Award season is well and truly upon us. The Oscar nominations are due, some bingo sites have done some back scratching, the IGB Affiliate Awards have passed and nominations are now open for the 2010 A4U Awards. This means it’s time for the great and the good in AM to nominate their favourite Publisher, Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2010, Account Manager at a Network, Affiliate Manager, and Affiliate Network.

Awards are funny things and are often the focus of some heated debate. Take the big bingo portals for instance. Every year they compete to offer bingo merchants an award for best site or newcomer. The merchants lap this up and encourage their users to vote and/or plaster links back to the portals on their site and newsletter with absolutely no regard for their other affiliates. Do I want to send my users to a site that has “Go to XYZBingo and vote for us” on it?

No I don’t! It’s understandable why it’s done, although imo it’s the bingo portal getting the most benefit with extra traffic and backlinks – but I guess that’s my cynicism coming through there. It’s a tough situation to work round with the only solutions being that bingo sites don’t add links or every affiliate runs an award set up each year and everyone gets treated a bit more fairly.

Staying with gaming, last week was the IGB Affiliate Awards. Loquax was nominated as best bingo affiliate, but had little chance of winning (or even getting to the final shortlist), but we were in there somewhere. The good news was that the awards were streamed live, which was an interesting experience.

The presenters weren’t exactly Ricky Gervais at The Golden Globes (or even Jason Manford at A4UAwards 2009), more Samantha Fox and Mick Fleetwood at The Brits after a few drinks. Hopefully they came across better ‘live’. Still the dance group interlude was good and perhaps streaming is something A4U can look into for 2010?

One more point about IGB! I guess it’s not good form to question winners, but for the life of me I cannot understand how Ladbrokes took the bingo affiliate awards. There must be a The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe type door on their affiliate system that takes people through to Narnia that I’m missing as what I see isn’t that impressive on numerous levels. Still, well done to all winners there – opinion and debate are always a close second aren’t they?

So awards and controversy go hand in hand, and that takes us back to this year’s A4U Awards. Who will win? Who won’t win? And how much blog mileage can we get out of questioning the judging, the voting, the vote for mes and the who I voted fors! To get the ball rolling head on over to the 2010 A4U Awards and make your nominations.

The 4th Annual a4uAwards will be held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, Mayfair on the 9th June 2010.

Nominate Now for the 2010 A4UAwards

An affiliate is in need of good product feeds as much as Portsmouth FC are in need of a couple of quid. The latter merchants probably can’t do much about (sorry Pompey dudes, hope it works out) but why the heck are product feeds still a flaming problem? Does anyone look at them? Check them? Care about them?

First the good news – things have improved. There does seem to be better descriptions, product names, manufacturer codes etc – and on the surface everything in the garden looks rosy! That is until you start looking for something and the following two examples have been encountered far too often of late…

New Products On Websites

An affiliate spots that Merchant X has some wonderful tshirts on their site and thinks “hey that could be a nice central point for a blog post”. They head over to their clever little feed tool or perhaps easy content units (who will have the same feeds) and search for those wonderful items. They’re not there!

So where are they? OK let’s allow 24 hours for an update! Days pass and still those products don’t appear.

Result: Merchant doesn’t get promoted!

Items In Emails

Quite honestly this gets right on the proverbials. You receive a wonderfully crafted email from a merchant. The items are screaming “promote me! promote me!” and so you set to work. Is it in the feed? Oh dear, no it isn’t. Again let’s be patient. In the words of Annie “ya gotta hang on ‘Til tomorrow” as it’s only a day away. But no, sadly those items don’t appear.

They’re pre-order items and therefore aren’t going to be in the feed!

Result: Merchant doesn’t get promoted!

So here’s a February challenge to all who are charged with managing product feeds for their clients.

1. Go and check the product feed and make sure it’s up to date
2. Check the images and links. Can an affiliate use them?
3. Check that the feed is being updated daily (or as frequent as required)
4. Make sure it’s being updated. Do spot checks!
5. See if new products on site appear in the feed.
6. Make sure old products are being removed.
7. Do tests on downloads. Are the feeds usable in both XML and CSV.
8. Do tests on putting CSV feeds and XML feeds into a database.
9. Make sure all site items are in the feed and are properly categorised.
10. Go back to 1 and repeat.

