Advantages of Affiliate Programs

Undoubtedly, marketers planning to launch an affiliate program see a benefit that's much bigger than simply tracking paid listings. Fortunately, a few vendors are spearheading enhancements in this area as well.

Instantly Generate a Savvy Marketing Channel

Work with an affiliate network provider, and you'll tap into thousands of commission-based salespeople who are eager to deliver sales. Affiliates know how to work the Internet. From January through October 2003, for example, Commission Junction affiliates delivered more than 5.1 million verified sales to advertisers.

Top-producing affiliates are executing paid placement and paid inclusion campaigns . Does your strategy allow these efforts? If so, you've basically hired a team of search engine marketers who will work on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis. Your affiliates will perform the keyword analysis, write ad listing copy, develop landing pages, and monitor the results so that you don't have to. (Don't assume that having affiliates perform these services is in your best interest. Read Chapter 23, "Managing Your Affiliates," first to determine the strategy that's right for you.)

It's easy for affiliates to join a network (the application process for Commission Junction was painless for me). Therefore, when you select prospective affiliates, or when they contact you, invite them to join the network you've selected. These networks handle commission processing, fraud detection, and other tasks related to managing affiliates, which removes one more administrative headache from your plate.

Evolving Support for Paid Listings

There's even better news for companies employing affiliate programs: Technology providers are beginning to incorporate search engine advertising resources as part of their solution.

Be Free sells an optional search engine marketing service, including both paid inclusion and Pay-For-Placement (PFP). Then there's My Affiliate Program, which offers an optional pay-per-click (PPC) Track module, where clients can manage their own paid listing campaigns. Clients enter a list of keywords into PPC Track, which creates a unique tracking URL for each phrase. My Affiliate Program generates a search engine ‚ friendly file for marketers to log in to their search engine account and upload the new URLs and associated keywords.

Until affiliate program providers develop a paid listing tracking extension of their service, you can utilize their existing technology, if allowed. (However, it's more cumbersome than using an e-commerce solution that has an ad tracking feature.) I'm proposing three levels of tracking, depending on your time and interest in getting deep with your data. If your program requires contact data for each affiliate, the advanced tracking option is going to be a nightmare to set up. You'll be forced to enter contact data over and over again.

Basic Tracking

Set up each search engine as an affiliate and combine all keywords under that affiliate name .

Intermediate Tracking

Divide your keywords into relevant groups. For example, an insurance broker could lump "auto insurance" terms together and " homeowner insurance" terms into another group. Name an affiliate based on the search engine plus keyword group . Campaigns on Ask Jeeves could be called "Ask Jeeves, Auto" and "Ask Jeeves, Home." Or, create a naming convention that makes sense to you.

Advanced Tracking

Set up each affiliate as a specific part of your paid listing campaigns. For example, the insurance broker mentioned in the previous section could create "Ask Jeeves, Auto, Ad 1, Landing 1" as one affiliate. Here again are your optional tracking levels (from Chapter 16, "Small Business E-Commerce Solutions"):

• By search engine

• By groups or individual keywords

• By ad listing (separate title and description if you create different ones for testing purposes)

• By landing pages (you can set up different ones for the same product for testing purposes)

Set your commission fees to zero if your affiliate program supports this data entry.