Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

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The “Dealing With Affiliates” panel at SES today featured short presentations by the panelists and then a discussion on the issues.

The panel was described as follows in the program…

Affiliates can be a love ‘em or hate ‘em situation for search engine marketers. Affiliates can send plenty of traffic to your web site, but they can also drive up the cost to purchase terms if you decide to maintain your own direct sales channel. This session aims to help you strike a working relationship with your affiliates — and the search engines themselves — that everyone can live with.

The panel was moderated by Jeffrey Rohrs, VP, Agency & Search Marketing, ExactTarget, and the panelists were…

• Kristopher Jones, President & CEO, Pepperjam
• Jeff G. Molander, CEO, Molander & Associates Inc
• Jeff Ferguson, Director of Online Marketing, Napster

Kris Jones covered potential channel conflicts with affiliates and ways to minimize this behavior, such as sending a request to Google to disallow use on your trademark, amending your agreement to explicitly state what affiliates can and cannot do.

He also emphasized that the focus should be on the quality of affiliates and not the quantity.

Next up was Jeff Molander who kicked things off with a brief bio starting with how he helped found Performics.

Molander talked about how affiliates should bring in incremental sales from what he calls “native traffic,” or traffic owned by the affiliate.

He then asked if incremental sales from affiliates are realistic or a pipe dream.

Jeff Molander then covered an overview of issues and solutions. I am not sure if the PowerPoint will be publicly available but it was more information than I could type. Now I wish I’d paid attention in that ninth grade typing class.

Last up was Jeff Ferguson, and he shared the merchant perspective.

He talked about how Napster went through a “Laissez faire era” where all advertising was shut down with the exception of affiliate marketing.

While this was happening, the affiliate program tripled in size to fill the vacuum of activities no longer being performed by other entities.

This enabled them to analyze the performance of the affiliate program and they eventually brought back paid search to co-exist with their affiliate efforts.

During the Q&A, there was a discussion about whether trademark bidding should be made available to some affiliates, and Kris Jones offered useful insight about the merits of ppc affiliates.

He encouraged opening the policy to a few select affiliates and forging close relationships with them.

There was also a discussion about handling affiliates that retaliate against a merchant when they are caught breaking rules in an affiliate program.

Jeff Molander suggested bringing the activity of these individuals to the forefront by sharing the story of their behavior with your colleagues.

I agree there and I would be glad to see affiliate programs and networks banding together to ban players that shamelessly cheat affiliate programs.

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