Now, it’s appreciated that some of the above is a faff and some may not have the technical know how to check some of suggestions, but in simpler terms – please check the feeds and if you see they’re not right, get it sorted!

And please don’t send emails with products to promote that aren’t in your feed! Just because they’re on site doesn’t mean affiliates can get to them via your feeds. We have tools, whether they be our own, third party like ECU, or networks and if your items aren’t right, up to date or in the correct format you’re losing out on promotion.

Even worse for you… if your competitors are up to date and have brilliant product feeds then they’re going to be used instead!

Emails from merchants often spark various reactions, but one last week left me more than a little bit baffled. Now we’re pretty much open when it comes to some of the affiliate marketing we do! Whilst every man and his dog are screaming finesse and niche, we’re pretty much in the “using a steam roller for your pastry” department for some aspects of AM. It’s not pretty but it can be effective.

It is targeted traffic – to a point! Our users want to win stuff, a retailer is giving stuff away, we send them traffic. If we can use an affiliate link at the same all the better. The downside is that we don’t get paid for doing that, but the chance of no commission is better than no chance for no commission and we just have to hope that the retailer is doing a grand job promoting products, offers, discounts etc at their end.

What this means, for retailers, is we end up (occasionally) sending high traffic with low conversions. They end up with people visiting their site, competition entrants, brand awareness, low conversion rate and occasionally an affiliate manager who thinks we’re up to no good.

And it’s the latter which has had me baffled over the last few days.

They said that “having such a high click through rate and low conversion rate isn’t great for the overall program”. I’m still trying to figure out how our CR has any bearing on the program at all. OK in stats it may skew things, but under “lines of best fit” we’d be an anomaly. We’re also an anomaly that can be accounted for!

Now it’s appreciated that some retailers look on people who want to win things disdainfully, but they do (well some do) buy online and they are very web savvy. They’re the kind of people who will search for and use discounts, look for cashback (grrrr) and do all those wonderful money saving type things. Our problem is that they tend not to buy right at the time we send them to find competitions to enter.

So how can you help improve our conversion rate?

Well firstly you could pay us for leads to your competitions. Now this will probably never ever happen, but if it did our CR would look a lot healthier, as would our commission levels on networks. Hooray!

Secondly, know your website. What we’re finding is that quite often the AM isn’t actually aware what is happening across the entire site that they’re managing. They may know that skirts are down and trousers are up but not if a prize draw has ever appeared. If they did then they’d probably realise why there’s a sudden spike of traffic from duckland.

Thirdly, make sure your competition mechanic is better!

Take Buyagift as an example. For Valentine’s Day you could win a trip on The Orient Express… cool! You enter and all you see is “Why not check out our great range of Valentine’s Day gifts”. It’s better than nothing, but it screams out for “you’ve got a discount code” or “today’s offer, buy now or miss out”.

There’s just nowt eye catching there for anyone! An improvement in these kind of areas may not have any influence on our CR, but for other entrants/visitors it may help more than just a “click here” link.

Finally, please don’t kick us off your program because we have a low conversion rate as it really doesn’t ruin your program (or at least we hope it doesn’t). We do promote retailers in more targeted shopping related ways including price comparison, content, blogging, vouchers etc and are constantly working on new ways to improve our conversions.

As the title says I should have gone to prison this week. Now, sorry to disappoint folks it’s not a Norman Stanley Fletcher moment! The prison I should have spent my birthday at is the famous Alcatraz, San Francisco. The last few years we’ve gone away for a break at this time of year. Christmas isn’t really a break so this makes up for it. The last couple years we’ve been to Cuba and Florida but this year we fancied something different this year.

