Are we wasting our time doing creative for Affiliates?

[Andrew Starr]

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There's some fantastic looking creative from Prezzybox on the link at #1

I was wondering whether affiliates are put off promoting a particular merchant if when they login to the network and go to the relevant merchant area, the banners which are presented to them look crappy and/or out of date, even if they are not intending to use the banners/creative.

so, if you are just looking for deeplinks or feeds, but the banners you see don't look very good, does it put you off, or does in not matter at all?

[Paul_MN]

It would put me off a little as like TheGiftExperience mentioned it would suggest you are not taking your affiliates seriously.

Whether that alone would be enough to put me off promoting that merchant altogether Im not sure - it would depend a lot on the merchant and why I wanted to promote them in the first place.

[Seamaster]

I'd like to see some more 'modern' i.e. Web 2.0 style versions of customer logos that I can use on my sites.

I really like this styling of the logo:


If more people could supply ones like that or just a transparent gif of the logo we woucld make our own logs from I would be happier to use them.

[kier]

If you are genuinely concerned I would say scale back the time and money you spend on it (scale back, not stop completely) and put more effort into getting affiliates active and motivated.

[jsp_1983]

In my experience, some merchants have been reluctant to produce creatives that I think would work for the site I've worked on.

Perhaps merchants should be more willing to respond to what their customers/ partners want, rather than trying to get them to respond to what they want them to have?

[TKC_Direct]

I think it's important to have a good set of creative on your program. We tend to focus allot on CPA and how much we are selling but banners carry a great benefit for branding through impressions. Saying that, if you asked me, I couldn't even give you a ball park figure of how many impressions we are doing a month because it's not a metric I look at.

So am I missing a trick? Should I be paying affiliates on post impression sales to encourage them to use more creative? Probably..

Q:Would anyone promote my programs more if I did?

Getting publishers to use your banners can be tough but if you build a good reputation for ensuring that you have the most common sizes and that they are up to date you will see a greater take up. I always offer to have creative specifically designed for individual affiliates needs and this has had some success in that the few affiliates that asked me did get a good fit for what they needed. Not many take this offer up though.

Perhaps we should look to work more in this way and only design banners on request from publishers in order that we can be sure to get the exposure. The issue (I guess) is the time it takes to get it right.

Allot of the creative we do for Route One and EBTM affiliate programs are a re-hash from the actual site creative so it doesn't take much effort to produce. We do have the luxury of an in house graphics team that understand what is required on the programs so they get it right pretty much straight away which keeps time and costs down.

From my experience getting good creative with limited resource is largely down to the creative brief you provide your designer with. If you detail exactly what you want and don't keep making changes to the design/layout then a full set of banners for a promotion can be done amazingly quickly. If you can meet with your designer face to face and explain what it is you want to achieve from producing the banners, who your target audience is and ask them for ideas you will often get a better result.

I find templates can often be a good way to keep offers up to date. If you only change the text element on a banner (the offer) and keep the rest the same all a designer has to do is a quick change before you can overwrite the existing creative in the network interface.

Have a good weekend

[Spreader]

Hi guys,

Wow - thanks for the response! Good to see.

I won't write war and peace in response (going on my hols soon!), but to respond a wee bit..

Did you follow up the release by talking to affiliates individually and encouraging them to add the creatives?

Did you send an email out to them all letting them know of the new campaign?

Did you really show the benefit of affiliates adding this stuff to their sites and give them ideas for how they can best implement it.

In my experience just announcing a new campaign is not enough, affiliates often fall in to one of two categories - either very busy, or very time poor (some might say lazy!).

Additionally with a few exceptions most top affiliates are too busy working on their sites to be veiwing and posting in threads on here.

To get the most out of a campaign you have to be prepared to work hard on communicating with affiliates, developing relatioonships, etc. Relying on a forum post or two will mean even the best campaign affiliates have ever seen is likely to be ineffective.

Hi Paul - yep - we do all of that. I regularly chat to my affiliates over MSN, phone, email, blogs, twitter, etc. We always send out regular newsletters for our campaigns (although we try not to 'over-bother' affiliates).

I agree though - all good things to be doing, and should help launch a campaign/promotion.

If you are genuinely concerned I would say scale back the time and money you spend on it (scale back, not stop completely) and put more effort into getting affiliates active and motivated.

Thanks Kier. I wouldn't say concerned. Just seeing if we can be working smarter. We try and run regular affiliate incentives too - especially at peak times like Christmas...

Is Father's Day that popular compared to Mother's Day - for me it's not something that has the same interest?

