A4U Thread – Brand Activity Need Separate Cookies

This is an extremely interesting thread that quite clearly demonstrates the lack of sophistication in tracking software in what is supposed to be the most advanced, transparent and accountable form of online marketing.

The initial post focussed on the assumption that brand bidding affiliate(s) hijack content affiliate sales. The vast majority of merchants already de-dupe search and affiliate activity and invariably merchants bid on their own brand.

In truth, all affiliates on major programmes lose commissions to brand search campaigns and this has been happening for years. I would even go as far as to suggest that some merchants might unknowingly be de-duping ‘Affiliate’ traffic against direct entry to their site.

Despite this, the industry still continues to grow at a rapid pace. A large portion of this growth is derived from merchants shifting their paid search activity from agencies to affiliates. Despite agencies working towards a CPA, merchants obviously prefer affiliates to take the risk, possibly due to the knowledge that affiliates use their own money and are therefore more likely to monitor and control campaigns more closely.

In cases such as this, the introduction of the closed group PPC affiliate should make little difference to content affiliates. Disregarding the problems surrounding choosing affiliates to run these campaigns, is this shift away from agencies actually a good thing for the industry? In the absence of more detailed traffic analysis, all this does is ensure more revenue filters through affiliate, demonstrating greater share for this channel.

Only now are we starting to see merchants and agencies properly analysing the entire online space, assessing the visitor ‘journey’ in order to apply value to the part played by each party. They still however, class ‘Affiliate’ as one channel.

Considerable growth in the cashback and voucher code sectors indicates that the battle to become ‘last referrer’ is still very much alive and brand bidders are certainly not assured of winning. It is currently impossible to establish how customers are actually behaving and what channels are adding the most value with the limited information available.

When assigning different tracking URLs to email, display, search, blog etc, these identifying trackers need to be applied to different types of affiliates and not just the entire affiliate network. Only then will we get a true picture of how the channels interact, where budgets should be applied and which affiliate disciplines deserve more reward than others.

Adam Ross
Client Services Director

Bookmark It

This entry was posted by adamski on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.