I think this is some good follow up questions to what’s already being discussed in ABW and at thinktank. Out of curiosity, when you spoke to the merchant and they mentioned that:
"as much as 10% of sales are snatched up in the last few minutes of the buying process by a coupon affiliate"
Did they mention to you how many sales were attributed by a couponer? I wonder if the traffic they are getting from a couponer is off-setting the 10% dilemma he/she described above.
Thanks
Kellie
· 2 years ago
"Of those 2, 3, and 6 sites with forced clicks, what’s the unique number of affiliate sites? Were they the same sites with a total of 6 unique sites?"
It was 2, 3 and 4 for forced clicks. The 6 was deceptive linking. There was a total of four uniques sites found to be using forced clicks. But yes, some of sites accounted for more than one of the postive tests.
What is more interesting is that some of the sites which tested postive also tested negative on a separate test. Which leads to your second question....
"And if not, did some of the sites behave differently depending on the source of the traffic?"
That is somewhat difficult to say without testing every merchant each affiliate promotes. An affiliate may not use forced clicks across all their merchants. This could be due to traffic source, Network involved, merchant involved, mucked up site programming, lunar cycle, etc etc etc.
There was one site using deceptive links which controlled the behavior via cookies. Once cookied it wouldn't happen again.
Pat Grady
· 2 years ago
"I’d bet my house that a big empty coupon code field in a checkout process is a bigger leak than any 800 number and cross-promotional links to other merchant properties combined."
Excellent point and I completely agree. I only became a couponer after getting tired of sending truckloads of completely incremental traffic to merchants and seeing couponers win most every contest for "sales". So now that I'm an affiliate benefitting from the "leak", you'd think I'd feel differently about it, but I don't. As merchants become more adept at discerning value, couponing affiliates will suffer through channel separation, lower payout rates and ever rising competition. Since I'm a incremental guy who added couponing to my quiver, I'm chilling. If you're just a couponer, I'd say now is the time to diversify. Incremental selling is so much more rewarding and stable, as a long term business plan.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"is a bigger leak than any 800 number"
hey, maybe you're on to something here... is there a way we affiliates can monetize phone traffic... "800" could be the new "coupon"... and we "800" affiliates can claim the prizes for all the phone calls we're sending to our merchants...
Durk Price
· 2 years ago
Scott, Another train of thought that went through the ShareASale Think Tank was the idea of a "shared" commission. If the content site wrote a review and the consumer didn't buy, but later bought with a coupon code affiliate (or was driven to look for a coupon code as the examples discussed above)... shouldn't the content site receive part of the commission.
Now I am sure there are ways to track this, technically speaking, but you are then asking the affiliate network, the merchant and the affiliates to agree to a whole new set of rules and parameters as to what drives consumer behavior.
A back of the house suggestion made during the Think Tank, and overheard be me, might be for content sites to take a few extra minutes to grab the coupon codes from the sites they are writing about and provide added value to the visitor/consumer that way. As automated as the tools are getting to add relevant coupon codes to sites, this should be relatively easy to do.
Scott
· 2 years ago
I agree Durk, trying to lay down "sharing" rules would be very, very difficult if not impossible.
Technically, it's very possible. The networks have the data. Though it would be no small task to build in the features. And to do that only to have it fall on it's face because the practice is too difficult would be tragic.
It may have back of the house, but I heard that loud and clear all around the table.
Essentially, the suggestion is to turn all affiliates into "coupon" affiliates. Someone made the very shallow statement, "don't be so lazy. Post some coupons".
Personally, I think that's a bad solution. Why hand out a discount to every single customer that comes through when most are perfectly happy to purchase without one?
The only reason they go hunting is that they feel like they're missing out because they see the big coupon field there.
For that matter, the merchant could pre-populate the coupon field if it came through an affiliate link.
Sounds absurd, but that's my point. So is the argument that all affiliates should push coupons.
