Into 2008; Adsense affiliate program removed

There’s been a bit of a hiatus on posting at the moment due to a new addition to the family of a bouncing little baby girl so affiliate market updates will be a little light for the next few weeks but hold in there as some new developments are in the wind for AffiliatePrograms.co.nz :)

Fresh into 2008 and Google have announced that they have quashed their affiliate program for referrals to Adsense. Here’s the full text of the email;

Hello,

We are writing to share some important information with you about
referrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts to
optimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we’re
constantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features as
well as tweaking those products already available to our
publishers. This is the case for referral units directing visitors
to sign up for AdSense. After experimenting with this program
over the past year, we’ve concluded that there are other products
that are of higher value than this program to publishers in your
region. As a result, referral units for the AdSense program will
be retired in the coming weeks. Referrals to other products and
services remain unaffected.

If you’re currently displaying referral units on your site
directing users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for details
about what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, the option to add referral units directing users
to the AdSense product will no longer appear in your account. You
will continue to accrue earnings for all existing referrals yet to
generate $100 until late January, at which point the program will
be fully retired. Existing referral units will continue to appear
on your pages.

By the end of January, you should remove all referral units
directing users to AdSense from your pages. Referral units
that you do not remove will continue to be displayed on your pages
as normal, but conversions will no longer be recorded. We
suggest you replace the AdSense referrals with referrals to
another product or service or an additional ad unit.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. We
apologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Darn. There are bound to be a lot of people who have many links through-out their sites promoting Google Adsense. It’s a frustrating experience whenever an affiliate program (no matter who it is) completely removes their program.

There have always been questions about this happening and the amount of traffic that the program continues to receive from old links that webmasters have either not found to change or are just never bothered to be updated.

Interestingly, Google appear to have replaced this affiliate program referral to Adsense with advertising Adsense itself through their own Adwords system. I consider it more than a bit questionable to have a company competing with their own clients (particularly in any form of bid system) to promote their own internal products. Very questionable, as the cost is nil to them but may drive up the price for other advertisers who are bidding to show their ads on affiliate related keywords. Perhaps Google should front-up and let the community know if their own Ads on Adsense affect the bids of others?

If anyone has heard of Google talking about this in the past let me know and I’ll update this post.

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.nz Internationalised Domains

If you hadn’t heard about it yet, the DNC (Domain Name Commission) for New Zealand are starting the process towards bringing in the ability to include (for a start) five different characters into the .nz domain space. These are; the the macronised vowels ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū which are not currently available in the .nz domain market.

Having New Zealand domains include these is a logical choice given that a large number of Te Reo Māori words include these characters. If you are interested in having your say about whether or not they should be introduced you can submit directly to the Working Group.

This brings up a few interesting questions in the affiliate marketing world in New Zealand as you may now have people who have been trading on words without these characters where, if they are not the first in to register the new domains, may end up with intellectual property issues (e.g. copyright, passing off) if another company or an affiliate decides to use the domain for the same purposes.

In the affiliate world, being a “domain affiliate” can be a lucrative business. Many affiliates have made a lot of money from buying up domains, both for type-in traffic (where people just type the domain directly into their browser in the hope of getting the site they are looking for) as well as for generic keywords which other companies consider a valuable item.

There are people on both sides of the fence in terms of calling some of the above domain-squatting or not. It is usually a case-by-case basis to be able to call it that as there are many legitimate reasons for registering valuable domains.

For an affiliate program, this can be a double-edged sword and some treat the matter very differently to others. Many affiliate programs will have in their terms and conditions that an affiliate cannot receive or pass-through traffic generated through the use of the companies brand name. Others are not quite so restrictive.

In the case of a large multi-national company who is receiving significant traffic from its branding, then protection of the brand from the affiliate is quite a logical choice (particularly when PPC traffic and branded keywords are involved). However it can be taken too far by some smaller affiliate programs when there is no real need to become so restrictive about the branded domain.

Take the registering of domain names which are similar to the brand name of the company. Not many companies have the resources to register every domain name which is mildly relevant to their brand. For example, I’m sure Google will have registered the googlr.com domain (for type in traffic mistakes) when your average company would not have the funds to register all typo’s or hyphenated domains relevant to their brand (e.g. google-analytics.com).

This is where a bit of flexibility from an affiliate program in regards to their affiliates domain and brand usage can go a long way to help both parties increase revenue. I have seen many cases where a good affiliate was trading off a hyphenated brand name and the smarter companies were happy for the affiliate to use those sites and their traffic, so long as the affiliate is sending the traffic to the brands own website.

