bayonblog

We’ve all been dumbasses at one time or another and we tend to be dumbasses in one regard or another throughout our lives. When you read online marketing forums regularly, which is a punishment rendered unconstitutional by the eighth amendment, you encounter a level of pugnacious stupidity that can only be described as: Fuck You.

The other thing that happens when you read online marketing forums as much as I do is you see patterns emerge. For the uninitiated, you can imagine that this is similar to something out of the scenes in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe, playing John Nash, stares at a board full of numbers until the numbers begin to float off the board and start forming patterns in his mind. The difference is that I’m not very bright (a statement backed up by the fact that I read online marketing forums daily) and in my world I read the same fucking questions day after day until they begin to float off the screen and form patterns of dumb, but instead of having paranoid delusions and talking to my imaginary roommate (who is deaf) I just stare really hard at the reply button, count to ten and then close the tab instead. I can only imagine how shithouse crazy Nash would have gone trying to deal with the boastful, dishonest, imaptient simians who populate our industry.

Anyway, having seen the same questions for years now, I thought I’d put together a top 5 list of forum posts that I see EVERY GODDAMN DAY for every field of online marketing that I read about (every broadly and commonly defined field, anyway) and answer them. Why not top 10? Because I’m a lazy piece of shit. Reading and understanding the complex and detailed answers on this list is a good way to avoid looking like a newb on various online marketing forums:

#1) IS AZOOGLE/CJ/LS/Affiliate Fuel DOWN?!??!?!?!?!!?!?!?

Carl’s Jr. thinks you are an unfit online marketer. Now go back to clapping at the fish tank for a few minutes and then hit refresh on your browser, moron. The internet is built for failure, but the odds that your affiliate network is down instead of your internet connection being wonky are infinitesimal. Do not ever ask this again. Carl’s Jr., fuck you.

#2) “What is cloaking?”/”Do I need to cloak links?”

“Cloaking” is one of those things that causes the guerilla online marketing types to go off on tangents, trying things that look really stupid to anyone who has ever written more than ten functional lines of any given scripting language.

Basically, the concept behind “cloaking links” is that, for a variety of reasons, it’s better to hide the links generated by your affiliate network behind links using another domain. These new links that you create then redirect to the link generated by the affiliate network. How do guerilla marketers commonly accomplish this? There are several common methods, all of which are functional and all of which I think are wasteful and dumb for reasons that I go into further down the page:

• Creating individual pages for each offer and using meta-refresh tags to refresh the user to the affiliate offer.
• Using hardcoded javascript to catch the outbound click and send it to the affiliate offer.
• Using hardcoded redirects in your htaccess file to issue 301 redirects to the affiliate offer.
• Using hardcoded PHP (or any web scripting language) to intercept variables about the incoming querystring or the incoming referrer and redirecting the user, using the header() tag, based on those variables.

Voy-la, you have cloaked the affiliate link. You haven’t done it very intelligently and you’ve created a ton of blue collar legwork for yourself in the future, but BY GOD you done cloaked them fuckers!

What are some reasons that disguising your links, however you accomplish it, is a generally good practice? Well:

• Many adblocker apps, spyware apps, antivirus apps and other programs of a similar nature have indexed a number of the domains used by major affiliate networks for their inbound links. These programs act as a proxy between the browser and the intarnets and strip out content containing these links before it gets to your customers’ eyeballs. Functionally, this means that a page full of AffiliateFuel links might end up looking at lot like a page full of nihilist beliefs. This is why a number of networks, such as Commission Junction, have taken to generating links for publishers with dynamic domains like qu2739.com or h9021u.com (though you shouldn’t rely on their cloaking for reasons we’ll explain shortly).
• Dongs.
• Depending on the terms of your particular network or offer, you may be doing something that the network or advertiser wouldn’t necessarily like. Sometimes it’s not even against the rules, it’s just something that you think might not make you the most popular guy at Affiliate Summit next year. If an affiliate network stumbles across your chicanery by googling their tracking redirect URL you’re going to feel pretty stupid.
• It is considered by some to be true that having lots of affiliate network links in your page affects the ranking of your page in various search engines. SEO is one of my weaker fields, so I can’t speak with much authority on this, but given all the other reasons it doesn’t stand alone.
• Leaving affiliate links exposed on your page makes you a target for the less ethical among us (imagine someone less ethical than the average online marketer!) to scrape the content of your page and simply replace your publisher id with theirs. As time goes on, some networks are beginning to hash their links and take other steps to alleviate this problem, but it’s still a problem.
• Many other reasons.

