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 3 Simple Habits for Monitoring Affiliates
Establishing some routine checks for your affiliate program is as essential as balancing your books and making sure you lock the door each night. It's not hard and will pick up most offenders.
- Do regular google searches for your name - that means yourmerchantname and yourmerchantname.com and yourmerchantname.com.au - and see what will come up when your customers do this.
Look at the paid ads for brand-bidders. Then look at the natural results to see what website affiliates are targeting you. Occasionally check the second page of results too. You can make this easy by bookmarking the links setting up a webpage with the links ready.
You need to do this at different times of the day and night, and on weekends. Some affiliates restrict their ppc activity to the hours that the affiliate managers are not working.
Some also restrict by geo-targetting so try this whenever you travel too.
- Search for merchantname coupon, or merchantname discount code
to see if there are sites presenting your site and setting an affiliate cookie to claim the sale. Not only do unauthorised coupon sites skew your marketing data, they can mean that you pay commission to the affiliate plus give a discount to the customer when neither the coupon site or the coupon initiated the sale.
- Learn to read your reports and look for anything out of the ordinary.
Look for affiliates with an unusually high or low conversion rate, affiliates that always have a blank referrer address, affiliates whose sales always have a very short time between click time and purchase time. Discuss it with the affiliate to see if there is a valid reason.
Posted by Gayle at October 16, 2008 1:10 PM
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