Transparency in Affiliate Marketing

December 5th, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

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).

  1. One Response to “Transparency in Affiliate Marketing”

  2. By CBS on Dec 13, 2008 | Reply

    Sorry, but I don’t see so much really new in showing IP address, user agent, referrering URL and conversion time. Several networks offer similar statistics at least for advertisers. Only the type of cookie (post click or post view) seem to be be additional. I also think, short conversion times are realistic, if the affiliate uses deeplinks and the customer is already registered at the merchants site. To check out at amazon after a price comparison takes me only some seconds for example. And I would say it’s nearly the same at other big retailer sites. In my point of view cash back is also even less a type of fraud than post view tracking (“legalized” cookie dopping). Anyway, the important thing is to explain the advertisers what these methods are about and have clear agreements with them.

Post a Comment