Affiliate Program Down Time
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One of the recurring concerns I see from affiliates (and have myself) is that tracking isn’t working properly when I am sending traffic through affiliate links.
Sometimes technology breaks, and there isn’t anything an affiliate manager can do about that. But the way they react tells me whether they run a top flight affiliate program.
So it was refreshing to get emails from the Charming Shoppes Affiliate Team about some tracking issues yesterday.
They informed affiliates that they performed a system upgrade, which temporarily affected their ability to track return days.
And the Charming Shoppes Affiliate Team explained…
In our experience, about 34% of affiliate sales happen within 30 days of the customer’s initial referral and by visiting our site directly. In order to prevent any negative impact on your commission and to compensate you for any inconvenience, we will be making an adjustment to your May commissions.
The way they are making good is by looking at the click traffic for each affiliate in the 30 days prior to the issue, combined with the average conversion rate per affiliate, and then estimating the sales that should/could have gone to the affiliate.
Bravo to Stacy, Gina and Herschel over at Charming Shoppes.
I think they deserve kudos for being upfront about the problem and doing right by affiliates.
So to Stacy, Gina and Herschel – I’d like to offer each of you a free, full conference pass to Affiliate Summit 2008 East, taking place August 10-12 in Boston. Contact me and we’ll work it out.
You can apply to their Fashion Bug, Lane Bryant, Catherines and Petite Sophisticate affiliate programs on LinkShare.
- Posted in Affiliate Managers
I wanted to also sing the praises of CardOffers.com's affiliate team (Jason Lobel is who I interfaced with at the time) who responded similarly. Their systems went down for 8 hours sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning and they made good based on each affiliate's prior month's performance. They could've easily tracked it down to the average affiliate performance in that downtime window (which, given the time, would've been cheaper for them) but they didn't. They calculated the per hour earn rate per affiliate and paid that out for the downtime.
reply to this commentNice to hear – I'd be happy to extend the same offer of a pass to Jason. Jason – if you're out there, touch base with the Affiliate Summit contact form and we'll set you up.
reply to this commentThis can be a real issue and is bound to coincide with your one really heavy traffic day of the month! Be sure to constantly promote equally a number of programs to minimise the effect of technology issues like this. Marketing is one thing, results another! I can get all the traffic in the world to my blog and all the clicks there are to my affiliate links, but if those links are down then my whole game plan has been wasted!
reply to this commentAnother good backup plan is to use your blog to gain optin subscribers to your email list so you can promote your affiliate programs time and again thus minimizing the bad technology day scenarios!
Hi,i have i quick question..where to go if one of affiliate networks kick you out (for no reason) and steal your money?
reply to this commentTnx
That is a different topic, and I've never heard of an incident myself where a network just decided to seize money from an innocent person.
So, you read the terms and followed them to a “t” and this network just ripped you off?
reply to this commentHi,i have i quick question..where to go if one of affiliate networks kick you out (for no reason) and steal your money?
reply to this commentTnx
That is a different topic, and I've never heard of an incident myself where a network just decided to seize money from an innocent person.
So, you read the terms and followed them to a “t” and this network just ripped you off?
reply to this comment