- Affiliate websites are non-transactional which means I have less control over the conversion data.
- Affiliates mainly direct traffic to merchants that could be obtained from any source.
- I have too many products, offers or merchants on my site so I don’t have time to understand what is converting better for me or my merchants.
- Not all affiliates understand the product, brand or business better than the owners/providers themselves.
- I spend too much time on data collection and data entry and less on understanding it.
- How to i interrupt data and what is de duping?
- Why do customers come back on my website if i am not offering the final product?
- Building good relationships with merchants and networks are not important for me because they have hundreds of affiliates working for them and their offers are open for everyone.

Well, all these issues or concerns could be resolved if the nine key strategies are understood. Please note that these are explicitly identified for affiliates based on my experience in the affiliate industry.

Nine Key Strategies For Affiliates
I have divided nine key strategies into three sections that shows customer journey on affiliate websites. The first stage understands the offer, second stage is to present the offer and third section consists of retaining the offer.

Understand The Offer
This stage is where all affiliates struggle to make a decision. There are thousands of merchants and vouchers, millions of products, so many networks and a healthy competition. This section offers three factors to understand the offer in detail.

1 – Interests & Inspiration
I had difficulty identifying a niche because I had interests in so many sectors, merchants and offers but not all of them were inspiring to me. The first stage is to think what could be an interesting niche to work in and also that should be inspiring for you. I was interested in sports but it was martial arts and snooker that could inspire me for long. I would suggest limiting the scope if you are new or small affiliate, because that would help you in all the other factors below. Look around yourself and let’s answer these questions.

- What sort of products do I normally purchase?
- Which sport do I enjoy playing?
- Where do i shop from?
- What do i read and watch?
- What type of products do i find in my house and what do they represent?
- What brand you, your sister, brothers, parents and friends like to purchase?
- What sort of gifts do you receive and from whom?
- Are you member of a social, charitable or other group? What are their interests and what inspired you to be part of that cause?

All these questions can help you to find a niche that is relevant, interesting and may inspire you to explore further and work on it daily. Affiliate website does not just mean a voucher or cashback website; you can be more successful with niche websites if you can identify one that represents your interests and it will definitely provide you better conversion in return.

2 – Relevance & Scope
It is important to understand the relevance of the offer and the scope for it in the market. I normally link relevance and scope together such as i need to offer a relevant product / offer to consumers but is there enough scope for it in the market? Such as there is higher scope for football in England than Cricket in the sports. In order to understand the relevance, I normally map the offer with my personality and analyse if I could be a potential customer of that offer? But it is not the best way to explore the scope for irrelevant offers to me. Another simple process is to sit down with your family or friends for a brain storming session. The topics you could explore with yourself or with a group of people are as follows.

- If the niche, brand or product I am interesting in could potentially be relevant to them?
- Do they have alternatives in mind that could help me increase my scope and relevance?
- Have I done market research on it? Trust me, you will find decent amount data on the net about the niche you are interested in. Get some numbers to identify the potential scope.
- Are there other big players in the market with my idea?
- Have I contacted the networks to get expert advice?
- Have I trawled through affiliate or product type forums?
- Try getting in touch with a couple of affiliate managers both at agency and merchant level to get some insights on the scope of the market.

These research based questions gives you enough information on the offer that is interesting and inspiring for you. Also if that shows potential relevance to the market you would like to present, and if that market has the scope for it. If you are fairly clear in these four attributes of selecting a niche then there is a better value and potential for you to succeed.

3 – Segment & Filter Users
Once you have decided on the niche for the project, the next stage is to understand the customer segments for your project. There are several ways to segment your potential audience. Your aim should be to target the consumers that convert better, at least from the beginning. The general segmentation rules apply to age, gender and location. Other segmentation attributes that could be relevant to you could be education, interests, hobbies, family structure, salary etc.

At this stage, your aim should be to write down major criteria for consumer selection that you believe could be your potential audience. It would be interesting exercise to ask the affiliate managers specifically at merchant level to give you some insights on their customer types i.e. age range, gender, location, average order value, buying for themselves or others as gifts etc.

The segmentation process for your niche affiliate project will also help you to manage your promotional campaigns more effectively i.e. age range, gender, interests, location controls for PPC campaigns on all major search engines and Social Media.

Publish The Offer
Some may argue this stage is easy if the last three sections are understood and implemented perfectly. I believe every stage in this process is important and none of them can be ignored.

4 – Track Everything
Before you start pushing the offers to your targeted audience, setup a tracking mechanism that should include all stages from entry to exit. Tracking the user journey can provide you detailed insights on what your customers are looking for, bounce rate for each page, best converting offers/pages, and more importantly if you are getting ROI on your promotional campaigns.

All your promotional campaigns i.e. email campaigns, referral programs, PPC clicks should be monitored on site. Paid campaigns such as Google Adwords may provide you information on how many clicks were provided on the website but how do you know if that click or user converted for you, how long he spent on your website, what did he browse and much more.

It is also useful to save all website searches in database that can provide you additional details on consumer interests. There are several free analytics packages that can provide you history of user journey, best pages viewed, most entry and exit pages and much more for you to define the promotional strategy. It does not matter how big or small your website is in that case. What you should be interested in finding out what your consumers are interested in on your website.

