Charging Merchants for Increased Exposure?

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Tweet

If you have a decent enough website whether aesthetically pleasing to the eye or acheives decent volumes of sales or as decent quality of traffic .. or any combination of the above. Considering the number of programs we have to choose from ... Could some affiliates request lump sums for preferential placement or increased exposure on top of any commissions received? Is it viable?

[yesasia]

We have offered this to at least one affiliate. Another possibility is to guarantee a minimum commission for extra exposure.

[Shane]

yup viable for branding and sales oriented thinking too.

I've been approached a handful of times by merchants, mostly finance sector but not always

It's one of those how long is a piece of string questions though as to how much to charge, usually take what you think is fair and double it, if it's a big blue chipper then trebble it, and after some negotiation you should both be happy.

as the online spend machine moves forward we'll see more interactive crative, video ads and branding in contextual scenarios for sure, so paid placement might work out well for some merchants rather than pay per click/lead/sale, but being paid for both would be nice for premium exposure

[yesasia]

One of the issues with it is if you do this via an affiliate network, the network will also charge you override. So if I want to pay £100 to the affiliate, we would end up paying £130. If we can reward affiliates with gifts instead e.g. a game console, the value for the affiliates will be higher than what we have to pay. So in practice we prefer to work that way.

[Elaine]

this is an area we are definitely going to explore next year.

Now that Google has stopped her insane monthly dance, and for those PPCers who have passed the quality test - we can (for the moment) offer merchants guaranteed exposure/sales - but who to choose for that prime position - especially as commission rates are pretty level - it makes sense to negotiate a flat monthly fee direct with the merchant.

[OLBG]

Its quite common in the betting industry.

We do it in three ways
- we sell some glamour spots that the ad agencies seem to want for branding
- we list sites generally by EPC and if a site wants to move up they need to contribute to boost their EPC. The more they pay the higher they get.
- for some of the smaller earners and also most new bookies we tell them they have to pay a fixed fee just to be listed.

[Azam.net]

Always charge flat-fee or CPC/CPM on top of the CPA for prominent exposure. Never had shortage of takers and would encourage other affiliates to not give away prime real estate for one-off CPA commission amount.

[Michael_Anthony]

Yes. If you have the traffic, you have the power in the relationship. Easier with direct deals than when you have to factor in a network margin though.

[jhood]

During the past year, I've received several unsolicited approaches to both join affiliate programs and place banner creative in a prominent position above the "fold"!

It's a win-win contingent on the quality of the merchant and/or affiliate.

[Steved]

Quite a few top affiliates offer banners on their site through the "blind network" deals where they receive a cpm amount in exchange for showing banners from a variety of merchants. DGM etc run these sort of campaigns still as far as I'm aware.
I can't see any reason why other affiliates can't do deals directly with merchants and get paid by CPM or CPC. Just need some tracking software so both parties can see how many impressions are used up each week/month. Anyone using some inexpensive banner tracking software?

Some of the affiliate networks are happy for merchants to use their systems to track PPC campaigns. The merchant just needs to create a zero commission account. I wonder what their stance would be on using the system for other promotional deals though? Probably not very likely they'll let a lot of it go ahead.

[neoone]

What level of traffic would a site need to have before an affiliate can negotitate any price with a merchant?

[aotagain]

From an aff. point of view its an interesting strategic puzzle. We carry links for products, with their pictures, highly targeted to pages, without the merchant's name being shown. Obviously our visitors get to the merchant and then see the name. Good commissions.

If we put the merchants name or logo up, the long term effect will be that for our visitors the merchant gets brand recognition. Bit by bit, our visitors will learn the brand and go direct, so we'll lose commission. Early results good ie. flat rate + £10, later results flat rate + £2 ??

So its a difficult balancing act. We've decided that its too risky to offer any brand exposure for flat rate, because thats relying quite heavily on the merchant continuing the flat rate with you after they become famous !

Whereas if you're providing an 'invisible' source of sales, they don't know what will happen if they switch it off.

Perhaps a little cynical, but its business after all.

[jess1]

sorry am I missing a point here, don't most affiliate programs have multi tier commissions? Allowing higher commissions based on a factor of x.
There maybe a case for more money where by there is a default commission rate and nothing else. I thought aff marketing was pay on performance not tenancy, although QGG, you should be able to move in to that arena by now, have u looked at adviva and alike also, there is money to be made from your email list too, what am I saying..of course you have Nice position to be in... now can you tell every one how you do it

[aotagain]

Surely if you're a merchant looking at an affiliate site where you think exposing your brand would be beneficial, then it would be worth offering the aff a fixed rate of some sort as well as running the commission structure. Otherwise you're at the mercy of that aff. chopping and changing links. If you want consistent exposure (and lets face it the net is full of retailers logos which come and go) then that would be worthwhile.

We run a well recognised niche site and there's no doubt that some of our advertising companies (who actually aren't running aff. schemes) have got their brand much more recognised by running logos/company names on our site.

If they'd just run aff. schemes then their logo wouldn't have been seen on our site and sometimes people would have clicked on a product and seen them, on other occasions they would have gone to another company.

I don't think tiered commission has the same effect. If a particular aff. converts very well for you as a merchant then by implication its probably worth looking at making sure your brand is exposed consistently. You''ve already got a relationship with the aff. which you won't have with a banner CPM network.

[Yourslice]

I have started to ask for more or charge a one of fee for better position, and why not if they want to be the first customers see. it helps there brand and does increase sales for them.