Duplication of affiliate / CPA payments

Paul Cook
Founder at TagMan

05 September 2008 13:12pm

We (www.positivefeedback.com) are putting together a questionnaire to probe the issues around the duplication of online performance marketing activities. Before we send it out we thought we’d solicit some expert opinion as to how big an issue this is , what companies are doing about it and why. It you have any thoughts on this subject it would be great to hear from you otherwise anyone know of any good resources in this area?
dan barker
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker

05 September 2008 18:26pm
hi, Paul, how's life?

Here's a neat way of doing it:

Problem

We want to know, for every order, which marketing channels have touched that order. We don't, however, want to pay out to 2 or more marketing providers for their part in that sale - we only want to pay once (if at all).

Solution

We use our own cookie to store details of every marketing channel a customer has come through prior to purchase. At the actual point of purchase, we can therefore attribute what they've touched HOWEVER, we only display the conversion code of ONE CPA partner.

So, let's say your route to purchase is:
- Day 1: visit the site through a Google ad (CPC)
- Day 2: visit the same site through a price comparison site (in this case, a CPA deal)
- Day 3: visit again through another comparison site (a CPC deal)
- Day 4: return through an email campaign (in-house)
- Day 5: return through an affiliate (CPA)
The system would record the fact that that order was touched by each of those different campaigns. It would also record that 'first click' was the google ad & 'last click' was the affiliate.

The internal system would record the following against the order:
- First Click: CPC
- Last Click: Affiliate
- All channels touched: google CPC, price comparison (CPA), price comparison (CPC), email, affiliate (CPA)
But would only show conversion for your choice of:
- All CPC + last-click CPA
- All CPC + first-clicked CPA
- last click only
- first click only
Make any sense?

daniel
Matt Brown
Founder at Hatmatic

09 September 2008 11:18am

Hi Paul

How's it going? We've recently put out a questionnaire to some key UK affiliates, having posted a thread on the A4U forum and got no useful response.

I support Danielb's post, in that merchants are keen to acknowledge where sales are being duplicated, separately to actually remunerating multiple partners.

Once I've correlated my responses, I'll be better placed to offer a publisher representative view.

Merchants absolutely want this information, but again it's a point of contention as to whether they pay only last referrer, particularly if that last referrer is Paid search, I've witnessed the plummet in volume when affiliates are duped out against Paid search.

SEO hasn't been thrown in - surely it will.

My view: Upstream and multiple referrer payment models are going to become the norm, and publishers / affiliates will become used to receiving a lower commission per sale, but a higher incidence of commission payments. There'll be a level playing filed so the focus is less on the perceived unfairness of brand cookies over-writing other hartd working cookies. Cashback sites will struggle to work with this model, simply because they cannot easilty offer their users a variable cashback, post sales report.

And onto reports. Who offers a reliable accurate interface? Not many. Atlas say they do, but from experience don't do it very well, or accurately.

Doubleclick do it through Floodlight, but reporting isn't up to much certainly not from what I've seen. Proprietary, bespoke solutions - purpose built not add-ons - will be where it's at.

Happy to swap questionnaires... ;)