5 – Presentation
You have already conducted half of the work required to create the interests for the user and also making sure your promotional efforts are bringing in the potentially targeted users. Next stage is to make sure that the offer or product you are offering is presented clean, effective, open and visible. Remove all popup or pop-under, additional clicks and other barriers on the offer page.

Large clear image, visible branding and message and easy click to action buttons are imperative on this stage. It will not only reduce your bounce rate but also help you to increase the conversion rates effectively.

6 – Get Them Out Quickly
This is another important element specifically for affiliates that is widely misunderstood. Affiliate websites are not always considered to provide the best interactive options or journey. The goal is to obtain a potential customer, present relevant and clear message and get him out to the merchant website for perform the required action. There is no use if a customer keeps browsing and trawling the affiliate website, registers, makes friends, dropping comments on stores, adding his profile info if he is not conducting the required function that in return generates revenue for the affiliates.

Try avoiding unnecessary data collection from customers before they even shop, presenting them large registration forms or hiding the call to action links on the expense of conversion rates.

Retain The Offer
Customer journey does not end once the sale is conducted at first instance. Merchants may not like that the same customers are being referred every time from affiliate websites because they have to pay commission on each sale but being an affiliate myself, I would like to make sure that I also make loyal customers for my website that in return increases my conversion rate at lower cost.

7 – Track Conversions
As mentioned in last stage to keep the full registration to minimum to encourage more exit clicks to merchant sites, it will be valuable to grasp just email at this stage and also send that email to the networks as an additional parameter in the merchant Deep-links. There are two benefits of this process for affiliates. Firstly, consumers can be contacted via newsletters if only email is obtained at the stage and secondly to understand which sale is attributed to the email/user on the network. Please ask the networks on how to add and track additional parameters in the URL i.e. dynamically add &epi=my@email.com at the end of the URL for Trade Doubler. If you do not wish ask email address on exit page then even sending dynamic IP address and campaign referrer i.e. Google, Newsletter etc of the customer could offer interesting information.

8 – Analyse Consumer Buying Behaviour
If you write down the consumer journey from the steps above, you can easily clarify that actually each step is being effectively managed, tracked and data is available to analyse consumer buying behaviour.

- Step one, two and three shows strategic process to define, create and scope your interests and audience for the website.
- Your promotional campaigns will be targeted that in return will attract potential audience.
- Setup tracking to understand which sources are generating the quality of traffic.
- Setup goals and path for consumer journey on your website and track each step similar to checkout process.
- Track each sale from networks and match the data based on email or IP address. If you can add the conversation data in your DB from networks then you will begin to view interesting results on consumer buying behaviour and promotional campaigns.

Essentially affiliates can track the entire campaign and user journey with effortless and free tools. It is simple to manage it for niche and small websites and the data will be able to show exciting results. On my websites, I normally track all of the above to understand the following questions.

- Which campaigns are converting better and at what cost?
- Any changes in number and quality of traffic from each source, time and day?
- How much should I spend on each campaign for breakeven based on conversion ratio, commission and average order value?
- What users hunt on search engines and on my website?
- What customers view, which pages have higher bounce rate, highest and lowest rates on exit and entry pages?
- Adding additional info in deep links helps me understand which user actually converted and at what cost?
- What sort of users convert better based on gender, location, age range, interests, campaign etc so I can concentrate on similar segments rather than targeting everyone in the niche, especially if working on small marketing budget.

9 – Retain The Customer
Finally, how do we make sure that the customer makes the purchase again and again from an affiliate website? Well, if you have managed to get the user make the sale at the first instance or even after several visits, that shows interests of the customer on your website. Let’s just assume this interest in your website makes the customer loyal to your website offers. The concern here is how you would get back to the customer with more relevant offers. It is easy to understand what customers were looking for, what was purchased at what price etc, that in return gives you several ideas on what sort of offers you should be sending to engage the customer again. Some ideas I normally look into retaining the customers from analytics packages and other data collection methods are as follows

- Understand the buying schedule of the customer. If they purchase once in a month that could potentially be when they get paid. You do not want to miss the opportunity of sending them relevant offers at the right time. Check your best conversion days that may give you some additional information and you can plan your email marketing campaigns more effectively.
- Understand buying capacity of users. Collect the data from the networks to analyse how much on average your customers spend per merchant or product. That would help you to send them offers within the range of their budget.
- Check you best selling products or offers and present similar rather than alternatives. You probably do not have time and budget to change perceptions of customers about their choice when similar products are available.
- Work closely with networks and merchants to understand the changing trends and latest offers in the market.
- Increase your product knowledge especially if you are working with seasonal, technology or customised offers or products.

These were my nine tips for affiliates extracted from my personal experiences with the industry as an affiliate.

Good Luck..

This section is important to understand what is affiliate marketing, who affiliates are and if you being an online merchant, need an affiliate campaign?

What is an affiliate campaign?
In simple terms, affiliate campaign is an opportunity and process for online merchants to promote their products or services to the relevant audience through affiliate partners. Affiliates provide targeted users to merchants and earn a percentage or fixed bounty in return.

How does it work?
There are several ways merchants could setup an affiliate campaign. The most successful method is by working with an affiliate network and they will be responsible for setting up the campaign for you from the beginning. The other option is to purchase an affiliate tracking software and manage it yourself. We will explore the pros and cons of each setup later in the article.

