Why do we need affiliate networks?

For any business partnered with a network whose task list never seems to change (1. Recruit new affiliates; 2. Grow existing affiliates)from week-to-week and year-to-year it may seem a pertinent question. After all, Amazon kick started the whole industry and they have always managed it completely in house without any need to use an Affiliate Network. Why shouldn't this be the model for the industry as a whole?

It's all about economies of scale and barriers to entry. Amazon may have a popular network yet I would still question almost any business, client or otherwise, that wants to move their affiliate management in house. Just because it ‘works' for Amazon and eBay doesn't mean it will for anyone. In reality most brands simply don't have the technological platform, the expertise or the resource to manage a campaign effectively.

If you were looking at working with just the high volume drivers it might make sense to maintain long-term business partnerships directly in order to keep costs down. Yet ultimately affiliate marketing is all about the long tail and this just is not fertile ground for clients to target directly.

It make sense for a network such as TradeDoubler or Commission Junction to work with an affiliate that generates five sales a month for a client, because they are probably doing this across 30 other clients. It makes sense for them to build a large, self-service tracking platform because it doesn't have to generate a return from one programme - the development and maintenance costs are spread over every programme they represent. It doesn't make sense to build a robust tracking system for just one programme and unless you are Ferrari it probably doesn't make sense to engage on an ongoing basis personally with every partner that can drive a couple of sales every once in a while.

Strong affiliate programmes are all about collaborations - from a client setting the commercial requirements through an agency translating these into a programme strategy and a network providing the technology. All three play an important role.

Amazon and eBay's in house programmes work because they are self-service and they are large enough merchants that the economies of scale still exist and that affiliates are likely to deal with them regardless of them having a tailored platform. This simply isn't the case for smaller merchants - an off the shelf tracking solution is required and most affiliates only have time to deal with a small number of partners. Whilst your specific high volume affiliates may want to talk to you on an individual basis many won't, they just want a simple one stop shop.

If you want volume then you need to be in the supermarket. If you aren't then it's highly likely someone else will be.

Heaven forbid you reduce your PPC budget !

For a any campaign, there is rarely a time when search shouldn’t be considered as part of the marketing mix. An exceptional mechanic at capitalising on demand and a worthy investment despite its weakness in terms of stimulating that initial engagement. Some may say that appearing against a generic search result is beneficial and while I give that argument credence it is rarely the motivating factor in investment choices.

So we are all agreed, spend money on search. Now the tricky bit – the  relationship of investment and results between SEO and PPC. Why do clients confidently and happily spend many hundreds of thousands on PPC however balk at the prospect of paying  five figures for an annual SEO retainer ?  Naturally the focus of a search budget will vary for a number of reasons  - vertical, seasonality, competitive set, business objectives your current position and learning, internal resource, I could keep going for some time however what’s really starting to wind me up is the energy and funds going into the source of 15% of the traffic while the remaining 85% is just “assumed”.

More specifically SEO still seems to be falling between the cracks. It still doesn’t have a comfortable home, its not marketing, its not IT. As a result of this I have recently had the following exchange

“We cant do SEO someone, forgot to put a line in a budget”

“don’t panic” was my retort “lets recut the PPC budget and reinvest in SEO”

eery silence with a look that suggested I’d just asked him to give me his first born.

So my question to you, all 15 of my readers is, what have I missed ? Why on earth wouldn’t you reduce reliance on PPC to invest in organic search ?

Newspaper recycling ?

Interestingly I wrote this last week and the debate has now moved on however I felt quite strongly when I read of the recent lobbying by major media companies in the US to force Google to make them appear top of its natural search results for news stories and decided to post anyway.

It is supreme arrogance, ignorance and laziness from newspaper barons who are rightly scared that they are being increasingly marginalised by users finding their content where they want rather than where these old school ‘institutions’ would have them find it. If newspapers want their sites to be top of search engines, and surely they do with 80% of internet journeys starting with a search, then they should take the steps to make sure they get there via ethical SEO techniques; by improving and optimising their architecture and content and improving the quality of their inbound links via digital PR. Asking for special treatment is just, well, cheating. The Guardian for example, has always been one of the lowest selling national UK dailies but it has tapped into a worldwide liberal audience online and its site is now one of the most read newspaper websites in the world, and consistently the most visited in the UK (although traditionally populist Sun did overtake last week according to Nielsen).  Why is this? Mostly breadth of digital content, especially blogs, and, in the case of the Guardian, the identification of a target audience- something that most national newspapers, who have more or less the same centre right agenda, will not be able to differentiate against. Say what you like about it politically, but the Guardian understands digital arguably better than any other traditionally offline media owner, arguably in the English speaking world. If print media brands want to survive in the brave new world, they need to realise that they are no longer people’s first source for news.

The word ‘fragmented’ does not come near to describing the sources from where users get their content from these days. Why should we go to a newspaper website for it? Many print media owners seem to think that users will come to their site because in the pre-digital past if you wanted news you had no choice other than to use their brand. Moreover, many people only read news in the past because it was all that was available for your commute. Now all that content, and more, is on the web and the new generation of mobile phones such as the iPhone are only making it easier to read that content on the move, even if that portability is still embryonic in its development, not to mention other distractions like mp3 players and video games.

Admittedly, when it comes to big international stories, it is the larger and more established media owners that have the resource to send journalists to the front line but then those media owners need to take steps to ensure that their content is then found by search engines spiders. To ask for special treatment flies in the face of the principle of an unregulated, democratic world wide web. It’s an old media solution in a digital world. We all have to face the reality that there are too many newspapers in the post digital world, certainly in the UK. The Trinity Mirror Group has closed 27 titles in the last year alone. The recent realisation that selling ad space alone does not provide enough revenue for newspaper sites to keep their content free only complicates the issue. Digital has been cutting into the sales of national newspapers for years forcing some, such as the near 150 year old US newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to go online only and reduce their journalist staff from 120 to just 20.  Is subscription for content the answer? That’s a whole different question.  As for the immediate future, newspaper barons can moan as much as they want but although some will have the vision to survive, some are ready for the recycling bin.

Free lunch anyone ?

Apparently there’s no such thing, yet I swear I never picked up the tab on all those long forgotten media lunches (nostalgic sigh). The cost, of course, comes through in the endless phone-calls that follow looking for the chance to get on a schedule, in short acquiring a new best friend. 

The same is true of anything that initially appears free. 

It was just a few weeks ago that the world was up in arms at Facebook’s policy change – an attempt to keep user’s data even in the event that the user permanently leaves the network – until it was swiftly reversed and Facebook suddenly just wanted to  be everyone’s mate again.  You could argue the back-tracking was the right move in light of the fact that even Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is now on Twitter but people are missing an important point here: there is still no such thing as a free lunch. 

What does this all mean?  Behavioural targeting is here to stay and advertising sure as hell isn’t going anywhere, evolving definitely but disappearing never.  This isn’t driven by a dogmatic passion for buying ads but as someone who wants to use websites. 

When Ted McConnell, P&G’s  Marketing Chief, tried to lambast brands for trampling over consumer’s social environments last year and said social networks have no right to monetise its users’ conversations he missed the point – users of social media need those ads, whether they know it or not, just as they need Facebook to sell on their data.