So, if you’re looking at whether or not to try and register every domain you can think of that looks even close to your brand, try opening an affiliate program instead and you may find that you problem will be solved with an increase in revenue!

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Affiliate emails: Get the basics right

I would have thought an affiliate network would understand the absolute importance of the privacy of their affiliates email addresses however I just received an email which included 100 email address of their publishers in the “To” field.

Unbelievable!

It was a promotional email promoting one of the affiliate programs on their network who is running a special campaign for a limited amount of time. The email was reasonably well written and quite compelling as an affiliate. I was thinking about promoting the product for the time of the special offer.

Then I noticed that 100 other affiliate email addresses were in the “To” field. This breaks the fundamental policy of working with any database of customers (or affiliates) that their privacy is paramount. A customer trusts you with their personal details which must be respected with utmost care.

Getting the basics right in emailing affiliates (and your sites newsletter database) is very important. The reputation of your brand is depending on it.

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URL’s in Affiliate Promotional Material

In my past life as an Affiliate Manager, the first time I thought about URL’s in affiliate promotional material was when a very influential affiliate came to me and said;

I will not promote your site because all of your promotional material includes your URL on it.

I was quite properly shocked.

I hadn’t even considered that an issue (this was a good few years ago now) when we were in development of the promotional material for affiliates.

After talking with the affiliate for some time, it came down to choice in the market.

This affiliate had the option of promoting many different affiliate programs, they were all pushing for his attention and prominent spots on his homepage. When this situation occurs (an affiliate dream scenario) then it’s all of the small things which a program can offer the affiliate which make the difference on their decision to pick a particular product or program to go with.

In this case it was the fact that the affiliate was not interested in the program promoting the main site URL through his affiliate banners as that would mean a percentage of viewers (even if it was small) would not click the advertising but would instead type the domain name directly into their browser. They may even remember the URL from the affiliates advertising and later on type it in.

If the URL had not been there they would have been a lot more likely to either click the banner to get to the site or to come back to the affiliates site to find the resource again.

This may be a very small percentage of people but when you’re talking about super-affiliates with millions of page views per day across their sites then the percentages all start to add up and there’s just no reason for them to promote a banner with a URL on it as opposed to one without.

I was thinking about this recently as I was contacted directly by an affiliate manager about a site, I agreed to post their banner on the homepage of the site as a trial run however on getting into their banner farm there was no banner which didn’t have the URL splashed across it. Needless to say I didn’t put them on my homepage and have since requested a banner without the URL.

Something to think about it you’re an affiliate looking to promote a program or an affiliate manager working with your creative team to come up with advertising options.

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What kind of affiliates do New Zealand merchants want?

I’m happy to introduce the first in a series of four articles on affiliate marketing in New Zealand from a merchant perspective by Antony Ellis, Affiliate Manager for NZ Fine Prints, New Zealand’s largest retailer of art prints and posters; www.prints.co.nz.

The next articles in the series will be;

What kind of affiliates do New Zealand merchants want?

Why should a New Zealand merchant care about the kind of website that is signing up to their affiliate program?

No retailer wants to set up shop in a shady part of town. They want to associate their brand and products with quality websites. If your affiliate program offers the option merchants should always thoroughly check the content of sites that apply to join their affiliate program. Infringing copyright? Objectionable content? Think hard about whether the extra sales are worth associating your company, brand and products with dodgy looking websites.

Merchants should read the applicant’s “About Us” or “Contact Us” - check who owns the site. If this is not clear try using whois or domainz to look up the owner. It’s hard to trust any site that doesn’t have clear contact and address details. I’m not bothered by the lack of a physical address - many of our best affiliates are run from a home office and don’t want people dropping by as a matter of course - but a contact form with no other details will make a merchant less likely to accept your affiliate application.

If your merchant program includes pay per click think very hard about the signals you pick up from your research. Unless you have sophisticated tools in place to prevent it click fraud may mean paying out more to the affiliate than they deserve. Pay per sale is harder for a dishonest affiliate to fake - but there is always the possibility the site owner is just signing up to get a discount on your products for a one off sale!

A word on expectations. Owners of new websites in particular may have unrealistic expectations of what they can earn in the short term. Let you affiliates know how much traffic your site needs to make a sale (your conversion rate expressed as sales per 100 visitors) so they don’t give up on your program within a couple of weeks if they are not sending through much traffic. Savvy affiliates will also want to know the value of your average sale. Remember that your merchant ads are competing with alternative affiliate programs for screen share on the affiliate’s site so be as open with them as you can - while imagining one of your competitors is reading the email too so you don’t let slip any commercial secrets in you haste to impress an important affiliate!