What is an affiliate network?
An affiliate network is a technology provider to manage an affiliate campaign. That will contain setting up the affiliate campaign, managing sales & tracking, recruiting affiliates, authorising payments, communicating and providing promotional contents to affiliates.

The affiliate mix!
As mentioned above, affiliates could be individuals working from home, professional affiliate or media companies. The aim of each affiliate is to provide relevant traffic to merchant website and earn a bounty in return. The affiliates mix could entail content websites, email newsletter companies, search engine professionals, individuals with websites, blogs or forum, cashback or voucher websites, RSS engines, article directories, widgets, content writers and a so on.

Do I need an affiliate campaign?
This question can not be answered by a network or an affiliate for a merchant. If you answer Yes to the questions below then definitely you need an affiliate campaign.
1 – Do you have a website?
2 – What do you sell on the website (products / services)?
3a– If it is service then do you gather customer data i.e. Contact details of potential customers?
3b– If you sell products then is the website transactional?
4 – If yes to point 3a or 3b then write down your profit margins on a paper.
5 – Do you need relevant traffic on your website i.e. potential customers to purchase your product or service?
6 – Do you advertise online / offline? If yes then do you have a sales budget? Some may argue that it should be covered in the marketing budget.
7 – Do you wish to pay affiliates only when the customer agrees to purchase your product/service?
8 – Please identify a couple of your direct competitors and view their websites or call their marketing mangers to find out if they have an affiliate campaign and what value do they offer to their affiliates? This exercise is only required if you are not sure what should you offer to your affiliates.
9 – Once you have analysed how much you are willing to offer to affiliates then deduct the cost from your profit margins. For example if you are computer retailer with only 5% profit margin then how much are willing to give away to affiliates? The last point can guide you to find the value/bounty you can offer.

Have you answered yes to the top six answers and identified the bounty you will be willing to offer that is similar if not comparatively higher. Don’t worry if it is not even close to what your competitors have on offer for affiliates. Well, my conclusion is that you definitely need an affiliate campaign.

The second section shows how to setup an affiliate campaign and what elements are important to consider while choosing the right technology or technology providers.

Affiliate Technology
I do not recommend setting up an affiliate campaign through purchasing a third party affiliate management software. However, it may be comparatively cheaper but may not be an effective and competitive tool for a new merchant in the industry.

The major issues are you are required technical resources to setup the technology, recruit and communicate with affiliates, make regular payments and so on. So let’s concentrate on the tried and tested affiliate technology and management providers.

Affiliate Networks
Affiliate networks are affiliate technology and management providers. Well, some of them are just technology providers so it could be tricky for you to choose the right network just by searching in Google. Some of the important factors you need to consider while choosing an affiliate network for your campaign are as follows.

Read affiliate comments on the affiliate networks on Affiliates4u.com forum. You will be surprised to explore minor issues which are neglected by large networks i.e. effective communication or affiliate payments on time. I will also recommend posting a question on the forum to view how and on which network affiliates would like to work with you and if your affiliate proposition is appealing to them?

There are 4-5 cost of layers involved in the process; Setup cost, affiliate commission, network markup on affiliate commission, monthly management fees, occasional promotional cost and these are excluding VAT. The setup cost only covers the integration of tracking pixels and not the banner/creative designs. The merchants are responsible for providing the creative.

Just to give you an idea, the setup fees could be in the range of £0-£5000, monthly management fees £0-£500, network markup is normally 20-30% on your affiliate commission, promotional cost could start from £50 to £20,000 and don’t forget to include extra cost if you have an agency to manage your campaign. Of course there is no harm in paying all that cost if you can achieve a valuable ROI that should be reviewed at least quarterly.

I would strongly recommend working on affiliate commission and network markup model with the networks. I hardly view good return on monthly management fees, promotional cost and some ridiculous set up fees. If you are not sure then email me and I can recommend some networks based on your business and product range.

Another factor you need to analyse while choosing an affiliate network is your competition. If your competitors work with network A then why should you work with network B? What additional benefits do they offer you and at what cost? Some networks specialise in particular niche that can beneficial in terms of gaining similar affiliate base and offering them additional bounty on the same channel. It will also be useful to review your network performance at least on quarterly basis.

How to setup affiliate tracking?
Once you have chosen an affiliate network and analysed the cost, it’s time to start technical integration. The first step is to add tracking facilities (pixels or tags). It is normally a JavaScript code that needs to be implemented on the checkout confirmation page. The aim of the code is to track sales referred by your affiliates and fire the relevant order details back to your affiliate network. Your network can help you to implement and test the tracking pixels.

Here some of the important elements you need to understand at this stage.
- If you are using more than one affiliate network at a time then consult with your networks for local cookie to stop duplicate sales.
- Are you de duping the sales against only affiliate networks or the entire marketing mix?
I would suggest reading my other post “De Duping For Merchants” to understand how merchants should implement the tracking facilities to have better control on the tracking facilities.

Links, Creative, Product Feeds, Dynamic Contents & phone numbers
Prior to launch, you will have to provide essential contents to affiliates that can be published on their websites. The contents are delivered through the affiliate network. Here are some tips for you to provide links, banners, product feeds and dynamic contents.

