The Pre-Commerce Blog

What's Wrong With Affiliate Marketing

The Affiliate Program Tip Blog asked an interesting question (the title of this post), and has been posting a series with answers from different people. I submitted my answer (below) so now we'll see if I merit the free t-shirt. What’s wrong with affiliate marketing: # Far too many affiliates don’t add any real value – they have ugly sites without significant content – and just exist to get their commission because they managed to jump in front of the transaction via SEO/SEM skill, luck, or some other niche targeting or marketing method. This obviously isn’t true of all affiliates, there are excellent affiliates who truly add-value and/or have a real existing client-base that they’re rightfully getting paid to introduce to the merchant. But the garish / no-value-add affiliates outnumber the other 10:1 or more, and they bring the image of the whole business down in the eyes of marketers and customers. # Most merchants don’t give affiliates enough tools and information to do a good job merchandising their products or adding value. They run programs assuming that all affiliates are just going to slap up the (often badly designed) banner ads – thereby encouraging the type of affiliates described above. Investing in richer content to share with affiliates, better creative, and advanced tools like web services needs to become the baseline, and more merchants (and affiliate networks who can afford to invest in these tools) need to go beyond the baseline. # Neither side really treats it like a sales channel. If merchants thought of their affiliates as part of their sales team the quantity and frequency of information flowing out of the company would increase by 3-5x. They would communicate positioning, competitive issues, and work to educate their sales team on both what they’re selling and how to sell it. If affiliates acted more like members of the sales team they’d work to fully communicate the positioning of the products they represent, hit their marks in terms of when promotions were supposed to stop and end, find a way to add value for their prospects and to gather feedback that the merchant could use to improve the products or the business. Elements of all these behaviors exist here and there in the affiliate world, but by-and-large the relationships feel a lot more like advertiser-publishers (you distribute that and if anyone clicks on it I’ll pay you.) Despite all of the above, affiliate marketing works to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This means it is a good business for just about everybody, and despite the comments above I believe anyone sending traffic is earning their commissions and providing great value to their merchants. But imagine how large the affiliate market would be, and how much respect it would have in the larger world of marketing, if most affiliates added real value to their customers (beyond pointing them to the merchants), if merchants enabled affiliates to really promote and fully merchandise their products, and if affiliates were treated like star salespeople, and acted like stakeholders in the businesses they represent. The affiliate market would quickly grow to many times its current size in terms of both dollars and respect.

Yahoo Mindset - The Power of Choice

A new search option from Yahoo Research, Mindset brings a very simpley yet very useful addition to search - a slider that allows you tell the engine if you're shopping or doing research. As you move the slider, the results change in real time. Very cool and very handy. And a big change for the world of organic search optimization.

Andrew at Traffik as already posted a good analysis of the long term implications for SEO practitioners. The one point I'd add is that if 'gaming the engines' gets harder, then it's even more important to actually be useful and relevant to people who are searching - whether they're doing research, price comparison, looking for reviews, etc. I've believed for some time that we've crossed the line where it's now easier to just win honestly than it is to play all the SEO games. Developments like Mindset make this even more true for the reasons Andrew points out.

InsideGoogle has a chart comparing the different results as you slide. (Why's that at InsideGoogle?)

Greg Linden (via SearchBlog) points out both the Google and MSN similar research projects. But he thinks the 'fail the grandma test':

I'm surprised to see this focus on sliders. They aren't particularly useful. They fail the grandma test. Most novice users will not use or understand the slider; they just want the top result to be useful. It's not even that useful to power users since sliders fail to provide the level of granularity they need.

I disagree, but more importantly think that with everyone in the world (almost literally) searching these days, we can't have search engines only aimed at Grandma. I like the simplicity of the Yahoo approach even though I myself might like (and use) 3-5 different sliders (grandma I ain't). But I think their decision to just have one, and have it offer such clearly different choices is a good one that most users will understand and come to appreciate.

Anyone Can Be The Company

If I'm your customer (or prospective customer) then anyone I talk to at your company is not only your representative, but for that moment they're the 'keeper of the brand'. (BTW, when I say brand I mean reputation - I really don't know what anyone else means when they use that word.)

Today I called tech support for an ASP phone system we use, because I was unhappy about some features. I'll spare you the whole story, but I was told that the things I didn't like were A) not a problem because nobody else had complained, and B) impossible to fix. When I shared the fact that the phone rep had turned me into a 'very unhappy customer' - she hung up.

A few moments later I called back, punched up the CEO's name in the company directory, and told him my story. When I started telling him what the original problem was, he chimed right in - "I don't like that either" he said, "and we've got a new release coming that changes how that works." He then listened to what a lousy job his support person had done, apologized, and told me he'd take care of it. It was a good call and despite the incident I feel good about the company again.

I normally wouldn't share ths story, but I just read a a great guy who answers the phones at Patagonia , and it's a great story of the opposite extreme. Here's one example:

One day a woman called Patagonia to say that her cat had chewed up her new Snap-T®. She asked if she could get a replacement.

"Absolutely, ma'am," answered Patagonia gatekeeper Chipper Bro Bell. "What kind of cat would you like?"

Check out a great bio on this guy here.

Give Your Visitors A Voice

There's a lot of talk about conversations these days. Some have even described web sites as conversations, where users speak with their clicks. Too often, what they're saying is "you don't have anything interesting here, or at least we can't find it. Goodbye."

But there is another way to talk to web site visitors. It's easy, it's cheap, and it gets results. Post a survey.

We have no affiliation or benefit for saying so, but we use SurveyMonkey.

We recently helped one of our clients add a simple survey to their home page - not contest, no bribes - just 'please take 3 minutes and answer some questions'. And out of a few hundred unique daily visitors, a dozen or two are taking the time and providing great insight and information.

It isn't scientific, and the sample is still relatively small, but with those caveats we now know how many of our visitors aren't looking to make a short term purchase. We know how many of the are having their first exposure to the brand, and how they'd force rank the seven top selling points we thought people consider when making a purchase.

It may not be gospel, but it sure is interesting and as the numbers pile up it's clear the minor effort (and the $20) is going to really help improve the site and enable us to define success metrics that make sense for the site and its visitors. It may even help us to attract a different type of visitor to the site.

But most importantly it's giving us a sense of who these people are, what they want, and how the offerings on our pages relates to what they're thinking about. We're intense believers in analytics, and there are some new numbers we're going to be watching very closely!

A Google Map

No, Not maps.google.com (which I love), but a nice slide that shows what hell Google has bolted onto their search engine in the last year or so.

This is from a slideshow Google recently presented at its headquarters. The middle 70%, btw, is 'search and ads'. It would be interesting to see how they broke those two little items apart in terms of internal mindshare. My sense is that the force is getting strong with the dark side...

We're Lawyers, And We're Here To Help

Clickfraud is a real problem, one for which it would be great to see a white knight ride out of the forest and make the world safe and fair again. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be happening, but we do have a bunch of lawyers who want to sue the problem away. Of course, I'm fairly certain they won't be suing the folks actually responsible, just those who have a lot of money and therefore will wind up (financially) liable one way or the other.

It's been obvious for some time that search has grown up. What milestone is it when the parasites arrive?

(Via SearchBlog)