Visitor scraping and doing the dirty on affiliates
Posted by MattE on 22 Nov 2006 at 03:22 pm | Tagged as: Marketing, Web
As a person who is heavily into affiliate marketing (Shop Online Australia), I am constantly amazed by the number of merchants who feel it is alright to do the dirty on affiliates.
Merchants ripping off affiliates? How is this possible.??
Merchants can do the dirty on you in four ways:
- Have links to other sites they own. The Cookies and tracking does not apply to that site. There is one merchant in Australia who has a large button amongst all the ‘where-to next’ buttons thus drawing visitors away. Another has at least six links to other merchants who offer affiliate prohrams. I call this visitor scraping.
- Having prominent links to other affiliate sites on their sites. Ethically this again is a big no-no. We as affiliates put a lot of work and effort into promoting merchant sites. To have them earn non-shared income by way of THEM participating as an affiliate is wrong. Links on ‘links pages’ or resource pages I can accept, but not on the home page and product pages.
- Having freecall numbers so customers call call direct, thus sidestepping the affiliate tracking process.
- Cancelling sales. I had one merchant who cancelled every sale made – I dropped them after 9 sales in a row cancelled. Sure, a percentage of sales are fraud etc, but i have been around long enough to know that 100% is high! A typical number is between 0 and 15%, depending on the products. Some extreme products may have up to 25% (typically those appealing to the youth market from my experience).
So what to do about merchants who do the dirty on affiliates?
- Email them expressing your views. Someimes they are ignorant of the error they have made.
- If part of an affiliate network, let the network know (they should be monitoring sites, but don’t)
- If it is not rectified, spread the word throughout your own circle of contacts and get them to spread the word
- Drop ‘em and tell them when you do and the reasons why.
It is far better to have fewer merchants, or deal proactively with those that treat affiliates with respect than suffer the loss due to unscrupulous actions.
And for merchants – focus on your core business – if you have affiliates, then looking after them is part of this.
Had experience with this type of merchant. Share via comments (merchant name may be edited for legal reasons).
Technorati tags web income | affiliate advice | ecommerce | internet business
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Point taken,
I can see both sides of the coin
1 – I am an affiliate marketer
2 – I have an affiliate network promoting my product (which is, its self affiliate marketing)
I wouldn’t upset our affiliates, and would be upset if merchants ’scraped’ visitors we sent them back for them selves.
So take this situation:
Along with the main product we sell, we are putting together a list of related products to allow the more adventurous members of our system to buy existing products that will help them build something similar of their own (article marketing). We promote these more advanced products through affiliate links.
I can see that these products, and their promotion, are in no way related to my affiliates.
(FYI they’re promoted on our support subdomain)
Would anyone reading this disagree?
I think I follow your logic…
So affiliates can but the product and then compete against your existing affiliates?
Thats not the same as when your affiliates send you traffic, and you have banner ads for some other mnerchant on your website…
Except for just a few Select affiliate programs,WHY WOULD ANYONE DO AFFILIATE MARKETING.
If myy site ( FrontRowNews.com) is going to have an ad banner, I want the company to pay
for it, and not based on if someone should click on it, and buy something. MY site is
advertising that product or company to ALL my site visitors.
ANY company that advertises on TV, Radio, Billboards, News Papers, Magazines.., any
non web based place, has to PAY $$$ to do so. They don’t tell a TV station…
“We’ll pay based on how many people tell us they are buying because our commercial on
your station.
If your site has the traffic / demographic for an advertiser, than don’t sell your-self
short. The more people have affilaite programs, the more it hurts those that want to make advertiser PAY FOR IT!
David
I agree with the concept of pay per impression for banner ads – apart from the fact that banners exhibit the lower end of click-through percentages, often banners are more brand building. They NEED to feature a strong offer to encourage action!
There are, of course ad networks out there selling on a PPV basis – do you make use of them?
I understand your points of view perfectly I promote a number of different merchants and products on my website besides adsense adds.I had to recently write to the affiliate in question because it would appear at least 5500 impressions had been made of the advetisements and they were displaying a quarter of this and no sales the same number of clicks that had been displaying since the first week of joining as yet I am still waiting for a reply.Also has anyone had experience with bidvertiser?I was promoting their PPC on every page of my website before I used googles adsense,And in 4 months they tried to tell me I had made $0.54c and that only appeared when I wrote and complained and explained that at least 3 friends I know had exited my website via their adds and nothing had appeared in my account,It took ages to get a reply from them and when I did all they said is “there was nothing wrong with the number of impressions to clicks”,what happened to looking after the customer?what 3 clicks and only $0.54c in 4 months at least 1800 visitors,come on so I dropped there adds.I run a search engine ans as such get a reasonable amount of traffic.Some of those adds were paying upto $5.00 a click or more,I know this because their click bid is displayed and I could choose to accept or not,someone down at that place is doing the dirty somewhere is my opinion,The morale of this is some people don`t know what their main business assets are and how to look after them after all the affiliate is a valuable business asset without them some business would simply go under.has anyone else had experience of bidvertiser I am seriously interested or maybe I am just plain stupid.
Thanks
Steve