The following question was posed recently to me by a merchant:
Last month we announced we are closing our in-house Affiliate program and migrating everyone to Affiliate Network X. I was shocked at the outcry of our community who are under the impression Network X is full of parasites. This camp of unhappy people glean most of their information from AbestWeb which has a lot of posts on this issue and they are now debating the issues on our (The Merchant) forums which is stirring loads of panic. Assuming we can control the true *bad* parasites, we still want to partner with companies like Upromise and eBates - but even some of their methods of come under fire. I was wondering how you view their shopping toolbars? Do you believe they in any way hijack commissions from your company? My understanding is the number of people using this applications is very low, but who knows.
My response:
Good question! The simple answer is that we factor in any losses like this into our ROI calculations, so even if they do affect us, we maintain margin. I know that this doesn’t answer your question, but it helps explain why we don’t feel the heat. Also, I find that affiliates are often the most paranoid people around (which is what makes them so good!). We even did studies on anti-spyware cookie crunching which showed that the whole thing is blown out of proportion, once you actually run the numbers through the revenue loss calculator the effective loss of revenue is negligible at worst. That said, all networks have their pro’s & con’s and no single network, like Network X can be singled out as a problem.
I would suggest being creative and offering things like extended cookies for SEM affiliates and shorter persistent cookies for Toolbar distribution companies like Upromise - that would even things out quite a bit in the minds of the affiliates. At the end of the day, the market share that those individual companies have is not big enough to impact any one affiliate’s campaigns, unless they’re fighting over branded head terms - in which case, it’s probably not the affiliates that you want in any case!
These are my view… what are yours?
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