Preventing multiple payments when using multiple affiliate programmes

Daniel Warren Silver
Director of Digital Services at PureNet

13 August 2008 18:13pm

I am working with a retailer who is needing to work with multiple affiliate networks (not by choice - they partner with two sites who happen to using different affiliate networks).

Both the affiliate networks want the retail to pass details of all orders.

1. Is this common practice?

2. Should the retailer only pass order details to the last affiliate who referred the customer, and if so, how is this best achieved?

3. Even if they were only working with one network, would it still be common practice to pass all orders through the to network?

Thanks.
Chris Bishop Gold
Founder & CEO at 7thingsmedia

13 August 2008 22:50pm

HI Daniel

There are various ways to any you are not paying twice for the same affiliate referred sale. The method you chose will vary on the size of the programme and the amount of sales/leads being sent:

Manual - easiest however can be very time sensitive
When you are validating affiliate commissions from both networks and you have the same order ID ensure the affiliate with the last action (click) and therefore agency receives the commission.

Automatic
Gateway Page - A lot of merchants use Gateway pages to set a cookie and therefore track affiliate activity - set up correctly this automatically de-dupes duplicate orders - it is always worth auditing though.

I wouldn't recommend passing orders or even cancelled orders through to the network a) do you want them to know all this information and b) ensuring you are not breaching data protection.
Daniel Warren Silver
Director of Digital Services at PureNet

14 August 2008 08:13am

Thanks Chris.

This is exactly what I thought - in fact we have been trying to convince the retailer to go down the route of a gateway page. This is the approach we have taken before, but, I just needed a sanity check to ensure it was the correct method – especially as both networks they are using are adamant that they should not use a gateway page.
Anonymous
Online Marketing at Nil

14 August 2008 08:42am

Pass them through Dart with a Floodlight tag. This centrally dedupes all activity (search/affils/email etc).
Jonathan Kay Gold
Managing Director at 120 Feet Ltd

19 August 2008 09:52am

Gateway pages are a pain to do and therefore costly and time consuming to manage. Floodlight is limited with regards to which tags can piggyback through it and lacks many useful and essential features. Also, Floodlight is a Double Click product, so do you want to get locked-in to yet another service which will ultimately pump data to Google?

I'm working with a company who has a new to market product called TagMan. (The web site will be live in 1 week so for now look at our Blog, blog.tagman.com .)

TagMan can be used to conditionally serve tags which would resolve the issue your client is experiencing. Ie, to automatically only call affiliate 123’s tag if they ‘own’ the visitor based on rules defined by the client. And if you wanted to be more sophisticated it could also dedupe all other campaign traffic too; very useful if your client is running CPA banner campaigns.

TagMan has been specifically designed to manage and launch any number of 3rd party tags including affiliate, analytics, banner, email, usability, survey etc. You can also make a new 3rd party tag live through TagMan in a matter of minutes, even if you need to collect previously uncollected data from a page without the client having to recode any tags. If you want to know more email me