Why not? Of the people that read this blog theres a massive mix and one of the groups that I perhaps don’t cater for as much is complete newbies to affiliate marketing. So every now and again im going to do network reviews, explain things that perhaps experienced affiliate marketers just take as ‘common online sense’. Im going to kick off with Paid On Results
Firstly in true online fashion they are POR, everything online gets shortened so just want to get that out from the start Paid On Results = POR. I was abouts to say one of the net networks on the block, which made me realise how long I’ve been doing this for, they were set up in 2002 and ill admit I didn’t jump in straight away. At the time I was only doing bits and mostly through TradeDoubler. My first real use of POR was with the ASOS.com programme, I was doing a fair bit through TradeDoubler so thought, well why not change my links to POR, give me a bit of an incite into how POR works, sale tracking, reporting and see how easy it is to use with live data, real sales and active traffic.
From the outset I loved it, it was simple, when you login you get a summary, you’ve made X this week, X today, off these programmes. That’s the sort of thing, as an affiliate I want to see on my login page not some information about a programme I don’t even promote. Now I say simple, but only in how the data is presented, its all very clear, but when you start digging with some of the more in depth reports its actually very in depth, not complicated though. You can basically find out anything any other network would, in a logical way, tick boxes, drop downs, the data they can report on is complex, but the way you build the reports is simple is probably what im trying to say.
As I type this im looking round my POR account without much idea what to cover next, and then it just hit me – the navigation! Its so easy! Im in and out of merchants I promote, seeing clicks, sales, conversion, EPC without really thinking about it.
Im not going to cover everything as you’ve probably gathered by now POR is, from an affiliate side of things the best network. If every merchant I promoted had a programme with POR id use them. So – what could they do better?
2 things I can think of that would catapult POR into the lead:
- Product tracking
A feature TD introduced many years ago whereby an affiliate instead of just seeing a sale for example 1 sale. Would see the sale detail as reported by the merchant for example 1 sale – Snooker Table. The benefits of this are obvious, know what you sell find out why, and replicate it! - Custom Tracking Count
When you make a sale, if you have applied some custom tracking it shows up. For example next to your sale it might say “Google-AdGroup3” if that’s the tracking you set up. But what id like to know is total clicks from that link, so if I have AdGroup1 2 3 4 etc I can look at which link is sending most clicks, which is making most sales so that I can either optimise on page content, or optimise my campaigns.
Not exactly in depth, but a basic outline of the network – so much more that I could have covered but I don’t want to go too complex.