What really needs to happen is what this discussion always comes back to... the merchants need to get rid of that coupon/promo field and find another way to allow the coupon-loving consumers to use them.
Durk Price
· 2 years ago
Since I manage a number of programs I get lots of feedback from all sides- affiliates and merchants. At CJU 2006, CJ admitted that 60-70% of all sales were being generated by PPC affiliates. And, I know a lot of them didn't worry about coupon codes, so the sales were pretty straight up (a whole other line of discussion).
This year across all of my programs I have seen a huge surge/success in coupon sites. I would say that couponers have gone from 20% of sales volumes to 30% and higher of my sales volumes. PPC affiliates are still extremely important, but couponing has really gained marketshare. Hence I am giving them much more attention.
I have not seen a corresponding surge in content sites.
Going along with all of this is I am hearing lots of squawks from my merchants that their Google campaigns are not converting as well as in the past. I am getting more emphasis on what I am doing and contributing to the online success of my merchants than ever before as they try to "replace" sales being lost in their PPC campaigns.
So a question.
1. Have other merchants been complaining about Google conversion rates going down recently? (I have one PPC affiliate that won't use Google analytics in some verticals because he thinks they can control the quality of the traffic that gets sent to his sites and conversions as a result.)
2. Have PPC affiliate conversions gone down lately?
Stefanie
· 2 years ago
For our affiliate program, we don't even allow coupon code affiliates. While it's definitely tough to keep them out (and we're constantly finding some that slip through), we feel like the bad aspects of using them far outweighs the benefits. In general, if someone is searching for the company name + coupon codes or promotional codes, they're already completely brand aware. The sale would likely go through whether they searched or not.
Since we don't even release coupon codes for our affiliates, it's even worse - they just take our standard free shipping over $X and get people to click through to our site.
Chris B.
· 2 years ago
While I think losing 10% of customers who go off in search of a coupon code is definitely reasonable (if they wanted that customer, they should offer a few coupon codes), the forced clicks aren't - just dirty play really.
Web Host Buzz
· 2 years ago
As someone who runs a number of Comparison websites I feel that the main issue for me is merchants that bid on their own brand term & purposely overwrite the Affiliate Cookie after we've done all the hard work.
This is especially prevaliant with Search Marketing companies outsourced to increase PPC revenues & they rely heavily on the brand term to bump up their figures.
Colin McNulty
· 2 years ago
I'm surprised this isn't more widespread. I've seen software working that you can install on your website to secretly "click" a url without the users knowledge.
Basically it just opens up an invisible iFrame in the background somewhere and navigates to the site in question, setting the cookie in the process. Job done.
Paul
· 2 years ago
Ridiculous that someone would put software on their site to click the links automatically. I like to hope that things like this don't become widespread, but with the money that can be made, I feel eventually it will become a major problem. The end of PPC will eventually come.
Ashley
· 1 year ago
I certainly don't agree with forces clicks, there are a number and one large affiliate in particular who blatantly does this and claims to have be responsible for merchant sales of over £30 million in the past year.
The choice of issuing discount or voucher coupons really should come down to the individual merchants, i certainly agree that any box placed at checkout is a recipe for enticing searches etc.
All Comments
I think this is some good follow up questions to what’s already being discussed in ABW and at thinktank. Out of curiosity, when you spoke to the merchant and they mentioned that:
"as much as 10% of sales are snatched up in the last few minutes of the buying process by a coupon affiliate"
Did they mention to you how many sales were attributed by a couponer? I wonder if the traffic they are getting from a couponer is off-setting the 10% dilemma he/she described above.
Thanks
It was 2, 3 and 4 for forced clicks. The 6 was deceptive linking. There was a total of four uniques sites found to be using forced clicks. But yes, some of sites accounted for more than one of the postive tests.
What is more interesting is that some of the sites which tested postive also tested negative on a separate test. Which leads to your second question....