Merchants - once you have signed up the right kind of affiliate make sure someone in your company is given the job of keeping in touch with them so they send you visitors for many years. It’s hard for a merchant to find quality New Zealand affiliates - a problem that I will explore in my next article.

Learn more about the New Zealand Fine Prints Affiliate Program.

Thank you to Antony for his contribution.

Close communication with the affiliate market is a very important tool for Affiliate Managers to show their commitment to providing value in the industry so I’m glad to see the Fine Prints Affiliate Program is willing to help the community of New Zealand affiliates.

If you have any comments or contributions feel free to contact me on affiliate@nzbase.com.

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Further discussion on duplicate affiliate programs…

I was emailed recently regarding my previous post on my annoyance surrounding offering duplicate affiliate programs on a sign-on page and thought it would be worth further publishing my response here.

Here are the details from the email. Hopefully the person concerned does not mind the post going public as I believe this type of discussion is exactly what the New Zealand Affiliate Market needs to shape-up it’s thinking. Both views have good merit and until these things are worked out for the specific NZ demographic then the affiliate market will continue to struggle;

I’m writing in regards to your post “Duplicate Affiliate Programs”.

Let me explain why merchants do this.

Most publishers/affiliates only join one affiliate network. And some high profile publishers/affiliates need to join the merchants own program because they negotiate special terms with the merchant.

If the merchant was to join only one affiliate network, that merchant would miss out on advertising from affiliates who are members of a different affiliate network and are not interested in joining any other affiliate network.

And why should merchants only support one network?

Deciding not to join the merchants affiliate program because the merchant supports more then one networks is extremely disappointing. It’s like telling a manufacturer that you won’t buy their product because their confusing you by supplying it to too many different retailers. How lame is that?

Perhaps you just didn’t understand the concept.

Thanks for your comments although I believe you mis-understand my original point as well as my experience and understanding of the affiliate market :)

There are a couple of things to tackle here in a response.

Firstly the email suggests;

Most publishers/affiliates only join one affiliate network

This appears to be a good part of the premise for the email and mis-understanding.

My opinion (based on discussions with many affiliates at conferences internationally) is that affiliates are joined with many networks at any one time in order to give themselves the maximum opportunity to promote relevant products. Granted, there are some affiliates who will say that they will only ever promote products from one network due to the specific reporting or tracking that network has however in my experience this is often bluster from the affiliate, they are usually joined to other networks as well with a preference to the one they are promoting. The key point here is that the dollar rules. If an affiliate can see that the relevant product they know will work on their site is only available through another network then they are most likely to join that network as well.

On the statement;

And why should merchants only support one network?

This is a very good question. My initial post was not suggesting that merchants should only join a single network in every scenario, it was suggesting that they should not be pushing all networks they are a part of, as well as their own program on the same page as it creates a confusing decision for specifically a new affiliate who is not part of one of these networks.

I do believe that an affiliate program should be very selective in the affiliate networks it may join, for example it would not be my suggestion to join more than one affiliate network in the same geographical market (e.g. the New Zealand market). Creating partners of your affiliate networks is a strong necessity in this situation and I would freely admit that the New Zealand affiliate market is just not mature enough yet to have strong affiliate network partners who are promoting the affiliate programs in the way they should.

If an affiliate program is part of a network and they are looking for affiliates who they believe are part of a different network then it is in the best interests of the affiliate network to work closely with that partner to source the affiliate concerned.

Finally;

Deciding not to join the merchants affiliate program because the merchant supports more then one networks is extremely disappointing.

I couldn’t agree more and do not believe any affiliate should do this. It is counter-productive to the whole idea of building the highest returning business online that the affiliate can!

My problem with the program in question revolved more around usability and the way in which an affiliate program offers its wares to the affiliate. In this case I was in a rush, wasn’t already joined to the networks offered and didn’t have the time to research which option was the best (e.g. which offered the higher %).

If the program had promoted its own internal program first on its site with logos for the networks having a lower weight on the visual display of the site (just to show they were part of that network if you recognised the logo and would prefer that option) then I would have had an easy choice. I was there to sign-up and would have if I knew which network / program was my best option.

On the question of negotiating a higher affiliate percentage;

And some high profile publishers/affiliates need to join the merchants own program because they negotiate special terms with the merchant.

