Why Different Incentives On Different Networks

[csn]

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I am curious as to why merchants offer different incentives on different networks. From an affiliate perspective, this is unfair.

A banner on A4U advertises an exclusive incentive for Play on Buy.at. So people who promote the program via TradeDoubler get a slap in the chops instead? You'd be so lucky! You would get nowt, zip, nothing.

Kirsty (Thanks Cadbury’s For The Flake Passion Gift Set!) won a nice looking Cadbury gift set for generating 5 sales via Webgains. Purple commented saying that Affiliate Window had no such incentive.

To me it's unfair rewarding affiliates on one network rather than on another. The leads generated from both networks are likely to be the same quality. The commission should be the same. So why not the incentives?

Naturally, as an affiliate I do not know what the costs are for a merchant and it could simply be a case of not enough coins in the pot. However, if that's the case, why are you running an affiliate program over 2 networks?

The mind boggles.

[Paul Wright]

Hi David

Remember that the affiliate networks are also fighting for affiliates loyalty so these differences may actually have nothing to do with the merchants budget or favouritism.

If I were an affiliate network who had a very popular merchant running a program across multiple networks then it would be in my best interest to make sure that I became the leading network so that I could take the lions share of the override profits.

How would I do this? Well it could be down to tracking, technology, affiliate support or… I could also stump up a prize or exclusive incentives and encourage affiliates to switch?

This is just the first example I can think of, there are of course others.

Cheers
Paul

[csn]

If I were an affiliate network who had a very popular merchant running a program across multiple networks then it would be in my best interest to make sure that I became the leading network so that I could take the lions share of the override profits.

How would I do this? Well it could be down to tracking, technology, affiliate support or… I could also stump up a prize or exclusive incentives and encourage affiliates to switch?

So some networks provide / pay for the prizes? That's news to me. I thought incentives were paid for by the merchants, hence the question of this topic.

Suddenly the view looks clearer!

[kier]

This may be the case sometimes but in the Cadbury example we didn't pay for the prize, the merchant did. I don't know why the same wasn't done on AW.