Thanks Jason - probably not. However, in reality I think it should be MORE popular for gift merchants as in my experience most people buy flowers and chocolates for mothers day but there isn't really a traditional gift for Fathers Day. Food for thought...

I personally don't like it when I have to scroll through loads of outdated banners to try and find a generic one, often finding that the merchant doesn't have one, although they have Christmas, Valentines Day, etc.

I agree and think this is something which could be modified by the networks. However, I think banners/creative are left live in case affiliates are still using them. I think AWIN are working are a new 'archive system' for creative. I agree though - this is one of my bug bears.

As Paul_MN alluded to, I didn't get an email telling me about this creative, one of my main gripes with merchants. In fact, this is the first I've seen of it.

Cubs honour - we sent a newsletter a wee while ago. We always do. Sometimes however merchants do get lambasted for sending out too many emails, so it's tricky to find the right balance...

I have found hardly anyone clicks on banners

I agree. I also agree that banners/creative are an indication of how seriously you take Affiliate Marketing.

What I was getting at moreover is that only 48 people actually viewed the forum post - so the rest of the people can't have known what the post was about (if that makes sense!) as they hadn't viewed it. Maybe I need to give it a more inviting title next time...

So, going forward do you think we should concentrate on bespoke creative for affiliates?

For example, we could say " we can do banners, content units, flash creative, page peels, content widgets etc etc, please let us know what you want for your site and we'll do it".

Would this be a better use of our time?

Thanks again guys - really appreciate your input.


Zak.

[Leeky]

How about creating some varying styles of 'buy now', 'more info', type buttons containing a mouse over popup photo and a snippet of content of the product being promoted or any sort of icon, button or type of site graphic (interactive or static) containing your brand promotion be it either link or visual.

Banners are seen as ads so people naturally don't want to click on them, the less ad looking ad will always attract more clicks.

Lee

[D-Mac]

Banners are for brand building. Consider offering affiliates extra commision (or some other incentive) if they feature your banners on their homepages.

[Lawcom]

Your not wasting your time, your expectations are just too high..

your creative banners need to be there just in case, so it needs to be done, but if you want a higher up-take then you need to build in an incentive push for their use..

Stop moaning, your just being lazy

[buspassjohn]

Zak, personally I think your creatives are BRILLIANT! but as you and I both know, most of your affilates are much more interested in your £5 off £20 voucher codes, it makes conversion much easier, even if it costs you most of your margins.

Jason, for the last 30 years, Fathers day has always resulted in 3 times the business of Mothers day, if you are a general gift retailer without Flowers or Chocolates, Mothers day is no big deal.

[Spreader]

Stop moaning, your just being lazy

Not moaning squire - just being inquisitive and seeing if we can spend our time/efforts doing something more beneficial for our affiliates to generate more sales.

[befuddle]

At the flick of a switch I've just removed the 468x60 banners from the merchant's pages that have voucher codes on my site. (Exclusive code merchant pages remain as they were).

Not much of a scientific experiment but if I leave it long enough I'll be able to see if conversions improve or decrease (likewise bounce rates).

I suspect it will do more harm than good as the creatives often reinforce the marketing message and enhance the page.

[Mogga]

Saw it and went off looking for banners... it was a long time ago and although it was a biut early for me I suspect it was just a lot early for most people who perhaps don't have a fathers day site

[Supercod]

One thing to consider, many Affiliates that are using the generic text links and using banners on pages but the link in the banner may not be the "banner link" it's the "text link" instead that they are using in the copy. So you end up with stats saying sale was via text link (and so would the Affiliate) when it could have been the banner. Solved with Javascript but then you end up with loads of Affiliates not wanting to or can't rotate your banners as they need an image and text link direct.

That being told the majority of sales come from some kind of text copy. I know from my own experience its copy with creative/images to back up what the copy is selling.

With regards to out of date banners on Paid On Results a merchant simply has to have generic banners for all sizes they use in the system and can set an expiry date (many forgot to do this) for creative so after a special event, you stop promoting for example fathers day stuff the day after it's over and the banner reverts to your generic banner set. Very handy if you don't want to be promoting a sale that doesn’t exist any more and don't want to leave your affiliates with a broken image either.

You could even setup an events banner set or seasonal banner set and simply update this after each event so Affiliates can carry the latest message without having to update anything and it’s more relevant than a generic logo style banner.

I would also think about speaking with your top affiliates, see what they actually use and what they want and gear your design for them and everyone else can just fit in, they might moan but such is life.