Links
- Provide deep link facility to affiliates
- Update links on regular basis and drop the referrals on best selling products, categories etc

Creative
- Design banners in different sizes, from different categories & in different colours
- Clear and clean call to action on the banners
- Design jpg/gif banners and flash based if required
- Use your strong brand identity, if the brand is well known
- Integrate your other promotional themes in the banner i.e. as seen on TV, on BBC etc
- Add authentic credentials (not SSL logo) i.e. Best Seller Award, Lowest Price Award etc
- Use quality product images
- Use rollover effects to add 2-3 frames/layers of message but don’t exaggerate it with flashy effects

Some of the banner sizes acceptable for affiliates are as follows.
- 728 x 90 Leader board banner
- 468 x 60 Full horizontal banner
- 234 x 60 Half banner
- 125 x 125 Square button
- 120 x 240 Vertical banner
- 120 x 90 Button
- 120 x 60 Button
- 88 x 31 Micro button
- 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
- 250 x 250 Square Pop-Up
- 240 x 400 Vertical Rectangle
- 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
- 180 x 150 Rectangle
- 425×600 Extra Large Rectangle
- 425×500 Extra Large Rectangle
- 425×425 Extra Large Rectangle
- 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper
- 120 x 600 Skyscraper
- 300 x 600 Half Page

Product Feeds
This is a huge topic to be discussed separately but let me to give you an overview on its purpose and integration. Product Feed contains the list of necessary product information required for your affiliates to publish your entire product range on their websites. Product Feeds could be provided both for products or services depending on the choice of your network. Product feeds could be supplied in excel, xml or text file and some of the important columns in the product feed are be as follows.
- Product Name
- Price
- Description
- Image URL
- Click through URL

You can include additional elements that could be necessary based on your product information i.e. delivery cost, colour, size, large image URL, specification, quality, delivery time, warranty, SKU, EAN, ISBN, voucher code, up sell and cross sell item URLs etc.

I would suggest providing additional and unique information to affiliates and networks that makes it easy for them to dynamically map the products. I was setting up a website for mobile phones and the product feeds from a merchant did not have colour attribute in a unique column for us to easily map it with our system. Finally, we decided to drop that merchant from our database as it required too much admin resource to manually check and add colours. Consult with your affiliates as which attributes/columns would they like to view in the feed that will make you a winner. View the list of comparison engines at paler.com to understand how your contents could be published through product feeds.

Dynamic Contents
That entirely depends how creative your network and developers are to design dynamic contents such as hotel booking form, fight ticket checker, mobile phone form, search form in the banners, wordpress plug-in for your affiliate feeds, widgets etc. Some networks do offer these facilities as built in their technology package and others expect you to design and incorporate it separately.

Phone Number
This is a controversial topic between merchants and affiliates. If affiliate referrals are conducting sales over the phone number then how tracking pixels are implemented etc. First of all merchants needs to make that decision if they are going to allow phone numbers on the website even for affiliate referrals. It is fairly easy to hide the phone numbers from affiliate referrals and I will strongly recommend it to build strong relationship with affiliates. The phone number could be concealed with the help of the tracking facilities. Some of my clients have disabled the phone number by identifying the campaign through the analytics package and others by providing additional parameter in the affiliate URL such as www.network.com/?p=n

Affiliate Recruitment
Now the final stage is to recruit relevant affiliates and building strong relationship with them. There are several ways to recruit relevant affiliates.

- Publish your campaign details on affiliate forums i.e. affiliates4u.com
- Attend affiliate exhibitions, round tables, parties and discussions
- Trawl on search engines with relevant keywords i.e. ‘computer memory’ shows more than 73,000,000 thousands results and it is fairly easy to find 20 affiliate websites from the first ten pages. This exercise can help you identify affiliate websites ranking higher based on your product or service keywords
- Contact your network to be included in monthly newsletters and request them to publish your campaign on their affiliate page that may not be free on some networks
- There are some software packages to find affiliates but I have personally never used it. However, I do recommend Hitwise but it may be expensive to justify for affiliate recruitment mainly for a new or small retailer. Hitwise can provide detailed list of websites driving traffic to your competitors that also include affiliates.
- I used to follow a tricky procedure but it really works. Once you have identified a couple of relevant affiliates. Use alexa.com free service to find the similar websites. I used to have unbroken chain for hours to explore relevant affiliates.
- Create an affiliate page on your website with detailed information on the commission, T&Cs and link to the networks
- Your customers could be your affiliates. Try adding your affiliate proposition in the order confirmation page or dispatch email.
- Setup additional benefits for new affiliates i.e. entry in to competition or double commission on first sale

Recommendations
Finally, here some important tips for online merchants that could potentially enhance the exposure and loyalty with your affiliates.
- Work with the different mix of affiliates and build strong relationships with your top 20 affiliates
- Keep researching new affiliates from networks, forums and analytics packages
- Validate the sales and make the affiliate payments on time
- Hide the sales phone number if possible
- Be honest to affiliates, don’t hide if you are not paying commission on VAT or delivery charges
- Offer discount voucher codes on products, categories or on the basket value
- Communicate frequently with your affiliates with latest offers, deals, voucher codes, creative and also show appreciation to them for working on your campaign
- Provide creative banners, graphics and latest product feeds
- Engage the affiliates through regular competitions
- Offer different or layered bonus structure to top performing affiliates
- Offer them instant support through email, phone, forums or internet messengers
- Affiliate campaign is built mainly on relationships and not just technology. It is vital for you build strong relationship both with your networks and affiliates
- Finally be simple, honest and straight with your affiliates

Good Luck.

