Shop.org Blog

Is it just me, or do affiliate programs in general have a bad reputation right now. For what was once the golden child of e-commerce seems to have lost some of its luster. Now the hot channels are search, blogs, RSS feeds just to name a few – affiliate programs seem to be SOOOO 2001.

From someone who worked in affiliate marketing for about nine years, I think I have a pretty unique perspective on the issue. When I started in affiliate marketing I was working for site that was selling magazine subscriptions, and the idea behind our affiliate program was pretty simple.

If you had a site about sports, and we sell Sports Illustrated magazine – we would ask you to sell our magazine and receive commission. It was a perfect fit as it was based on the content of the affiliate site driving an audience, and the products that we are selling being a perfect fit for that audience. Very niche stuff we are talking about here. We were very successful from an ROI perspective and our affiliate program experience solid growth.

Somewhere affiliate marketing got away from this model and started driving sales at any cost. Affiliates bidding on branded terms on search engines, spyware, deal and discount sites, rebate sites, just to name a few.

Now that the big affiliate networks (admirably I might add) have cracked down on many unscrupulous affiliates and retailers are protecting their branded search words, affiliate revenue has been flat or dropping for many programs. I guess more accurately, it is easy to get started in affiliate marketing, but it is becoming difficult to sustain growth in a mature program.

It is my opinion that the affiliate industry needs to get back to its roots of matching content and the product for affiliate sites. With all of the changes in the industry and with so many other options for Internet users to do their shopping, I am not sure that the affiliate industry will ever return to its golden age. It is simply a matter of expectations. Even with all of the challenges, affiliate programs still drive revenue for many retailers – but it may never be the shining star that it once was.

This issue of restricting key words your affiliates can bid on continues to be hot-button issue. Just a few years ago it was common best practice to just let your affiliates do whatever they darn well please.

However, as the revenue and the ROI continued to grow with search marketing efforts, many retailers chose to protect their branded words from affiliate bidding on these words. This resulted in a drop in revenue for retailers affiliate programs, and left some affiliates searching for programs with more lenient policies.

As an affiliate manager for a major retailer (prior to joining Shop.org) I had the experience of allowing affiliates to bid on all words and then pulling back and restricting them from our branded terms. The results were not exactly what we had hoped for. In place of where the affiliates once showed up, now we had our competitors, shopping comparison engines, eBay, and other strange matches that had nothing to do with our brand.

We knew we had to find a happy medium of controlling our brand but allowing our affiliates some leeway. So, this how we solved the problem:

• We found three search based affiliates that we had the best relationship with. Not necessarily the top performers, but ones we could trust.
• Helped them build a site that only displayed our products. We gave them access to a URL that we owned that was similar to our brand, but sub-licensed it to these three affiliates.
• Let them bid on our brand terms, but gave them the conditions that they could not out-bid our own search efforts, they could not call themselves the “official site” in any way, and they could not display any specific sales or promotional language.

This solution worked very well. Now our affiliates were showing up on our brand, but they were under control and had sites that only featured our products. Plus, the three affiliates that we let bid on our terms were also self-policing and let us know if any other affiliates were breaking the rules.

So if you are faced with this issue, try not to think of it in terms of black or white. There are many options on how to make bidding on branded terms work for your affiliates while still protecting your brand.