Affiliates tend to like incentives, especially if the incentive doesn’t involve the ubiquitous iPod, and so it’s a bit of surprise that not a lot has been mentioned about the launch of the Groupola affiliate program on Affiliate Window. The daily city deal group buying site is giving it’s affiliates the chance to win a brand new Mini Cooper, holiday to Barbados, a Macbook or an iPad.

Groupola is the latest site from Secret Millionaire and MyVoucherCodes man Mark Pearson (Markco Media). It’s one of a number of daily deal sites aimed at localised groups that have sprung up during 2010. Techcrunch likes to call them Groupon Clones. Groupon are mainly USA focused, but do have a London section and no doubt will be looking to expand. They will join the likes of MyCityDeal, Likebees, Wahanda and coming soon Crowdity in battling with Groupola for the best deals and customers.

A good way to do that is by using affiliates and Groupola will be hoping to get ahead of their rivals with their bundle of attractive incentives. However, if you’re thinking “that car is mine” there’s a few things to consider. The winner of the car will be the affiliate who “generates the most amount in the six months, over £50,000 in revenue”. So if you make £50,002 and I do £50,001 that £1 difference will be a set of wheels! You have until the 1st of November to earn over £50k by the way.

I’d have liked to have seen the above as a prize draw for affiliates over £50k, just so that if more than one affiliate broke that barrier there’s a chance for all to still win. That said, it’s nice to see a big incentive on offer for affiliates and it most certainly makes a change from the iPods etc.

Could you get to £50,000? Well, commission offered to affiliates is based on the value of the deal purchased and ranges from £1 to £10. However, it’s unclear if repeat customers earn an affiliate revenue (if yes then that’s good news). There’s also no remuneration for email sign ups as offered by MyCityDeal, who are also on Affiliate Window.

One thing also worth considering is that Groupola has been introduced via MVC whereas other group buying sites have had standing starts. In other words one had a ready made audience and the others didn’t – and from an affiliate point of view the latter may yield better results in terms of new customers.

One thing that did tickle me about the Groupola affiliate program, bearing in mind voucher code site misdemeanors of the past, was it’s terms and conditions.

Any sites consistently presenting apparent offers from Groupola that do not exist will not be paid commission for their activity. This applies in particular to the promotion of discount or voucher codes. Affiliates will not be paid for such activity if:
(a) In our opinion the implication of the affiliate promotion is that we do have discount or voucher codes when we do not
and/or
(b) In our opinion the intention of the promotion is to drop cookies, rather than promoting our business in a constructive way.

I’m sure they’ll be one or two smiles raised after reading that.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how Groupola performs, not only within the group buying space, but also in terms of affiliate activity. Will, for example, another voucher code site promote a company owned by it’s main rivals? Or will they look to tie up special deals with competing daily deal services? Will more of group buying sites embrace affiliate marketing? And will any of them provide a daily updated product feed?

The last week or so I’ve been looking at Google’s Webmaster Tools to try and tidy up errors, old pages, meta issues etc, but one thing that really caught my eye was the data on site performance. On one hand one of our subdomains does really well, but on the other our average for the www version of Loquax was incredibly poor. So poor in fact that if site performance became a factor in rankings we’d be somewhere at the bottom.

The cause of this isn’t the fact that our servers are covered in treacle and managed by a bunch of snails who are incredibly relaxed thanks to the benefits of illegal grass type products, but because of our redirect page. We use a redirect link (goto.htm), with php header code, to mask our urls and redirect them. We never used to do this, but after having large swathes of the site “borrowed” on a regular basis it became a necessity.

Clicking on one of our redirects usually results in the outbound link loading in – so why Google was assigning an average over 7 seconds to our redirect goto.htm was a bit of a mystery. Could it be including the time to load the redirect as an indicator of our server response? Or can Google’s site performance data not take into account/identify a php redirect? For the first time I tried the support forum and made a couple of changes including identifying the redirect.

