiliates – the ones who can generate income either through PPC or by volume or by SEO. If that number is say 200 then those 200 affiliates are probably wanted by many merchants – but it must stand to reason that not every merchant is going to be promoted by every merchant and that in some cases a merchant may find they cannot attract an affiliate from this upper tier.

This begs the question are there too many merchants chasing too few quality affiliates? There’s a wide range of merchants to promote across numerous networks, so the affiliate has plenty to pick from. Also are affiliates interested in promoting low value products when they can earn better money with the likes of loans, broadband, credit cards and high value goods? If the answer is yes, merchants with low value goods may find they struggle unless the site has a unique selling point.

On our price comparison system at UK Shops to Buy we may consider adding a number of merchants within a category – after all the one with the best price should convert.

However, on Mobiles & Phones we have been selective and work only with a handful of merchants (e.g. Dialaphone, The Link, T-Mobile) who we believe will convert. If a new merchant came along it’s unlikely we’d change positioning for an untried company.

I’m sure this feeling and policy must filter through other affiliate’s minds – therefore new sites embracing affiliate marketing may find that the promises made by networks become unfulfilled. Not because the merchant site is poor, but because as affiliates we’re continually trying to juggle between building useable sites, getting SEO working and generating sales for tried and tested merchants. Adding additional factors of a new untried merchant to the equation is always risky and therefore networks and new merchants need to come up with new ways to incentivise (e.g. CPC, higher CPA) or publish test figures (sales per day) to encourage affiliates to start new promotions.

This week has seen the closure of a number of credit card affiliate programs. In essence it’s really one as they (Accucard, Scottish Widows, Lloyds TSB and others) all come under the “Create Card Services” name. For our finance site Apply for Credit this wasn’t a major problem. The site has struggled to become established and where sales have occurred it’s not been with any of the programs now closing.

Finance affiliates have had a lot of upheaval in recent months with FSA laws coming in to effect, merchants closing and zero notice changes to commission levels. It just goes to show that in a few months a thriving online business can easily be damaged by overnight changes.

For affiliates this adds further concern. Do we concentrate on single areas (e.g. credit cards, insurance, loans, broadband) or cover a wide number of areas and merchants. It is a very difficult balancing act between concentrated niche sales vs “jack of all trades”. Who said affiliate marketing was easy?

For umpteen weeks now we have been contacted by trafficsales.com asking about advertising casino and poker sites on Loquax and UK Casinos Online. Whilst we’re always interested in earning revenue we don’t take everyone’s cash. Trafficsales fail to comprehend the meaning of “not interested” and the emails still flow in.

To counter this we’ve started asking stupid money to see what happens. Today we’ve asked for a cool £500,000 up front for 5 links! If they accept then that’s great – but they won’t and tomorrow no doubt they’ll email us again and again. They may claim to represent the top casinos or best poker rooms, but their approach is negative and overly intrusive and as such we’d not wish to work with them now or in the future.

Another company, Tradal Ltd, do exactly the same thing. We even registered as an affiliate of Empire Poker to stop the emails, but they still kept coming. Very annoying and not the way to go about forging affiliate relationships.