This type of statement is exactly the reason why I didn’t sign-up to the program that day. How would I as an affiliate know (without researching every term and condition on every network) that I could only receive an increased percentage through high traffic levels by joining the affiliate program of the site itself? Affiliate percentages should be negotiable based on traffic levels irrelevant of the network the affiliate is part of. In this case I would have joined the program through a network that I happened to be already signed up to and would have there and then made the wrong choice based purely on the way the options were presented.

If you have any thoughts related to this I would be happy to post them on here. Just email affiliate@nzbase.com.

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Duplicate Affiliate Programs

A practice which I find particularly annoying in the New Zealand affiliate market which I believe is due to the small size of the market itself is when a website joins more than one affiliate network and also has an affiliate program on its own site as well.

Affiliates don’t need choice when they are on a website and select the link to sign up for the program to promote the site. Choice in this scenario just creates confusion, specifically if the affiliate is not already part of one of the networks that the site is offering.

The example of this I found this week has a site showing the options to sign up to it’s own program, the Commission Monster Network or the ClixGalore Network when you click on the “Affiliate Program” link on their site.

My first question on coming to this page is which program gives me the highest commission? Affiliates are invariably motivated by higher commissions so if you’re an affiliate program and expect to have affiliates sign up through a page like this then you’re going to have to spell out the pros and cons of each program. A flat choice just doesn’t work.

The program in question has the following quote on the page;

All programs provide outstanding affiliate tracking resources that will help you make fantastic profits from the range of products. Each program automatically calculates and tracks your commission and arranges direct payment to you. You can check the commissions you’ve earned 24 hours/7 days a week, simply by logging on to the relevant management interface.

In the end I couldn’t see what the pricing differences were and didn’t have the time to compare terms and conditions on each network so left the site without joining!

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ClixGalore and the NZ market

I had a good chat with the General Manager of ClixGalore.co.nz late last week. Nice guy, quite passionate about his company.

They have built proprietary software and have an impressive list of features on the software they have designed. The complete inclusion of impression stats, clicks and the ‘google like’ use of EPC (earning per click) reports gives a nice indication of the performance of sites you’re promoting on their network.

I would have to say that the usability of their system leaves a little to be desired although this is purely from a design stand-point. Priorities have obviously been in the right direction for this company in building what affiliates want in the reporting and functionality first.

Something he mentioned which I was quite pleased to hear was that ClixGalore use their affiliates as their decision base for developing new functionality into the software. If affiliates ask for it, they get it.

They are also opening up a New Zealand team soon. At the moment, while they have a fair few NZ affiliate sites on their system they do not have anyone on the ground in NZ but apparently that will change within a few months.

Keep an eye on them as if they start to bring on some of the bigger affiliate brands in the New Zealand market like they have in the Australian affiliate market then they will be quite a force.

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HYPERmedia program

I’ve recently had another affiliate program sent through for a New Zealand web development company who specialise in SME’s.

hyperaffiliate.co.nz appears to be a good offer with three separate steps in comission payments from $200 (NZD) through to $400 (NZD) per referral depending on the sales level.

The site is reasonably obscure about which sales level you would fit into with the first level being described as;

Occasional orders, mainly part time. (e.g one off friend referals)

and the second sales level as;

Steady stream of orders, mainly network referals (e.g through a job)

As an affiliate, coming across this level of ambiguity in the commission structure should make you question exactly who makes the decision on where one level stops and the other starts.

The program does appear to be a good offer so it’s the type of situation where you’d be best to sort out how many clients you are going to need to send through before you jump up to the next level. That way there are no chances of sending clients with the mistaken belief on which level of commission you’re on.

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Over-zealous affiliate terms

Having a read through some of the terms and conditions on NZ affiliate sites (e.g. the NZ Duty Free affiliate program) is like walking into a brick wall of legal jargon saying what needs to be said in approximately three times as long as required.

I’m all for careful contract construction but I also have a very strong belief that plain English in 99% of situations will cover the company (yes, I do know currently practicing lawyers who agree with this). Often in this situation you have a company who is pitching to webmasters who don’t really want to read through pages and pages of legal jargon just to find out what the % rev share is for the program. It took me five minutes of looking through this contract just to find out what the program is offering. How does that sell the affiliate program to the prospective affiliate?

There appears to be (especially in New Zealand) an initial impression from the e-commerce site that the affiliate is going to try to do anything they can to defraud the company. Therefore the company is attempting to protect itself at the expense of facilitating a quick setup of the relationship.

Most of the power in an affiliate relationship is held by the e-commerce site owner as they hold and faciliate the payments therefore the affiliate program needs to do everything it can to help establish the affiliates’ belief that their marketing for the company will be fairly rewarded.

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