a4u Blog

In part 1 I found myself having to change from Kowabunga/Kolimbo/MyAP’s affiliate tracking technology to AllAffiliatePro with only a few weeks’ notice.

Now I’ve actually come out the other end, I can risk writing part 2. The new system is up and running and apart from a number of one off inconveniences I hope that the affiliates themselves have a better system than before. For us as managers of the technology we have some problems, but the system seems to at least be stable.

All-in-all the transfer has been a success. Affiliates seem to prefer their reporting system, we now control the code end to end, our communications to affiliates have improved and the affiliates are starting to be more productive. That last one is the best sign that I could have hoped for.

To get there, we did find ourselves having to... adapt. First, the old system had four digit affiliate Ids , whilst the new system allowed everyone to sign up with any username. Unfortunately, any username would have been a disaster, as we had also built the four digit affiliate ID into the booking reference and into the text on the web page, to be able to catch any phone based bookings. Tracking phone bookings back to affiliates is one of Leisure Direction’s best affiliate program features, but if affiliates had Ids longer than six characters, the whole of the rest of the system (and website) would have broken. To get around this, AllAffiliatePro does have the ability to assign affiliate Ids numerically, but starts at “01” which was a bit of a challenge since we were already near the 2,800 mark. The solution was to precede the affiliate number assigned by “30” which will keep us in sync. However, after 100 new affiliates join on the new system, we’ll have to quickly change the preceding characters to “3” instead, otherwise we will go from affiliate 3099 to affiliate 30100 insetad of 3100. Little things... big consequences.

The next  challenge was emailing affiliates. The old system was – I have to be honest – much better at this. We could email different types of affiliates, like the top performing ones or the latent ones independently and we could add variables (like the affiliate’s name) into the email. With this it was all or nothing. Text only email. We tried it once. Some people got three emails (as they had three accounts) but most got none. I think there were several elements of the way the emails were configured that designated the email as likely spam. The fact that we had put the affiliate program on an email server probably wasn’t helpful either. Fortunately, we were able to export all the affiliate data into a slightly unusual “pipe delimited” text file. We could then import this into excel and from there into a much more sophisticated email system. Whilst it does mean we will need to update the separate email system with new affiliates periodically, at least we have a spectacular system that is giving affiliates the best offers and the best ideas.

Another problem was that MyAP had (just a month before) blocked Merchants from being able to access the affiliate passwords. Now – that’s a GOOD thing of course, but whilst we were able to export all the affiliate data from the old system and into the new one, the passwords had to get left behind. This has been the largest headache. In the end, we were able to assign new passwords to every affiliate and then email them with new login instructions. In addition, we were able to build in instructions at the login screen for anyone coming back to the program who had not been reading their emails. Not perfect, but it should only inconvenience and affiliate once and the fix for them is swift.

The Merchant interface – by comparison – has been a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I don’t think AllAffiliatePro was ever really designed to have thousands of affiliates. Sanela (Leisure Direction’s Affiliate Manager) rang within minutes of the changeover to say “how do I find Paul H on the new system?” Turned out to be a problem! The affiliates were listed in order – ten to a page. Affiliate 2,500 would have taken 250 clicks on “next” to find. Only then, could we click on “info” to get that affiliates’ details. Even then, we couldn’t see the affiliate clicks, only the sales amount. Getting the clicks involves getting into the affiliate area itself. Clearly not a goer. We had to get this changed and we are currently using a workaround that lists the affiliates in blocks of 100, not 10 and then also allows us to click straight to page 25 of the results. This is really still by no means perfect though. We can’t get a list of the top performing affiliates yesterday (or last week or last month) and we can’t easily see who is sending traffic but no conversions or – vice versa – who is sending more sales than clicks (a metric useful for fraud prevention).

So we need to work on the management reports. We have most of the data we need from other sources for now, but I hear that AllAffiliatePro is building a next generation piece of software with an upgrade route available. I look forward to working with them in the future.

Whatever network you choose, make the affiliates link direct to your own site. A simple javascript or CGI should work around any network system. But if the network does not perform as expected, you will have problems that cannot easily be overcome.