One additional change made since then has involved what happens when the goto.htm id is no longer used. We don’t want our users clicking through to dead sites, so when an id is not in use we redirect to a “sorry not available” holding page. Within that page was some database code that really wasn’t needed. My theory is that if Google is hitting a lot of our old redirects it’s just landing on the “sorry” page multiple times – resulting in multiple database calls and lots of confusion.

So, to counter this, we’ve put a robots.txt exclusion on the “sorry” page (it was already noindex) and, so far, it seems our average speed for goto.htm is now dropping. Hopefully the average will continue to drop and the changes made won’t effect anything else.

According to Blogstorm, site speed is not yet a factor in The UK yet. But, if you do use redirects it might be worth looking at your Site Performance just in case your speed average is being skewed.

And, if you have any ideas/suggestions as to the cause of why Google sees php header redirects as slow then please post below!

When the Iceland ash cloud issue broke on Sky News last week it’s possible that many affiliates, perhaps like the Government, didn’t anticipate that it’d last more than a day or two and probably wasn’t worth looking at. That perhaps could explain why a number of new sites offering affiliate links to ferry and train services didn’t billow up like a plume of volcanic ash.

However, there are one or two “entrepreneurial” people out there and domain names ashcloud.co.uk and volcanicash.co.uk are in place and active. The former site is more an information site with just a couple of affiliate links in amongst twitter, news feeds and updates. The latter site though is simply a one page effort with adsense, affiliate banners and a link to the siteowner’s main site.

Interestingly icelandvolcano.co.uk is still available whilst Eyjafjallajokull.co.uk (registered on 18th April) remains “parked” (or dormant in vulcanologist terms).

Perhaps these domains aren’t that useful? In my opinion visitors ending up at these sites would be looking for information and updates about the travel situation rather than using such sites for seeking out alternative travel arrangements. As is The BBC, Sky and the Met Office will always do a better job.

The “information visitor” versus “looking to buy” may also explain why there’s very little PPC activity on terms such as “volcanic ash” and “ash cloud”. Eurostar do have adverts with the headline “Ash Cloud Won’t Stop Us” running, but other travel companies haven’t joined them.

One company that has joined Eurostar on PPC are Street Shirts who are hoping that their “Ash Cloud” tshirts, such as I Survived the Ash Cloud will appeal to people searching Google for information.

Taking “advantage” of a situation, especially one which is fluid and that may be short lived, is a high risk strategy. It can also take up a lot of time, especially if you’re having to offer regular updates. It can become a distraction from your current activity.

For affiliates wanting to “take advantage” or “be entrepreneurial” it may be better to look at pushing alternative ways to travel such as train and ferry on existing sites. Alternatively (and assuming the volcano is going to be blowing ash for sometime to come) it might be prudent to look at developing sites that will run and be profitable beyond the current crisis (imgettingonnoplane.co.uk?).

Hopefully the situation eases soon and those people stuck waiting for flights home or away on holiday don’t have too much longer to wait.

The Grand National is over for another year and whilst there were a number of affiliate marketeers celebrating Tony McCoy’s success but there wasn’t too much protestation over the annual “change your content for a few days” rules from bookmakers. In previous years the free bet offers have been removed or in some cases CPA payments dropped over National weekend.

The lack of comment from affiliates perhaps suggests that things have settled in this area, maybe as some bookies have adapted their stance, or it’s become accepted as the norm that bookies will be a pain at this time, or perhaps there’s just an element of “there’s no point complaining”?

Or, as is more likely, many affiliates have become wise to the event and are taking advantage well before the actual day of the race.

For example, if you get an email at the end of March from Ladbrokes saying “We ask that you remove any reference to free bets on your sites during Grand National Day. Unfortunately any affiliates who do not comply with this request will see their revenue for the whole month of April withheld”, the best thing to do is send out “free Grand National bets” promotions in the interim period with a message saying there won’t be any available on the day.

That all seems fair and sensible to me!

However, any affiliate publishing that “Ladbrokes will not offer freebets on Grand National day this year” would have been in the wrong. That’s because they offered Sun readers who visited their high street bookies a free £1 bet – details here! Now fair enough it’s not online, but it’s still a free bet.

