a4u Blog

100% Agree

Couldn't agree more - its the battle of the next year mate, trust me. Most (yes really most) of the phenomanal industry growth is fuelled by closed groups, and very little of the value. If Financial Directors have a good look under the bonnet - they'll work that out, and we'll all lose out.

Whether or not this is a last referrer issue or a more general "value vs volume" argument I'm not sure. I doubt a technical solution will ever cater for the various value add situations

Matt,

I'm in complete agreement and blogged about it a few weeks ago.

http://www.leemccoy.co.uk/2007/11/economics-of-0-commissions-brand.html

It's certainly something I've been campaigning for for a while. And look forward to hearing the views of some networks and merchants.

When you think that some merchants de-dupe across many channels, including their own internal emails, then it looks like the affiliate is always bound to loose out - and the networks with their over-ride too.

Lee

One merchant is respecting the hard work put in by affiliates, received this yesterday:

Hoseasons In-house PPC

In the coming week you may notice that we will begin to bid on the brand term in Google as well as the other search engines, please be assured that the affiliate cookie will not be overwritten when a customer returns via one of these ads.

Excellent point !

Well from a network point of view, 30% override is 30% banked regardless of who gets paid out for the sale so there's no real impetus for them to even look at the dynamics in play when the network till is ringing, at least not whilst the merchant isn't asking any questions and the rest of the affiliates are happy to sit back and let the tail wag the dog

Seems to me that the harder an affiliate works the more he's struggling to get paid for the actual work he does, it would appear the super easy stuff like [brand name] and nothing else wins hands down in the effort v reward scenaro

Looks like brand activity is going to have to evolve from the middle ages to the digital age in 2008

This is definitely something that needs looking at and I expect it to become more of an issue over the coming year as Duncan says.

However, I think the question should be expanded to encompass cashback and incentive sites too. Every new user who joins a cashback site and every new merchant that is listed on the cashback site makes life that much harder for other affiliates in exactly the same way that a brand PPC ad does.

Why not remove closed brand bidding groups completely? Rather than ask affiliates to reinvest lower cpa's back into generics simply pay them more in the first place so that they can chase the generic volume anyway?

This will at least put everyone back on a level playing field, eradicate this overwriting issue and those affiliates that can effectively monitor ROI to a keyword level still get the volume and return.

Hi Paul,

This is partly why earlier this year moderators jointly asked networks on the forum to disclose or at least mention within the program details whether a program has a closed group or not, to at least establish who, from which affiliates can make their inferred decisions from there. A few networks were forthcoming & a few were not, when comment was made to those, it got a bit PC on the forum & a few affiliate comments were removed.

A few networks were unmoving, a few as you expect were top a banana, but it is still not clear enough on the information pages on most networks.

Putting display URL options to one side, content affiliates pre-selling a merchant are simply lining the pockets of the closed group brand bidders for those bidding on brand & hybrids, but then we have a long drawn out discussion where a few have had to now bid on generics to cover the cracks.

But we could go on & on with that.

But in answer to your question "Why not remove closed brand bidding groups completely?" ... yes I agree .. because this is one the scenarios why I want to know who has closed groups so I can select another merchant in the same category. Whilst all networks could do better to keep have the information clearly seen if at all (a couple are good so no big brush) there a few who just won't from Buy.at to CJ to Affili.net for example and on the whole is one of the aspects on the ugly side of affiliate marketing.

Maz Darvish raised the exact same point in his travel session at A4UExpo. It's particularly bad in considered purchases like travel, and high ticket electronics where the last click might be one of more than a dozen in the decision process.

I saw some client data 2 years ago that said there were an average of 13 clicks to a merchants site before a holiday was actually booked, so that's not just pub statistics.

I do apologise most profusely, as i have clicked on the slap instead of back icon above.
I hope you can forgive me, as i had no intention of dis-agreeing with your comments, because i found them very intuitive and helpfull.
Again, sorry
Terry