What is the number one problem with “cloaking” your links? It’s a half-assed, dipshit measure. A “cloaked link” is a redirected link, not a cloaked link. Cloaking is just one of the positive side-effects of redirection. Another positive side-effect is that redirecting a link gives you a chance to gather important information about the transaction, but most guerilla shops miss this in their willy nilly drive to cloak the links.

To better explain, we’ll pretend that you run a PPC campaign that links directly to a landing page full of affiliate offers. If you simply “cloak” the links on this page, you lose all kinds of important data about the transaction and, potentially, the conversion. What kind of information, you ask?

• The PPC network that was the source of the user.
• The keyword that the user clicked on.
• The ad that the user clicked on.
• The date and time of the click.
• The offer on the page that got clicked.
• The actual, database tracked conversion ratio instead of the estimated Google analytics version that you currently use.

Furthermore, once you record this data on the redirect you can assign a transaction id to it in your database and pass that id on to the affiliate network. If the transaction results in a conversion, you can download the subid report from your network (that contains this transaction id, details about the affiliate offer that was completed and the revenue generated) and then true up their records with yours to find out:

• How much this transaction earned.
• Your conversion ratio at the affiliate end for this offer.

Now you’ve got data on impressions and clicks from the PPC network, you’ve got data on the transaction that occurred on your page and you’ve got data about what happened after the user got handed off to the shysters at the affiliate network and, subsequently, their advertiser. When you combine all of this, what can you get?

• Average/Daily/Monthly/Hourly revenue per keyword.
• Average/Daily/Monthly/Hourly revenue per PPC network.
• Average/Daily/Monthly/Hourly revenue per ad.
• Average/Daily/Monthly/Hourly revenue per offer.
• Average/Daily/Monthly/Hourly revenue per click/impression/conversion.
• Let your imagination wander!

What’s the best way to accomplish this? Keeping it fairly simple, have a database to record your links from your affiliate networks and have an admin interface to spit out redirect links for your given domain or domains. Have scripting on your site that knows how to interpret the redirect links (using native querystring variables or disguising them using mod_rewrite rules) to pass the click on to the appropriate offer. During the process, add logic to detect any incoming variables you want to track, write them to a tracking table in the database and spit out a transaction id for every record into the subid field used by the affiliate network (sub, u1, whatever). This is not something that Captain Guerilla of the USS Excel is going to be able to accomplish on his or her own, but it’s not a very big project for a developer once they understand the constraints.

So, hopefully after reading this one can understand what “cloaking” is, why the core concept is an important practice, but also how much data is being wasted every time a link is simply “cloaked” instead of tracked during the redirection. This level of tracking actually isn’t that difficult to achieve. The hard part is the reporting, but you guys spend all day pasting shit in and out of spreadsheets like some kind of awestruck 1982 accountant who has just received his first copy of VisiCalc, so you’ll probably enjoy downloading the raw data and clapping wildly as you make a “Hoo! Hoo!” sound with your mouth and click the sort button on Excel over and over.

Counterpoint: I just need to redirect, I don’t need to get all this other data.

Counter-counterpoint: Die.

#3) What is the best affiliate network?

What is the best beer? What is the best Scotch? This is a stupid question. The opposite question, “What are the worst affiliate networks?” actually yields some useful data about who to avoid and for what reason. Of course when you ask the opposite question, you have to weed through the whiny people who fucked up on their own and blame the affiliate network and these people are very prominent and, unfortunately, very vocal in online marketing.

Getting back to the original question, though, there are ways to make it a less stupid question. You could ask what the best networks are for education offers or what networks have the best AEs, or account executives, (often called AMs, or affiliate managers, in the industry). Maybe you could ask what affiliate networks have the best reporting. Decide what your qualification is for “best” and then ask an intelligent question.

There’s an important caveat here: if you haven’t so much as fucking looked at the networks’ offerings yourself, we will know and we will hate you. The forums don’t exist to do your Goddamn homework for you, so fuck off. Yesterday, at least ten people somewhere on the internet asked whether Commission Junction is better than Linkshare. Yeah, CJ has issues with publisher and advertiser relations that eclipse Linkshare’s, but functionally speaking they tend to have a somewhat similar range of offers from large, branded advertisers. If your question is too broad to make note of this or, even worse, if your question asks something as stupid as “Who has better marketing offers, CJ or LS???” then you deserve to be held down and shat upon by horny Germans.