Furthermore, a forward thinking affiliate could have used this information to offer extra promotion for the bookmaker, had they provided it. With this in mind, it makes you wonder if affiliates would respond better to “please ensure you tell your users they’ll be no free bet via the online site but you are welcome to mention that there are these offers offline” rather than the “remove any reference to free bets… [or have] … revenue for the whole month of April withheld”.

For example an affiliate may want to tell their visitors “if you pick up a copy of The Sun you’ll get a £1 free bet from Ladbrokes, but if you’re not able to get out today there’s no free bet offer but you can place your National bet at Ladbrokes.com”. It gives visitors truthful information, it’s useful and valid, plus offers promotion and links to the merchant. It also combines the merchant’s other advertising channels together with affiliate marketing.

Is that unfair on the bookmaker? Would that be worthy in a penalty for the affiliate?

What do you think?

Interesting changes are afoot in the bingo affiliate world with the announcement from two affiliate networks about third party link building. The rule changes have essentially been put into immediate effect by Ignite Bingo, who run Costa Bingo, and Joy of Bingo who are responsible for Wink Bingo and the new site Tasty Bingo.

The gist of the announcement is given below:

As of this date affiliates are not permitted to acquire any links for [Bingo Site] terms from third party sites for the purpose of deep linking to their own [Bingo Site] review and information pages. Any affiliate found to have broken this term from this day onward will have any affiliate commissions withheld. The brand owner has made this move in order to guarantee the quality of reader experience when a user searches for their branded terms in search engines.

As I understand it the sites in question aren’t happy about paying commission to affiliates who perhaps are paying for trademark name links in order to inflate their positions in SERPS. Bingo is a competitive area and ranking for a “brand name”, even in the top few places can be beneficial to an affiliate’s monthly earnings.

In some ways the decision is understandable but the brand doesn’t control Google or how the search results appear or the quality of reader experience. Any brand owner would love the right things in the right order on SERPS but sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Perhaps the solution is a better SEO strategy from the brand?

Or if an affiliate is acquiring backlinks through payment then Google should be the ones to deal with it (paid links). Perhaps the fact that some affiliate sites rank for “brand name” (and above it in the case of Tasty Bingo) means that the search engine is happy with the link building processes that have gone on or they feel the site is genuinely worthy of that spot?

This puts the merchant in a bit of a pickle.

Firstly how can they determine what Google ranks and where and really is it up to them to decide who goes where? And secondly how is the acquiring of third party links going to be monitored? Also does acquiring mean getting a free link because someone has read your comments and wants to genuinely link back to you?

Another issue is what if the affiliate says “no” to the terms and switches links to a competitor site in protest (i.e. they rank for Site A but tell their users to go to Site B)?. That possibly raises potential legal issues but the fact is that the affiliate will still be ranking in SERPS for the brand. If they kick off the affiliate will they have more problems to deal with? If they don’t take action are they paying out commission they don’t feel they should be to an affiliate who perhaps isn’t working with them in partnership or “adding value”?

The eventual result will be a bit of a shake up in the bingo affiliate arena.

One merchant unveiling the new terms seemed to me to be a “reaction”, but a second following 24 hours later suggests that this issue is going to transcend across more brands over the coming weeks and months.

I’d expect many operators to now extend their own SEO and link building work so as to outrank affiliates under brand terms and generics, something which many are already trying to do. This no doubt costs them money and perhaps that will mean commissions will be cut to accommodate? It could well be that some operators start to become a bit more selective about who they work with, especially when it comes to their own independent networks.

It’ll be interesting to see if these term changes have any impact on SERPS, affiliate/merchant relationships and which bingo operators affiliates work with over the coming months.

Personally I sympathise with the bingo brands, but don’t think the strategy employed is really going to change anything. Monitoring and proving if an affiliate has acquired links is going to be difficult. Even if you ask affiliates to stop doing something they will try and find ways around it. That said affiliates paying for links run the risk of eventually being caught out so perhaps natural equilibrium will eventually win through?