Move Over CPA & Bring On CPC & CPM – Hybrid Commissions
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
My faith in tracking, generally, has probably reached the ends of it’s tether to the point I have no T.I.T.S, yes I have the Moobs (Man Boobs) but I am taking about Trust In Tracking Solutions.
It’s not unless you send a decent enough volume of traffic to a merchant with a fairly constant conversion that you notice something is amiss. If you only send low or incidental traffic, then realistically you have no way of knowing and are at the mercy of the gods. It doesn’t matter how long it’s down for, it’s still pennies which should be in the affiliates pockets.
Only this week we have one network who doesn’t have the common courtesy to communicate with affiliates when it was obvious tracking was not working. It hadn’t been tracking from about the 16th April, then I noticed on the 23rd April when taking a cursory glance at reports. The merchant had reported it to the network prior to that but the network even took a couple of days to get back the merchant. I think that merchant may leave the network soon.
There is absolutely no excuse for a network not notifying affiliates and any apologies are hollow without true sincerity because it’s not an isolated incident!
These woes are familiar to affiliates so why haven’t things generally improved with some parties. Simple … they just don’t care! Granted a few networks keep you in the loop but some are so incompetent.
That was not all this week, to fill a brace, we had been running a very targeted campaign for a merchant, with about 15,000 keywords each deeplinking to specific products. Scraping the site for relevancy & introducing a number of negative keywords for improved quality of traffic via paid search. The conversion ended up worse than generics with no negatives, indicating that sometimes the tracking worked on deeplinks & sometimes it didn’t. This is currently being looked into as the conversion was only 0.3%. The reason for scraping the site was because the network, agency & merchant were totally useless at providing a very basic product feed. In fact all i wanted was a list of products they sold, we could have done the rest.
For the hatrick we have another merchant pleasant they are who recently launched on dual network, their advertised cookie of 30 days actually seems to be just a session cookie with session time outs too, where potentially affiliates have been potentially losing out loads over the years. The second network is looking into it, but what is worrying is that it had been on another network for a few years and they never noticed. Yet again it’s myself like other affiliates who notice the problems. Oh and the network who hadn’t noticed all these years is the same one that still hasn’t informed affiliate the tracking isn’t working.
There are other programs we suspect too, but it would probably be less stressful if we simply drop the program. I would rather keep what remnants of hair follicles I still have left, than inference from any suggestions that I mighty be indulging in a magic mushroom pizza or chasing the dragon.
Short Notice Programs Closures
Yet again all this year we continually see short notice program closures, and program T&C’s with hollow meaningless wording “we apologise for the inconvenience”. What total poppycock, their not sincerely sorry or apologetic at all. It shouldn’t be permitted.
Bring On CPC & CPM
I wonder what proportion of sales affiliates lose through lost tracking which isn’t identified, poor remuneration policies in place, de-duping of sales against merchants own paid search activity on brand or super cookies which maybe in place where it doesn’t matter if you are the last referrer, because the customer visited the merchant’s site sometime in the past the affiliate will not be credited the commission.
My answer is too much, keeping on top of program changes and no T.I.T. has led me to gradually move away from the performance marketing CPA model for the simplified & more harmonious model of CPC where I get paid per click & even CPM to supplement this. It means less relationships being managed & I can focus more on marketing the merchant. Keeping on top of changes is a full time task in itself whether it be openings / closures / suspensions/T&C’s.
As you know most merchants convert poorly, even if product targeted sometimes, so we shall culling them like the grim reaper soon and maintaining a fraction of programs we had previously where the bar for EPC’s & ROI’s will be raised considerably. If the merchant wants to appear on any of our sites, then they will have to pay CPC at the minimum level we determine. Personally I think more affiliates should request this from poor quality / poor converting merchants, even including the big brands. This change in focus I know will be more rewarding whilst a couple of networks & number of merchants can fester in the stew of inadequacies.
I am confident I will deliver quality traffic on any CPC model with the added benefit of less frustrations managing it, improving still further the quality of lifestyle.
Hybrid Commissions : A Possible Short Term Solution
A possible solution to this is to escalate the introduction of hybrid commissions, rather than affiliates being Guinea Pigs, until a merchant program comes up to scratch on a suitable EPC for their sector. Barring abuse from a minority, introducing a hybrid commission with an element of both CPC & CPA may go some way to off-setting these tracking problems we endure.
Please Read: Affiliates Need TIT – The Need For Trend Graphs and why networks are bottling it with regard to any implementation.