Why merchants should de-dupe sales?
I personally de-dupe merchant sales for two reasons. First of all to make sure that merchants only pay once for a valid sale (not in all cases) and the second reason is related to campaign analytics that means to identify which referrer or campaign is contributing to the last click sale.

Please note that you do not need necessarily explore analytics or tagging software at this stage and I am not intending to recommend any. The aim of the article is to provide basic understanding to merchants on why and how should they de-dupe sales? However, it is important to start thinking what would you be aiming to achieve and then choose a relevant technology.

Rules for de-duping campaigns!
Merchants should define a set of rules before start looking into de-duping process i.e. which campaigns should be included in the de-duping process. Merchant do wish to control the cost and stop leakages in online campaign tracking but also do not alienate the paid campaigns those are mainly based on the CPA model. Once you have identified the rule then it would be interesting to list down all the campaigns you would like to add in the de-duping circle.

I have worked for several merchants in the UK and I personally suggest the following rules for online merchants in computers, home and garden and electronics market.

1 – Add your monthly subscribed campaigns that could be PPC, Affiliate, Media, email etc
2 – Add your link building campaigns only for first year i.e. Yell, Directories etc
3 – Do not add random link campaigns you have generated with automated link software or outsourced to a guy from India
4 – Do you want to add your returning customers? Be careful on that as most websites in CPA model work on customer loyalty platform and would like to earn commission on each sale from a new or registered customer
5 – Do not add social media bookmarks. These are typically free and generated by other users
6 – Do not add social network bookmarks but consider your own social application i.e. Facebook or iphone application etc.
7 – Do not add random articles written by third party, users on their website or blog, review services, send to friend forms on website, comments from existing customers
8 – Add offline campaigns i.e. paid magazines, newsletters etc. Well, think again on this…

It does not matter if your campaigns are based on CPA (affiliates), CPC (search), CPM (media) or other hybrid models. It is imperative to add all the campaigns in the mix based on your rules.

One of the important elements of de-duping is to control duplicate sales within affiliate mix if you are running affiliate campaigns from more than one network. Other campaigns are pre-paid or must-be-paid based on the traffic but if you do not wish to add other campaigns in the de-duping process then you might be paying a lot more than you should, primarily on your CPA campaigns.

CPA – Cost per Action/Acquisition means that the bounty is paid when an agreed action is performed such as making a purchase or applying for a credit card etc.
CPC – Cost Per Click means paying agreed amount on per click only, as I mentioned must-be-paid campaigns
CPM – Cost per Thousand means paying an agreed amount for impressions per thousand.
Don’t confuse yourself if it stands for CPM and not for CPT.
Hybrid Models – these are based on combination of CPA, CPC and CPM models.

De-dupe experiment!
OK, you have setup the rules and identified the campaigns at this stage. Now let’s analyse some scenarios based on the sample image below.

You can view each order had several referrals before the users decided to make the purchase. The cost to the retailer on each sale is also shown based on the agreements with the marketing campaigns. I am not sure how many times a user may divert and come back to your website from a different channel/referrer before making the purchase but I have seen between 2-6 visits in Home & Kitchen sector. It would of course depend on your sector, marketing campaigns channels, consumer segmentation and targeting techniques, relevance, product type, price sensitivity, availability, loyalty with the brand and much more. A typical online customer buying weekly grocery from Asda or Tesco websites would make the decision in the first or second visit but may browse a retailer website several times/sessions when installing a new kitchen, matching bed linen colours and booking holidays abroad. Also, a single decision maker would be able to finalise the sale in less visits as compared to when more members/family is making a combined decision. The consumer buying behaviour and decision making power are separate topics that will be discussed in some other session so let’s get back to our de-duping process.

De-dupe results!
We have seen that de-duping against selected campaigns could save considerably towards your marketing cost. After de-duping the CPA based campaigns do not generate duplicate sales across networks and only the last referrers are honoured with the commissions. The campaign cost for first sale hasn’t changed because the first three campaigns are based on the CPC model and they must be paid on each click and the last referrer is an affiliate network, based on CPA model that should only be paid when the sale is conducted and they are the last referrer. The total cost before de-duping is £13.90 and £7.70 afterwards, reducing the cost by 45%. This is just an example to show you how you can calculate the cost and it could be more or less based on your campaign agreements. If you do not de-dupe sales but you do have an analytics/tagging package then try to drill down some reports based on clicks/conversions data and analyse in detail. You would probably understand the above concept just by looking at some consumer clicks that finally converted into sales and referred by several campaigns in single or different sessions.

Secondly, you also need to analyse and make some decisions here. Let’s get back to the image above. Google has referred two customers also participated in making the conversion decision and email campaign has also referred two customers but did not mange to convert the customer. I would think of the following scenarios here for a merchant.

1 – Conversion ratio of each campaign if they were the first referrer
2 – Conversion ratio of each campaign if they were the last referrer
3 – Who was the initiator that probably indicates where you are spending heavily OR you have highly relevant audience on that channel
4 – Which campaign is under-performing based on the conversions but they were the initiator i.e. Yahoo in our case. These are your choice of rules how to interrupt that information such as Yahoo provided the first impression to the customer or Yahoo did not manage to convert the customer at first opportunity.
5 – The cost and sale was comparatively lower for order no 3466 before de-duping. Does that mean those campaigns manage to convert a customer in fewer clicks and that combination is more effective and so on..

