I’m not quite dead yet!
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There’s been a lot of kerfuffle (great word) in the affiliate blogosphere (annoying word) over the past couple of days following David Hawk’s posting How The Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself. Now I’m not one to let a bandwagon pass me by without jumping on board so here’s my take it all.
My contribution to this debate is in relation to David’s first point : “merchants wised up to affiliate tricks”. I’m in the interesting position at the moment that I’m trying to develop a business as an affiliate in my spare time whilst working fulltime for a merchant which is just starting an affiliate scheme.
I’ve had my eyes opened quite a bit by the experience of being on the merchant side. Specifically we’ve had problems with coupon sites using IFRAMEs to drop cookies, affiliates using 302 redirects to effectively wrap our entire site content with their affiliate cookie in Google listings and PPC affiliates blatantly breaching our policies and bidding on our trademarks.
All of these techniques are nice little earners for the affiliates. They’re nice little earners for the networks too as they pick up their cut of all these transactions too. But they’re no use to the merchant. In fact, they are worse than useless, they are costing us money to get sales which we would already have received. As David’s article points out, coupon sites frequently do nothing to generate the sale but take a cut out of profits by getting to drop their cookie just before the customer buys.
So, is David right to say affiliate marketing is killing itself? I say no but it could start to feel pretty poorly pretty soon.
Certain affiliates and their sharp practices are dragging it down and it is down to the networks to get their act together and start policing their affiliates more efficiently. All the above breaches of terms and conditions were caught by us, the merchant. I appreciate that the networks can’t watch every merchant all the time but they are the ones who have access to the aggregate data. They are the ones who can datamine for unusual referral acctivity. They are the ones who can see referring urls that come from PPC campaigns when the merchant says no PPC.
At the moment the networks have little incentive to police their networks because their share of the pie is largely dependent on their affiliate share - it serves the network to have more revenue showing as affiliate generated even if it isn’t. But if this sort of cream skimming carries on both the merchants and the legitimate affiliates will lose faith in the system. I don’t think affiliate marketing is dying but it certainly needs to change because it’s in no-one’s long term interests for it to carry on like this.
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