Broadbanned 2: The Wrong Kind of Snow
Posted under: Following yesterday’s blogpost further information has emerged about why we’re no longer accepted as a Tiscali affiliate. Although we do leads through the program, the leads don’t go on to become “genuine sales” – the internet equivalent of British Rail’s wrong kind of snow.
The way we’ve promoted Tiscali traffic wise is via their numerous competitions. It’s in my opinion unlikely to generate many leads or sales, but it’s a way of getting cookies burnt and users aware of Tiscali. It’s the basic method we use for competitions and lacks any kind of affiliate finesse – a sledgehammer to demolish a walnut approach.
The second way is through broadband offers. Loquax has been #2 on google for example for “best buy broadband” so it’s feasible that some, none, or all the leads for Tiscali we’ve generated to have come via people actually interested in joining the service.
So – why the problem?
The big issue has to be that whoever made the decision to remove us from Tiscali’s program didn’t actually bother to talk to us and find out what we do. A phone call asking to either remove linking via competitions or perhaps add tags to the affiliate code so that it could be ascertained where leads were generated from could have been the first step.
If all our sales came from our broadband page would that change things? After all it would be better targetted leads and that would surely mean the blame for lack of genuine customers falling on the side of the merchant.
I can sympathise if some PAYG dial up sign ups have been made by users wanting to be registered Tiscali users so they can enter their competitions. However, if someone has signed up for broadband and has not become a customer then that is not the fault of the affiliate…. it’s the fault of the product, and therefore the merchant.
Merchants need to start taking responsibility for their programs. As an affiliate we show people the gate, it’s up to the merchant to take them the rest of the way. If a person walks in to Dougie’s Duvet shop, picks up a duvet, decides they don’t want it and puts it back, the fault of the non-sale is the shop… not the guy stood half mile away with a sandwich board directing people to buy Dougie’s duvets! If Tiscali don’t want to pay for leads that don’t become customers, then the program needs to be changed so that they only pay per genuine customer.