I will leave you on that to make up your own assumptions because you probably know your customers, campaigns, products and market segment better. Keep these attributes in mind because they will provide you a base and logically understand the rules to process the data with more consequential approach.

How to de-dupe?
Now we have learnt what is de-duping and why merchant should perform it regularly. Let’s get a bit technical and understand how can we de-dupe the data (click/conversion) in some easy steps but we must set up another rule first that is how often should we de-dupe? This is based on how you are de-duping mainly for CPA campaigns where conversion data is instantly passed on to the relevant parties.

Tip: If you only wish to de-dupe against affiliate campaigns then ask the networks about the local cookie and that would solve your problem of cross network duplication. However i strongly recommend investing in other technologies to build strong and long term solution.

Data collection for de-duping
First of all, merchants need an effective conversion tagging solution. I have worked with Tagman and it works perfectly. Please feel free to browse other providers on the internet or eConsultancy report on Website Analytics also offers a list of top analytics packages. Analytics packages are more advanced with additional facilities but our aim at this stage is to tag each click referral to store them in database and then fire the relevant campaign tag. The tagging software allows you to add additional parameters in the URL at the beginning or at the end that would help the technology to track each click, referral and conversion data.

For example your website domain is www.mywebsite.com and the tagging could be done in many ways to identify the campaigns or referrals such as
www.mywebsite.com/home.php?campaign=Google
www.tagsoftware.com/home.ph?campaign-Google?URL=http://www.mywebsite.com

The first URL has the campaign identifier at the end and the user would be directed on the merchant website. The second URL is directed to a tagging technology server to save the campaign id before redirecting the traffic to their merchant website. Merchants do not have to worry about the URL redirection and campaign keyword tagging because these are based on your choice of tagging or analytics package.

Here is a simple example to show you what and how the data is stored for de-duping? In our experiment image above for order no 3455; the data stored with minimum ease could be as follows.

The session ID shows the unique user, RefID is the campaign name, date and time and who contributed to the conversion on the last click. Of course this is very simple and you would probably view the conversion and all sorts of other data in your analytics/tagging package. The aim is to show you the trend and what you should expect when thinking to designing or purchasing an analytics or tagging technology.

Note: There are several free solutions available on the market. I have not explored in detail if they are effective for this purpose i.e. Google Analytics but you are most welcome to recommend in the comments box below.

We have covered three main sections by now. Firstly, what is de-duping and why is it important to merchants? Secondly, rules for de-duping and thirdly how it should be done? Once you have decided which solution should be used for de-duping, you should not have any problem to setup, configure and test the technology with the technology vendor.

Types of de-duping process
There are two main types of de-duping processes you will encounter with your chosen technology. Here is the brief overview of both with the additional benefits for choosing the right technology.

Manual de-duping
The first type of de-duping process is rather manual that means that the technology tagging system is collecting information in the database and you would be able to view the reports and extract the data but the data is not being de-duped instantly. This normally happens when the conversion codes (tags) from all the campaigns are dropped on the checkout page. Once the sale is conducted, the data is passed on to all the tags nested on the website based on the campaign cookie and also to the tagging technology. The problem is that that the conversion data has been passed on and the de-duping would be conducted manually through CSV or xml files mainly for CPA campaigns.

The above image shows that the de-duping solution sits in between the website and campaigns. Each campaign click is nested with additional parameters for the database to save the valid information. However, the problem is that the conversion and de-duping technology tags are still nested on the merchant website.
In the above case, three cookies are being dropped on user machine; website, campaign referrer and de-duping technology cookie with both user and campaign ID.

Benefits
- De-duping technology is collecting data on each click and conversion in detail through the tag implemented on the website.
- Merchants will be able to extract the data instantly.
- The sale at Trade Doubler will be removed when de-duping is manually conducted based on the de-dupe technology results.
Problems
- Two external cookies are being dropped. One from the campaign referrer and other from the de-duping solution. Data is being directed to both parties, merchant and referrer based on referrer cookie. That means that even Yahoo that is the first referrer will receive the conversion data when the sale is conducted.
- Trade Doubler will also receive the conversion data based on their cookie but the sale will be later rejected during the de-duping process that will be conducted manually. Being an affiliate I would not like sales being rejected at the end of the month and would create more work for affiliates if not networks to explore the reasons of the rejected sales.
- MSN and email newsletter does not have conversion tags implemented on the website and therefore do not receive any data back. However, the data is being collected at the de-dupe hub and would provide you conversion results in detail.
- Another problem is that de-duping process is not required for Yahoo because the campaign is based on CPC but the conversion tag was implemented to monitor performance of the campaign. In this case Yahoo will keep getting conversion data even though they are not the last referrer and that would potentially give you over performed results.

I personally do not recommend such systems because you still have to perform de-dupes manually and also data is being passed on as normal to all campaigns which is simply not wise if you are a large merchant. Let’s analyse the second process in detail.

Auto de-duping

The second implementation process is exactly the same except one element that makes the real difference.
– Campaign conversion tags are nested on the de-dupe technology database and only de-dupe tags are remained on the website.

Benefits
- Campaign clicks are directed to website through the de-dupe technology.
- Conversion data is passed to the de-dupe database from the website and then directed to the last referrer. In this case trade doubler will not receive the conversion data and it does not require manually de-duping the sales.
- Yahoo will also not receive the conversion data and the results will be more accurate.
The above case is ideal as it would only provide relevant data to the concerned parties based on the pre-defined rules and also eliminates manually de-duping. Another major benefit is that the conversion reports will produce accurate results.