"And if not, did some of the sites behave differently depending on the source of the traffic?"
That is somewhat difficult to say without testing every merchant each affiliate promotes. An affiliate may not use forced clicks across all their merchants. This could be due to traffic source, Network involved, merchant involved, mucked up site programming, lunar cycle, etc etc etc.
There was one site using deceptive links which controlled the behavior via cookies. Once cookied it wouldn't happen again.
Excellent point and I completely agree. I only became a couponer after getting tired of sending truckloads of completely incremental traffic to merchants and seeing couponers win most every contest for "sales". So now that I'm an affiliate benefitting from the "leak", you'd think I'd feel differently about it, but I don't. As merchants become more adept at discerning value, couponing affiliates will suffer through channel separation, lower payout rates and ever rising competition. Since I'm a incremental guy who added couponing to my quiver, I'm chilling. If you're just a couponer, I'd say now is the time to diversify. Incremental selling is so much more rewarding and stable, as a long term business plan.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"is a bigger leak than any 800 number"
hey, maybe you're on to something here... is there a way we affiliates can monetize phone traffic... "800" could be the new "coupon"... and we "800" affiliates can claim the prizes for all the phone calls we're sending to our merchants...
Now I am sure there are ways to track this, technically speaking, but you are then asking the affiliate network, the merchant and the affiliates to agree to a whole new set of rules and parameters as to what drives consumer behavior.
A back of the house suggestion made during the Think Tank, and overheard be me, might be for content sites to take a few extra minutes to grab the coupon codes from the sites they are writing about and provide added value to the visitor/consumer that way. As automated as the tools are getting to add relevant coupon codes to sites, this should be relatively easy to do.
Technically, it's very possible. The networks have the data. Though it would be no small task to build in the features. And to do that only to have it fall on it's face because the practice is too difficult would be tragic.
It may have back of the house, but I heard that loud and clear all around the table.
Essentially, the suggestion is to turn all affiliates into "coupon" affiliates. Someone made the very shallow statement, "don't be so lazy. Post some coupons".
Personally, I think that's a bad solution. Why hand out a discount to every single customer that comes through when most are perfectly happy to purchase without one?
The only reason they go hunting is that they feel like they're missing out because they see the big coupon field there.
For that matter, the merchant could pre-populate the coupon field if it came through an affiliate link.
Sounds absurd, but that's my point. So is the argument that all affiliates should push coupons.
What really needs to happen is what this discussion always comes back to... the merchants need to get rid of that coupon/promo field and find another way to allow the coupon-loving consumers to use them.
This year across all of my programs I have seen a huge surge/success in coupon sites. I would say that couponers have gone from 20% of sales volumes to 30% and higher of my sales volumes. PPC affiliates are still extremely important, but couponing has really gained marketshare. Hence I am giving them much more attention.
I have not seen a corresponding surge in content sites.
Going along with all of this is I am hearing lots of squawks from my merchants that their Google campaigns are not converting as well as in the past. I am getting more emphasis on what I am doing and contributing to the online success of my merchants than ever before as they try to "replace" sales being lost in their PPC campaigns.
So a question.
1. Have other merchants been complaining about Google conversion rates going down recently? (I have one PPC affiliate that won't use Google analytics in some verticals because he thinks they can control the quality of the traffic that gets sent to his sites and conversions as a result.)
2. Have PPC affiliate conversions gone down lately?
Since we don't even release coupon codes for our affiliates, it's even worse - they just take our standard free shipping over $X and get people to click through to our site.
This is especially prevaliant with Search Marketing companies outsourced to increase PPC revenues & they rely heavily on the brand term to bump up their figures.
Basically it just opens up an invisible iFrame in the background somewhere and navigates to the site in question, setting the cookie in the process. Job done.
The choice of issuing discount or voucher coupons really should come down to the individual merchants, i certainly agree that any box placed at checkout is a recipe for enticing searches etc.