AFFILIATE CITIZEN

Tmesis

‘Tmesis’ – a feeling that you may have missed something. A vague feeling of guilt that intelligent marketeers can use to their advantage to keep shoppers or indeed online browsers around for longer. Comparison sites thrive on this by convincing consumers that the need not look elsewhere and their time has been well spent. Of course, in the current climate of instant gratification time is vital to a lot of people.  This also applies to choosing a suitable merchant, when faced with so many, on the various affiliate networks you may frequent during your time as an online marketeer.

Metrics

How do most people in the offline world overcome the feeling of tmesis? They justify their shopping experience by going for special offers, discounts or top of the range items to ensure they can stave off the guilt of ‘having missed something’. They look to metrics and figures – ‘buy 1 get 1 free’, ‘ 20% off’ and so forth.

In the affiliate-merchant relationship where remote communication and interaction is commonplace affiliates must rely on metrics and figures to gauge a good program and whether to promote it with their precious time. When a market is competitive and many similar merchants are available to the affiliate how can the successful marketeer be sure they have chosen the correct partner and avoid massive tmesis?

We are bombarded with a huge amount of statistics: EPC, CPC, CPA, 90th EPC, CAVE DATA, NETWORK RATINGS, AOV, CONVERSION RATE to name a few. These metrics and figures are extremely useful in measuring the relative performance of merchants against each other but of course the only real test is a live PPC campaign or inserting the merchant onto your content site. Both of which take time and in the former’s case, money.

Gut Instinct

What it comes down to, in my opinion anyway, is a general positive gut instinct feeling about a program. When considering several programs with similar metrics and commission deals consider the ‘added value’. This may well result in you choosing a merchant that could possibly offer a lower %, but the additional aspects will help you run a more profitable campaign.

So what would I consider to be ‘added value’? Read on:

• Tiered program with REALISTIC goals for the affiliate based on sale volume through the month
• Communication and support is viewed as essential by the merchant. This point is crucial in my opinion, especially if you are planning to promote in a market you dont know a lot about. Support via MSN and phone is invaluable in these situations. However, dont stand for agencies who contact you on MSN or offer support and then take days to resolve any problem with ‘their’ merchant.
• The program offers an in house solution. Usually an in house program offers a higher % than the network program as merchants dont have to take into account network costs.
• A reasonable approach to PPC. If you see a merchant’s program that says ‘the affiliate must not bid in a higher position than us’ that is a sure sign of ignorance on the part of the merchant towards how PPC works (notably google) and the long term aspects of an affiliate-merchant relationship.
• With regard to the above point, if the merchant bids on their own brand and restricts affiliates from doing so (commonplace), check whether affiliate cookies are overwritten by the brand bid. This effectively means if anyone comes back to the merchant site by searching on their brand having discovered them at your site – you get nothing. Some merchants do this, some dont.

There are many other added value factors that may come into play for different types of merchant depending on the vertical but those are some of the main ones. Hopefully that will help new affiliates choose the right merchant for a long and fruitful relationship – without too much tmesis!

Lets Start with a Bang!

Ok so to kick off the new blog im going to post about a technical solution to a problem that was raised recently on the A4U forum. The subject raised was how to implement affiliate link masking using a server side scripting language. Now as im fairly fluent in PHP and have also made said scripts it seems a great idea to share them. You need to be able to code a little in PHP to use this and also able to upload to your server (which im assuming most readers should be able to do!).

The Elements

There are three elements we need to get the masking going:

• The robots.txt file – a simple txt file than is specifically targeted towards controlling the behaviour of search engine robots. Its proper purpose is to restrict some areas of websites that are considered private or have some kind of security sensitivities, or, are out of date.
• The redirect page. In this case we we call our page redirect.php – easy.
• The new affiliate links. These will be the links to the redirect page that you will need to write into your pages when everything is in place.

The Robots.txt File

Open up a text editor of your choice (notepad for purists ) and the following code is all you will need:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: redirect.php
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: redirect.php
User-agent: slurp
Disallow: redirect.php

The ‘User-agent’ refers to the robot of a certain search engine. So googlebot for Google and msnbot for MSN etc. Different search engines have different bot names so if you want to block others aside from the big three you’ll need to find out their descriptions before you go ahead and add lines to your robots.txt file. The ‘disallow’ line tells the robot that it cannot crawl that file. In this case the redirect.php file will be in the root of the server to make it easier.  Save and upload your completed robots.txt file to the root of your server.

The Redirect Page

Open up your favourite text editor or website creator and begin a new PHP file. You’ll need to add the following lines of code:

<?
$linkid = $_GET['linkid'];
if ($linkid == "") {$link = "http://www.yoursite.com";}
if ($linkid == "1") {$link = "http://www.merchant1.com/";}
if ($linkid == "2") {$link = "http://www.merchant2.com/";}
header("Location: $link");
exit();
?>

Lets look at the code. The $linkid variable is provided in the links we will use from the pages with affiliate links on  -  more on that in a moment. Each link is assigned a number and placed into a conditional statement. The statement compares the $linkid value and assigns the $link variable the correct url. The final two lines then forward the browser to the $link location url using the header function in php. Add as many links as you need, most probably every time you add a new link to your site that needs masking. Save this file as redirect.php and upload to the root of your PHP enabled server. We now need one more essential element….

The New Affiliate Links

Previously your links may have looked like this for all to see:

http://scripts.affiliatefuture.com/AFClick.asp?affiliateID=xxxxx&merchantID=xxxx&programmeID=xxxx&mediaID=x

Take the raw affiliate links and place them into your redirect.php file. Assign them numbers as described above. Lets say for now the affiliate future link above is named as ‘1′. Now you are ready to write your new link just like this:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?linkid=1">Affiliate Future Merchant Name</a>

And voila! The new link should now go through the redirect page and the search engines (well those that obey the robots.txt file) won’t see it. If you are really paranoid about search engines following afiliate links try adding rel=”noindex, nofollow” to your masked links.

There are many other things you can do with a redirect script to help with analytics and monitoring of your websites, one example is to add popular links (or products) to a database on the fly. Another is to send an email to yourself if a link has been clicked. Ill cover that in another post soon!