Private relationships between merchants and sites that affect affiliate traffic

[Mogga]

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http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/a...e-rate-cr.html


Massive deduping going on - do private relationships damage affiliate marketing?

Should they be declared?

I think so. Although AWIN is brilliant for showing decline rates a lot of networks don't.

[Hero]

do private relationships damage affiliate marketing?
Should they be declared?

The IAB released the Ethical Merchant Charter a few months ago, which most networks endorced and we have all been in touch with our merchants to get concent in detailing their Channel dedupping to affiliates.
Webgains has tried to give as clear info as possible for our merchants - you can view the information in the program info page as well as in the programs joined/not joined columns. We also show cancellation rate for each program, so our affiliates have this info when signing up to programs.

Why would direct partnerships worry you if they are also on a CPA basis? Are the direct partners not affiliates too?

[HelenMarie]

Hi Mogga,

I believe that there should be transparency over all channels / partners that affiliate traffic is being de-duped on. I can't see why any clients would have an issue with disclosing this information and you should request it as it may affect how or even if you work with a client.

Helen

[Mogga]

@Hero - because it seems some cookies get priority - it was stated in a recent merchant dedup thread.

@helen - why should we ask for info that should be very clearly available?

Let's look at the nectar tool bar - should all nectar affiliates and any merchants allowing sales via the nectar toolbar have to tell affiliates about the cookie-napping?

[Hero]

it was stated in a recent merchant dedup thread.

I'd be interested to read that thread, must have missed it. Could you post the url please?

[Mogga]

In the first post....

but from the thread in question:

Beyond Television had just implemented a new de-duplication policy against the direct partnership they have with price comparison sites. The tracking for this has only been implemented in the last week, so going forward you shouldn’t such a high decline rate as for sales where the last referrer is not attributed to the affiliate channel this will not be shown in the AWin tracking, therefore negating the need to decline manually. At present Beyond Television’s approval percentage is 80.49% amd we are expecting this to increase now the tracking has been put in place.


I read that to mean "their relationship with the PC sites overrides any cookie"

[Hero]

There is no indication of a "super cookie", as Doug likes to call them. I can't talk about the specific merchant, but it seems to me that they did a natural thing - they dedupe all CPA activity. The fact that their decline rate has gone up is because the deduping was expanded. Are there less network affiliates showing as the last referrer? Maybe, but that has nothing to do with "super cookies" and everything to do with customer journey.

[Ben C]

Hi Mogga,

Don't know much about the merchant in question, but it's quite a big jump from what they stated to 'there must be a super-cookie'. Super cookies are as anathema to networks as well as affiliates and I can say in the case of dgm, where find them we won't accept it. Thankfully the business logic behind them is extremely hard to justify, the only people who want them are the super-cookie owners and that just isn't sustainable, so I can't say that they will ever become widely established.

Traditionally tracking involves putting affiliate tags on the confirmation page permanently. The network records all the sales and check to see whether a valid click (or PI) event took place within the cookie period, and if they do a sale is recorded in the interface. Speaking as a network it's the way that I prefer as it's the most reliable way to record sales. However, we record sales that the affiliate has contributed to but wasn't the last referring click, which then needed to be de-duped, which doesn't look good as you see commissions accumulate in your account and are then removed. We refer to that as Conditional Validation of sales.

Alternatively, many clients now use Conditional Tracking of the sales - so rather than display our tag all the time, they display it when their internal tracking system (either a simple in-house built or 3rd party solution, such as DoubleClick, Atlas, MediaPlex, etc) decides that we are the last click. Conditional Tracking is more problematic and when things go wrong there's not a lot the network can do to recover from the issue. However, there is no need for sales to be deleted for not being the last click, which looks better and is easier for affiliates to work with.

Beyond Television seem to be switching from one to the other, and there wouldn't appear to be anything sinister in that.

Cheers

Ben

[ian]

Super cookies are as anathema to networks as well as affiliates

anathema ~ a person or thing detested or loathed

[Ben C]

anathema ~ a person or thing detested or loathed

lol. Do you reckon I read too much?