So, in closing, what is the best affiliate network? Only you can decide, but until you know what the Hell an affiliate network is and what kinds of offers are available from the different kinds of affiliate networks, not only will you not be able to ask an intelligent question, you’ll be too fucking uninformed to understand the answers you’re given.

#4) IS ANYONE ELSE’S [major network] CHECK LATE?!? MY [major network] CHECK IS LATE IS YOUR [major network] CHECK LATE MINE IS?!?! [major network] CHECK LATE?##@??

Fuck you. This always starts the day after checks normally go out. I’ve only seen one or two times in a year that this thread actually turned into a substantive discussion during which it was revealed that a major network sent its checks two fucking days late - you’d have thought it was the apocalypse to read all the fucking howling, crying and impotent threatening. Short of those rare (but still annoying) instances, this thread is always posted by some myopic retard who got fucked by one day because of the postal service.

While the following is probably a larger life lesson of some import, it bears repeating specifically with respect to this: everything is not about you. If your check is late from a major network, ask the Goddamn network. If they’re closed for the day, wait for the next day. If your check is more than a couple of days late, start asking around. If you’re so strapped that getting your check two days late is a major issue in your life then I have some debt consolidation offers that you can fill out.

#5) Should I be building a list?

This is actually not a dumbass question in many cases, but often enough it is. It’s also a topic worth covering, so we’ll add it to the list just for the sake of having useful content on here.

Whether you should be building a list depends on what kind of offers you’re running, there’s no doubt. If you’re running porn offers or ringtones or something of that nature then your user base might be more transient and the typical buying impulse might be as well. Maybe people don’t want to fill out contact info for a porn site and maybe on a ringtone site they’re only likely to give their cell phone number. Who knows? I don’t run that kind of crap. Anyway, not every set of offers is cut out for collecting user info.

All that having been said, a vast majority of the affiliate marketing world consists of offers that ask for some form of personal information and a lot of publishers run these offers. If you’re one of these publishers then you should be building your own list instead of building someone else’s list. Whether these offers are hosted on your servers or the advertiser’s servers or even the affiliate network’s servers, somewhere, somewhen somebody is inputting an email address and other personal info and hitting a submit button. If you’re not on the receiving end of that form then you’re missing out on a goldmine. Certainly you’re going to be better off making the long term gamble and collecting this info for yourself than making the short term gamble and just sending the user off blindly to the network and praying to Jeebus for success.

Let’s break this down another way to explain. A lot of guerilla online marketers have landing pages that redirect to offers that ask for personal info. Really common examples are mortgage, debt, education and loan offers, but plenty of other kinds of offers ask for the same info (Bowflex, Vonage, you name it). If the user is compelled by the advertiser’s creative, hosted elsewhere, to fill out and submit the form then they’re just as likely to be compelled by the same or similar creative hosted on your end. If you can collect this lead information (and other information about the user, such as what keyword they clicked or searched for to get to your site) then you can do a number of things:

• Email the lead multiple times in the future about similar or other offers.
• Amass a targeted list and rent or sell it to other online marketers.
• Set a cookie on your site and pre-populate personalized information on subsequent visits (assuming you expect user retention).
• Depending on the nature of your offers, pass the user on to a single offer or an offer path consisting of an offer or offers that allow pre-population by the advertiser.
• Other neat things!

One of the first lessons you learn about direct marketing in school or in practice is that it’s a numbers game. Whatever methods you use to get eyeballs to revenue-generating content, the concept is the same: you’re driving users to content. Every time you drive a user to an offer using a PPC ad, you pay for that click. Every time you drive a user to an offer using a banner ad or other form of placement, you pay for that click. Even with natural search you’re spending day after day tweaking content and, usually, playing against a field of other SEO experts (as well as the SEM companies) to keep your incoming numbers consistent. However many eyeballs you drive, you expect a certain percentage to complete a revenue generating activity. The problem with all the above methods is that they either cost per eyeball or they suffer from instability or both.

When you build a list, you capture the ability to drive eyeballs to your content at the click of a button and to do it at will, over and over. Obviously doing it too much will destroy the effectiveness of your campaign, but we’ll leave the dumbass email marketing discussions for the dumbass email marketing post. And, as mentioned above, there are a number of offers available where it’s possible to capture the lead and still pass the user off to a pre-populated offer (sometimes even to complete the offer locally on your end) meaning that you can often capture a sizable percentage of the revenue you would have captured anyway.

All in all, building a list, assuming you’re already working with lead-generating offers (and often many other kinds of offers), is a win-win proposition and most people who advise against it either have a theological objection to email marketing or simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Get with the fucking program!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 5:46 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. 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.