Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

I Was a Cookie Stuffer (and Didn’t Even Know It)

by

Affiliate Marketing Cookie Stuffing

This morning I got an email from ShareASale with the subject line “Sunshine Rewards: Urgent Compliance Issue.” That’s the kind of subject line that makes you stop in your tracks and drop everything else that you are doing.

With my heart racing, I immediately opened the email and read it as fast as I could. Skimming through I found the words “compliance team,” “forcing clicks through an image tag,” and “against the Terms of Agreement on ShareASale.” Holy crap! What have I done?? I’m a rule follower. I’ve been outspoken in our industry against cookie stuffing, cheaters, and even people who walk the line. Did I all of a sudden become one of them? I literally felt sick to my stomach. Like I had been called to the principal’s office for cheating. Only much worse.

Guilty As Charged

Thankfully Brian wasn’t vague. I’ve gotten the dreaded Google emails before that basically say “You broke the rules. We’re shutting you down.” Not only do you know you are in trouble but you can’t even figure out what you did to get there or how to fix it. In this case, I was directed to the page with the offending image. I knew which merchant was the problem. I didn’t know exactly what I had done to screw things up, but I also knew in my brain (and my heart) that no one in my company would have done it intentionally. [Read more…]

Commission Reversals: What You Need to Know

by

Affiliate Commission ReversalsAs affiliate marketers, we look at a number of factors to determine which programs we want to work with. Among these are obviously the type of products, the reputation of the merchant, the EPC, and how the program is managed. One other metric that is often debated is the Reversal Rate, shown only in some networks. The reversal rate can be an indicator of very good or very bad things, but you have to know what you are looking at to figure that out.

What is the Reversal Rate?

The reversal rate is quite simply the percentage of affiliate sales/leads that were reversed for any reason during a time period. I like that ShareASale shows both the 7 day and the 30 day reversal rate. You can see these even before you join the program.

Why Do Commissions Get Reversed?

Commissions can be reversed for any number of reasons. The most common is usually that the order was cancelled either before it was placed or after the customer received the merchandise. This would include orders where the credit card could not be processed. Orders can also be cancelled if they were duplicates for technical reasons or for fraud. Less commonly, a commission may be reversed because the customer exchanged the merchandise for a different size or color. [Read more…]

Ask the Affiliate Networks Recap ASE12

by

Affiliate Summit East Ask the NetworksIt’s not very often that I do full recaps of an Affiliate Summit session, but so many people asked me about Ask the Affiliate Networks and it correlated enough with my own session that I felt the need to this time. My own session was Comparing Affiliate Networks and focused on 4 of the 5 networks featured in the Ask the Affiliate Networks panel. You can view the slide deck for that presentation although the video will be much more helpful once Affiliate Summit publishes it.

The description for the Ask the Affiliate Networks session was as follows: Wonder what you could do to earn more with a network? How a dispute over quality is handled? Top networks weigh in on your questions, talk what they’re most excited about today, and what’s to come. It was moderated by Oliver Roup, the Founder of Viglink. Participants included:

  • Dan Chiss, Head of Network Solutions, Google Affiliate Network
  • Allison Fox, Senior Director, Publisher Development, PepperJam Exchange
  • Brian Littleton, President/CEO, ShareASale.com, Inc
  • Kerri Pollard, President, Commission Junction
  • Adam Weiss, SVP Global Network Development, LinkShare

I hear a lot of complaints about networks (and have a lot myself) so I expected this panel to be pretty lively with the network reps each addressing complaints/misconceptions about networks on the whole as well as their individual networks. In total, the panel only got through 8 moderated questions and 3 questions from the audience. Most of the questions were very generic and did not lend themselves to conflicting opinions or approaches. If I did not know much about the networks going into the session, I would have thought that pretty much all of them operated the exact same way based on their responses. Here are a few of the things that I did find interesting or worthy of pointing out. [Read more…]

10 Things That Made Me Laugh at Affiliate Summit West

by

ASW11 SAS Photobooth with Kim Rowley
ASW11 SAS Photobooth with Kim Rowley

Normally this would be the time when I do a serious wrap-up post about everything I learned at Affiliate Summit. This time I can’t get out of my head just how much I genuinely enjoyed the conference. It’s not that I didn’t seriously learn a lot, it’s just that (shockingly) I felt myself giggling an awful lot the last few days. I think I’ve finally learned how to truly be 100% myself there so that I can laugh and learn at the same time.

In no particular order, here are 10 of the 100+ things that gave me a good laugh in Vegas.

1) Shawn Collins in the Patriot jersey. On the one hand, it was a sad moment for all of us AFC fans. On the other hand, knowing Shawn, it was pretty darn funny. And I won’t even start in about his “short pants….”

2) Not being able to find the Blogger Lounge for 2 hours. It was totally, completely my fault. I started feeling like I should be saying “Look, kids, Big Ben, Parliament” as I went around in circles seeing the same people over and over. I think maybe I was too busy socializing to find a map.

3) Jason Rubacky and the Jazzy. Jason could #GetSome serious senior citizen action rolling on that thing.

4) Trying to figure out how the curtains opened at the Wynn. Yep, I’m from Indiana.

