German affiliate network belboon has made a move towards more transparency which I really appreciate. Well done guys. I think if other networks did the same thing they’d probably lose a good portion of their business.

With belboon affiliates and merchants can view the following details for each tracked lead or sale now:

• the IP address and user agent (browser) of the customer
• the referrering URL
• the date/time of the initial view or click
• the type of cookie used to trigger the transaction (click or post-view)

User identification

Using the IP address and user agent the merchant can check for multiple orders coming from the same person. Especially in lead generation campaigns this will be quite useful to prevent fraud. I just don’t like the fact that belboon is still relying heavily on cookies. There are more sophisticated ways to track already.

Publisher sites

I hate networks and programs that make publishers approve every single domain they’re using. It’s really a pain in the ass. Yes, merchants need to be concerned about their brand so they want to know where their ads show up. But please don’t make it so difficult to do business with you.

By examining the referring URL the merchant will finally be able to identify the publisher’s websites. In theory this allows the network to switch the burden of proof. If they really want to monitor where ads show they should run their own statistics on a regular basis but leave out the pre-approval process.

Time to conversion

Using the time of the initial view or click one can calculate the time between the display/click of the ad and the conversion. This allows the merchant to run statistics on the average time to conversion per affiliate. That way you can determine whether an affiliate is:

• driving quality traffic (conversion within a day)
• cookie-spamming (no conversions within the first weeks)
• using cash-back or ripping you off (conversion within a minute)

Over the years I’ve seen many leads and sales with a conversion time of less than a minute. I’ve always been convinced that these ones are fishy. Especially on large e-commerce sites with complicated check-out processes it’s impossible to get a customer to purchase that quickly. These transactions must be fraud or cash-back (which is in my opinion a type of fraud too).

The German affiliate network belboon just relaunched their interface. The interface has become bilingual (German and English) and even more user-friendly. There are new special features for premium affiliates. They get paid twice a month, have access to EPC statistics and get automatically accepted to most programs. Furthermore they’re not subject to any referrer URL or domain checks.

belboon is a product of YOC AG, a German mobile advertising company with about 50 employees. Their main office is located in central Berlin, right next to the headquarter of Jamba, the world’s leading mobile content provider.