How to de-dupe offline?
It is difficult to de-dupe sales against offline campaigns. First of all think carefully, do you really want to de-dupe sales against your offline activities? For example I have seen a nice kitchen unit ad in the local newspaper and only managed to memorise the brand name, finally I went to Google and found the website. This is a big argument if merchants should honour the conversion to Google or the local newspaper? If we are still convinced that the last referrer should be honoured then it will be Google. I let the merchants decide here..

The simplest way to track the offline media sales is to offer a unique discount / voucher code. When the code is redeemed on the checkout, the tagging system should be able to identify if the voucher code has been tagged with a pre-defined offline campaign or not? If it has then do not pass on the conversion data to the referrer otherwise let is go to the last referrer but isn’t the argument to honour the last referrer?

Summary
- De-duping for merchants is a process of comparing, identifying and validating legitimate sales within the marketing mix based on the user tracking data.
- De-duping can save thousands of pounds for large retailers and provide accurate results for the marketing campaigns.
- Setup rules on the marketing mix and do not include non-paid campaigns.
- Understand the reason, processes and methods of de-duping before identifying a technology to work on.
- Tag each new campaign and inform the referrer about the conversion process.

Good Luck..

Why merchants de-dupe sales?
Merchants generally implement tracking facilities to identify the referrers with each click on the website. A customer may be referred by several affiliate websites and finally makes the purchase. Who do you think should get the commission on the sale? Should it be the last or first referrer? Well, let’s assume it would always be the last referrer in our case and also based on how UK affiliate networks operate.

What is Local Cookie?
If the merchant’s affiliate campaign is available from more than one network then it becomes tricky. Both networks would like to claim the commission of the sale. How do merchants setup conversion tracking so that only one network is honored with the commission? It is fairly easy as all networks in the UK offer a solution called Local Cookie that helps merchants identify the last referrer based on their cookie.

Let me explain with an example.
Merchant Uzbekistan program is available on two networks in the UK. A user John has been referred from affiliate A website and the cookie has been dropped by the first network. Let’s assume that John had decided to make a purchase from this retailer. In order to get extra discount he trawls for a voucher code from the internet. Finally he has found a valid voucher code and made the purchase but the voucher code affiliate was promoting the Uzbekistan program from network B. Network B also managed to drop a cookie on John computer to track the sale. If the local cookie code is implemented then only one network acquires the conversion data and it’s always the last referrer. Who do you think should get the commission on that sale? Should it be affiliate A or B?

De-Duping against other campaigns?
How many merchants de-dupe sales against other campaigns? Well, I don’t have answer to that but this is something affiliates should be aware of and could ask the merchants. In the above example we had two affiliate networks competing for the sale based on user clicks from referring campaigns.

Let’s make it spicier and add all the promotional campaigns from Uzbekistan merchant. Just to give you a intimation, these could be 10 price comparison sites, 5 search engines, 50 media campaigns, 2 affiliate networks, 50 links, 10 corporate partners, 5 data providers, 10 review sites, email campaigns, SEO and much more.

Here some sample questions for you to ask the merchants.
- Do you de-dupe sales against other affiliate networks?
- If yes, do you also de-dupe against other campaigns? i.e. PPC, Media, email and even SEO.
- If yes, how do you honor/validate the affiliate sales?
- I would personally be slightly cheeky here and ask which technology/software/agency do you use to validate the sales? Although it is not important to know!

Once you have established that the merchant is de-duping the sales against other campaigns, you really need to explore how and more importantly when do they validate the sales? There are two ways merchants normally validate the sales.

De-Duping process for merchants.
The first process is simple and automated that the merchant only passes the conversation data back to the merchant based on the last referrer scenario. There is no need to manually update the commission status on the network because only valid conversion data is being passed on to the relevant network. Affiliates should have two main concerns at this stage.

1 – If only last referrer is honored, has the de-duping conducted against all paid (PPC) and nonpaid campaigns (SEO, Links, Referrals)? Do you think it’s fair?

2- Secondly, how does the merchant honor the affiliate if the user is referred online but the sale is conducted offline i.e. phone? Also, do you know what other means of offline payments are offered by the merchants and how are they being tracked? It is interesting to view that several merchants offer free print catalogues to customers where the intent or interests is initiated online by affiliate but the sale is later conducted on phone, through offline catalogues etc.

Tip: Always analyse website payment methods and leakages i.e. phone sales, offline catalogue requests. You could ask the retailer to track the catalogue requests and to include in the affiliate proposition.

The second process is when merchants manually (could be through csv file) validate the commissions. It could be processed daily, weekly or even monthly. That entirely depends on T&Cs agreed between the participating merchants and networks. Do you see your sales being declined once a month from particular merchant? You should be asking reasons both from the network and merchant.

Without naming the merchant and the agency, I have seen about 10-20% sales being declined during the bulk validation through the second process mentioned above. The analytics data was processed once a month and sales were being de-duped at the end of the month.

My only concern (including two previously of course) here is that affiliates can loose confidence in the merchant if sales were initially shown but later declined although it doesn’t matter if the status remains pending during that period. Isn’t that better not even to show the sale on the network if the last referrer is not an affiliate?