5) Tiny coffee cups with baby spoons at lunch. The desserts were cute as could be, but watching people eat them was kind of a Gulliver’s Travels moment. (The book, not the movie. I haven’t seen the movie)

6) Trivia night and how competitive but not at all really competitive all my friends are. Did I mention that my team won?

7) The scared look on the faces of the merchants in the audience  by the end of our Inside the Minds of Affiliates panel. We really didn’t mean to sound so grumpy. I promise I’ll be nicer if you email me. (Just don’t try to call me)

8 ) Putting on every single hat, boa, and pair of glasses in the ShareASale Photo Booth with Kim Rowley. And the number of people who asked if they could have a copy of the pictures that we took when I told them that we were making out in there.

9 ) My (non)sighting of Charlie Sheen before the Tuesday keynote and the fact that people back in Indiana actually believed it because it was retweeted so much. (Thank you, Erik Hom)

10) At least 50% of every conversation that I had with OPMs, affiliate managers, networks, and fellow affiliates. Each of you brought me so much joy that I couldn’t help but laugh at least a little. And I have to mention Eric Nagel specifically for putting up with more of my giggling than anyone else.

Thanks as always to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for giving us an environment in which we can both work and have fun, ensuring that we will be back time and time again!

My Dream Affiliate Network

by

As the owner of a rewards site, I do not have a choice but to work with many different affiliate networks. That said, if I had the choice I probably wouldn’t work with a few of them. Affiliate managers and merchants often ask me which networks I like and which I do not like. Rather than complain about what I don’t like, I decided to put together my “dream network,” or what it would look like to take the best components of each and put them all together.

(As a bit of background, I’m not a “Super Affiliate” by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have some good niches and databases. I don’t market to a million people or do paid search at all. I’m pretty much your average content affiliate.)

Personal Communication: Hands down, ShareASale and buy.at do the best job of communicating on a one-on-one basis with affiliates. They make it easiest to talk to them via email, forum, Twitter, Facebook, and just about any other way that I could possibly want to talk to them. I know that I can get in touch with at least one person with either of these networks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Troubleshooting and Problem Solving: In a way this goes along with communication, but ShareASale definitely stands out for this. I’ve sent messages via ABW forum or Twitter and gotten responses from the management team there within an hour. Actual responses to my questions and not just passing the buck. Some networks make you wait 1-2 business days for responses. That isn’t acceptable when our industry never stops. Even worse, some of the networks hide behind “help desk” email addresses and names and you can’t just communicate with someone until you get an issue resolved. It’s infuriating and it can result in lost revenue for all of us (Linkshare, I’m talking to you specifically on this one). Trouble ticket/help desk systems can work well when there is accountability behind them but they aren’t helpful when you have emergency situations or not actual point of contact.

Finding and Applying to Merchants: While no one network stands out for this, some are definitely better than others. Commission Junction makes it easy to search for and apply to a whole list of merchants at once. I also seem to get good results on my search terms, even if I do not know the exact merchant name that I am looking for.

Coupons and Discounts: This is huge for us at Sunshine Rewards and we need to automate as much as possible. It doesn’t do us any good when we get hot coupons but can only download them once a day. We end up loading the coupons manually from the emails before we can download as much as 24 hours later. Because of this, I favor the networks that allow coupons to be downloaded as they are added such as Linkshare and ShareASale. The one way that Google excels in that they allow you to decide which types of coupons and discounts you want to download.

Reporting: Obviously most affiliates are going to favor real-time reporting over batch reporting. I like when I can manipulate the data in different ways easily. ShareASale and buy.at are the best for transactions coming up quickly. Commission Junction is great for allowing easy downloads that can be manipulated in different ways. Linkshare has the easiest way to find individual product sales, which can be important for some of my niche sites.

Credit Disputing: Often we have to report when we do not get credit for a purchase. Some networks do not have a mechanism for this at all. Both Linkshare and Commission Junction make it easy to file disputes for credits, and Linkshare even lets you “escalate” a denial for further review. This helps keep track of outstanding issues and ensure that they are actually getting to the merchants.

Newsletters: I would much rather get links in a newsletter than have to click on the “Get Link” in an email to generate the links. I don’t know how much this depends on the affiliate manager, but it seems like the Google, ShareASale, and Linkshare links are most likely to come right in the newsletter. I also like the ability that some networks have to send the newsletters to multiple people in my company because I am not the one who pulls the coupon links from the newsletters.

Video: I haven’t been using too many videos through the networks lately, but ShareASale makes it easiest for me to add their links to my own videos and many of their merchants have video links now. buy.at has a new video tool but I honestly haven’t used it because I haven’t come across any good videos for merchants that I am running with them. Video on the networks doesn’t matter too much to me because I find people click on the links around the embedded video anyway.

Advanced Tools: I love the Linkshare LinkGenerator and CouponSnap. As a blogger, there is nothing simpler than navigating to a page and then clicking on the little box on my browser to generate my link. If every network had these, I would do a lot more product reviews. ShareASale offers a pretty easy way to generate a link to a specific page as well, although you do need to go into the interface and do it. I like that deep linking functionality to pages where I want to refer my visitors to a full category of products. All of the networks are hit or miss to me on how easy it is to pull links for individual products. It seems that a lot of that comes down to the merchants as well.

I could go on for hours about other features and each of the networks specifically, but you would get pretty bored. These hit the high points for me. What would your dream network look like?