In the affiliate marketing relationship we have 3 main parties, the merchant, the network and the affiliate. Who’s job is it to make sure that the affiliate programme works?
The Merchants
The merchant has obviously started or is currently running and affiliate programme to generate sales. It’s a marketing channel like any other and its sole purpose is to make sales, so its arguable that the merchant should be doing anything to help its affiliates. But isn’t too much help just spoon feeding? Now in the current market the amount of effort merchants put into affiliate programmes varies massively from merchants who bend over backwards, create keyword lists, check links, check products are up to date and basically maintain sites for affiliates to merchants who take 2 weeks to reply with a “we’ll get back to you” reply.
The Affiliate
It’s the affiliates living, they make their money through promoting affiliate programmes and want, or should I say need the programme to be a success. However with so many affiliate programmes available to choose from their time is very valuable so they need help from the other parties involved to firstly find the right programme to promote and to be able to put the time in to make it a success. So for the affiliate they rely on an active merchant and an active network to be able to answer questions and provide help. Remembering that an affiliate cannot be an expert in all sectors, transition from a retain merchant to a travel merchant isn’t easy and help is needed to learn the differences of promoting each.
The Network
Now this is the big one. The all mighty network, firstly its primary function is a tracking platform – a 3rd party to provide tracking for both affiliate and merchant without bias, they are paid by the merchant a % of the commission earned by affiliates. So saying they are an unbiased tracking platform is a bit contradictorily as if they track more sales they earn more money. So surely its in the networks interest to help affiliates drive more sales, as the more sales that are going through the network the more the network gets paid in override.
Some networks do for example Paid On Results (POR) have set up www.contentunits.com showcasing their latest content units. These are small content units that fit on your site allowing the user to browse through any merchant product database live from the affiliates site based on AJAX technology. Brilliant! They are building tools to add further value than just a tracking platform so the % override that a merchant pays isn’t just for a tracking system, its for the tools they add.
Affiliate Future do the same with www.henoo.com which is a travel comparison / search portal. Any merchant wanting to have their products included in this needs to be an Affiliate Future merchant, again an added advantage of joining Affiliate Future.
Over time im hoping that more networks will start to develop tools to help affiliates and become much more than the tracking platform that they all started out to be.
