Alpharooms T&C changes around voucher/discount code sites

[morleymouse]

Hi all,

In the interest of maintaining a healthy affiliate programme and growing relationships with current partners we are making a slight change to our programme terms and conditions surrounding site offering a voucher / discount code.

The addition is:

“Alpharooms.com permits affiliate sites to show relevant discount codes and/or promotional offers to their visitors. These codes or offers must be visible to the user without an action that would trigger your affiliate link and create an affiliate cookie on the visitors machine.”

Any affiliate member found to be in breach of the above will be immediately suspended from the Alpharooms affiliate program and will not be paid commissions already earned for that month. A decision will then be taken on whether or not to exclude the web site permanently and take further action.

This decision has been taken after considerable analysis of traffic from affiliate sites displaying a voucher or saving opportunity to their users and sites that hide any saving and require a click to show the content in the same motion as setting their affiliate cookie.

The majority of sales driven by sites hiding discount codes or offers that force a click to reveal the content have a click to book lag of less than 10 minutes. This is a lot lower than the average click to book lag. It is also noticeable that the majority of bookings via these sites have a marketing source already assigned which we retain as the previous referrer. We feel the above change will protect our existing partners from having cookies overwritten by sites attempting to drop cookies on users at the checkout stage.

These changes will be going live with the networks over the next week and email notification sent. Enforcement will begin from the week commencing the 12/05/08.

If you would like to discuss how this may affect you please feel free to contact me.

[ian]

well done Dan, great to see some analysis on voucher site sales being published

[Cheapdvds]

sounds good to me

[befuddle]

How will this affect my code site that has never published an alpharooms code nor hide's a thing?

EDIT: I've re-read the terms and see that I'm fine.

[Cheapdvds]

Originally Posted by befuddle How will this affect my code site that has never published an alpharooms code nor hide's a thing?

how will it affect your site? it wont

[befuddle]

Originally Posted by morleymouse The majority of sales driven by sites hiding discount codes or offers that force a click to reveal the content have a click to book lag of less than 10 minutes. This is a lot lower than the average click to book lag.

This sounds like it's a good thing, code sites converting into sales more quickly. What am I missing?

[Cheapdvds]

doesnt this give the impression someone is going to a content site , goes to checkout and sees u can enter a discount code so then goes to a discount site to get the code , this is why i think code sites would be quicker booking time.

so its over writing cookies

[ian]

Maybe they are already part way through the buying process, and popped off for a voucher code?

[morleymouse]

Originally Posted by befuddle This sounds like it's a good thing, code sites converting into sales more quickly. What am I missing?

Hi Ray,

On average a holiday purchase is a fairly considered buy as its often a large purchase. From first visit to booking it can often be up to 7 days. It takes aprox. 6 minutes to get through our booking process if you know exaclty what you want (flight numbers, hotel name, credit card to hand etc) - and this is on average, its hard to get through it any quicker.

So a site that can convert a click to a sale in under 10 minutes flags itself for attention. We have spent time analysing the traffic and behaviour of it and feel the only effects of this will be an increase in number of sales credited to affiliates driving traffic rather than intercepting it at checkout stage.

[Kandevil]

you a missing the fact that Dan is saying in a lot of instances another affiliate has done all the hard work and got the user to the checkout. Then the user has searched for a voucher/discount code, found something on another site, clicked to reveal the code and then the commission has gone to the voucher site. I imagine in a reasonable percentage of instances a code hasn't been available, but the voucher site has taken the commission anyway.

If they have a code, the voucher site gets the commission.
If they don't have a code, the original referrer gets the commission (or nobody does)

All in all, doesn't affect you or the way you do it, so you should be happy

[Mallorca_M]

I think my conversion ratio is going to grew quite soon.

I did a search for "alpharooms discount code" and none of those on the first page did actually have a discount code. But yes, they did have "Show code and go to site" links which overwrited any other aff cookie.

So well done man!

(BTW: any way of getting any of those discount codes?)