However, a number of things however conspired together before departure and we made the decision to move travel to another time. The coup de grâce was the central heating boiler “dying” at 5am on the morning we were meant to be heading through ice and snow to Heathrow. By the time it was fixed we’d changed dates. One advantage of being an affiliate is that if your holiday plans go the way of the pear you can switch them without any major problems with the boss.

In hindsight it’s been a blessing in disguise. For the last 8/9 days I’ve been hit with cold/flu (nowt like Hannah’s swine flu) whilst the wintry weather conditions has seen the Northern half of the Loquax team effected by school closures.

Fortunately a lot of content has already been written for this week so I’ve not had to do much work wise, but “being off ill” most certainly should appear on Lammo’s working from home sucks. Watching Jeremy Kyle in the morning and afternoon is not a novelty when you’ve been able to do it for many a month. I’ve been stuck with a desire to do things but the inability to do them. Very frustrating!

Contingency in the short term!

If you work for yourself, especially as an affiliate there’s a tendency to just keep going, however you’re feeling. The PC is after all just around the corner if you work from home and a few hours “won’t hurt”. Read some emails here, do a bit of content there… it’s all a lot more draining if you’re not 100%.

If as you’re working day to day, try and factor in a bit of additional contingency – “just in case”. You could perhaps do this by preparing content and articles for few days in advance or even teaching a partner who can take on a few of the day to day responsibilities whilst you take time off. Then when those Lemsip (foul evil stuff btw) days arrive you can just concentrate on vegging in front of the TV for a few days.

You could of course just switch everything off and ignore all emails and contacts and let things be! But, if you’re anything like me you’ll be itching to get things done or want to know what’s happening. Even if you’re getting told off for working by the lovely Nurse Jude (thanks dear).

However, even I know when it’s time to rest up and so I’m going to at least try and take it easy for the rest of January… and I’ve still got that holiday to look forward too!

What does a short fat squirrel, a spare 5 minutes and a vanishing missus equate to? Yes it’s my affiliate highlight of 2009! On the surface spending a few minutes with the Conversion Rate Experts at A4UExpo may not seem that exciting to most people. But, it literally opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about how things work for our users.

Those of you who were at A4UExpo couldn’t have missed the squirrel who was handing out leaflets. Jude had gone AWOL and so I thought what the heck let’s go and have a go. It’s not something I’d usually do (too shy usually) but in all honesty the 10 minutes spent doing it have probably been the most useful conference minutes from all three expos.

Just watching the eye tracking analysis, which was free, made me realise how important it is to see the site through our user’s eyes rather than our own. When you work, as we do, on a site day in day out it becomes easy to assume everyone knows where they are going.

The analysis was just basic although it did reveal quite a obvious coding error which could result in user confusion. But beyond that, just watching someone do this basic process was enough to spark lots of new ideas and improvements we could make to Loquax. Sometimes you just need a push to get the “epiphany” moment… and it happened there and then.

I always felt that terms like “customer journey” were just pretentious marketing mumbo jumbo, like “facilitating the conversation”, but yes I was wrong and understanding the journey is important. And so, since the above took place at Expo we have made a variety of changes across the site. We’ve looked at our welcome emails, automated response emails, error messaging and plenty more.

I don’t want to reveal too much as competitors do read this, but for example one rule on our forums is that you must “say hello”. This notion was sign posted if a user went in the expected direction. But, if they deviated a message would appear saying “there have been no posts in the last 60 days”. That’s not a conducive way to get people to join in a forum now is it? So that has been fixed and all roads lead to where the user needs to be plus they get the right information.

Of course all is not perfect and there’s still plenty of improvements to do.

Can we gauge success?

Without giving too much away, let’s just say we’ve improved things socially and also in site to site relations. New users seem to also know what they’re doing (well mostly) so that in itself is a major plus. More importantly those few minutes helped spark energy and motivation to do mundane, yet critical, things which perhaps would have been left.

The driving day with Cashcade was a close second, but as I didn’t win a trophy and Jude did and has made sure I know about it every day since, it just missed out to the short fat squirrel at A4UExpo!

So what was your affiliate marketing highlight of 2009?