Why merchants de-dupe?
The most obvious and honest answer from a merchant would be is that they do not wish to pay to more than one referrer for a sale. If they give you a different answer then my suggestion for you is try to ignore them with their affiliate campaign. Merchants could be purchasing, directing traffic from more than one campaign and not all of them work on aka CPA model. For example merchants have to pay for CPM or CPC campaigns that are irrelevant if the sales are accomplished or not. It was interesting to discover that a leading search engine even ask for pre-payment before the ads are delivered. I believe they don’t trust that merchant would pay them on time or even at all. Affiliates may like to explore that how many sales are rejected or not even reported because of de-duping process?

Summary
- De-Duping in affiliate marketing is a process of comparing, identifying and validating legitimate sales.
- De-duping is legal for merchants if conducted honestly and openly.
- Affiliates should be aware of the de-duping process with the merchant they promote.
- Don’t be shy to ask which campaigns are being included during the affiliate de-duping process?
- Don’t blame the merchant for de-duping. They do care and want to build long term loyalty with you.
- It is fair to merchants to de-dupe but not to the extent of adding non-paid campaign click referrals.

Good Luck!

These are some of the important factors you should consider before start thinking about setting up a cashback website. I though it would be useful to share them with you as I ignored a couple of them when I began working on Guide 4 Shopping, which took us longer than expected to accomplish the project from scratch.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
These three factors are important for you to understand which consumer segment(s) would you be targeting and how would you position your website and marketing strategies to attract and convert users more effectively. If you are not sure who, how and when to target then I would suggest reading some material on understanding online consumer behaviour and how to drive traffic on your website.

Tip: If you do not understand how will you promote the website, how will you target the users and do not have necessary skills to drive traffic from online campaigns then please do not read further. I would suggest you reading topics on SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Online PR and consumers. Some of my favourite resources are found on eConsultancy reports.

Technical Abilities
If you are through to the first step then you need to ask yourself is if you are technically capable to design the entire project on your own? Cashback website require advance development and coding techniques to track sales for each customers, storing data for each click and sale and offering ability to customers to login, view and track the cashbacks and much more.

Do not ignore accessibility and usability of your cashback website. You can not simply drag users from Google Adwords and expect them to convert for you. It requires detailed analysis of how your website design would drive the users on the website?

Tip: Consider outsourcing the entire project to other companies or individuals. IMG offers cashback design and help on cashback websites in UK, USA, Australia & Netherlands.

Copy Writing Skills
Do not neglect quality contents, considered as the King of a good website. A good editorial for each retailer is a key which can convince the user to make a click on your fortune cookie banner or link.

Tip: Quality contents can enhance your SEO rankings.

Admin, Admin & Admin
Are you able to view sales, add them manually or dynamically on the website, change the status of the cashback for users to view, reply to customer queries, keep an eye on latest offers etc. cashback websites requires huge amount of administration that could be adding daily cashback, maintaining data from networks and providing effective customer services.

Tracking in Detail
Tracking is an integral part of the cashback website. You can obtain assistance from the affiliate networks in setting up tracking parameters. The tracking could be implemented in several ways and some networks now provide APIs that are useful to automate mainly cashback tracking but requires good understanding of web services.

Tip: Ask each network how to pass on additional elements in the tracking tags.

Security, Privacy and Trust
It is often ignored but I consider it very important. Most of the cashback websites do not offer secure login. Ask yourself if you can comply with the privacy and trust agreements? These options may cost you money but definitely increases consumer confidence in your service.

Interactivity
This is an interesting factor for me as I would like to view higher degree of interactivity on cashback websites. Just a few of them offers the ability to comment on the services and merchants. It would be interesting to view message boards, cashback calculators, viral marketing, wish lists, blogs, Forums, testimonials, reviews etc to engage and creating interests in the service.

Revenue Model
Do you have a revenue model? You need to be very clear how would you generate revenue after paying the fixed and variable costs? It would be useful to list down the total cost involved and create a revenue projection sheet for at least one year. Some of the costs you are most likely to encounter are as follow.

- Cashback (what share are you offering to your customers)
- Signup bonus (do you intend to offer signup bonus?)
- Referral bonus (do you have a referral scheme?)
- Hosting and SSL cost
- Website development and maintenance cost
- Data entry and update costs if you outsource
- Marketing cost each month
Now you can add other costs i.e time, resources, office bills and then workout your yearly budget, costs and revenue.

Competition
Do you know who are you competing with in the industry? It is imperative that you are aware of competitor moves and strategies in advance. Quidco, Rpoints, Greasy Palm etc have extensive investment, resources and customer base to retain and excel in the market. Can you target your niche audience with your set budget? I leave that question for you to think based on your skills and resources.

Affiliate Networks and Merchants
If you are already working with the affiliate networks then it’s a bonus for you as it will not require a lot of training and you will only have to adjust the links to make sure they are compatible with your cashback model. It is valuable to analyse if you would be promoting specific merchants or simply adding all the merchants available on the affiliate networks? You need to identify which merchants convert better for you and initially concentrate on them if you are working on limited resources.

These are some important factors I have encountered but in summary if you do not understand them then scrap your idea of setting up a cashback website on your own.

Tip: IMG offers cashback white label solution with fully customised and automated options. The aim of the solution is to provide you an effective platform, tools, data and management so you can simply concentrate on promoting the website.

Good Luck!