Report: Affiliate Marketers Need Reality Check

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Affiliate marketers generally take an optimistic view of their business, but a recent report from MarketingSherpa suggests that affiliate marketers should pay more attention to the potential pitfalls.

The report–”Affiliate Marketing 2005–Do Merchants & Affiliates Have Unrealistic Expectations?”–reveals that a whopping 91 percent of merchants and 82 percent of affiliates said they expect revenue growth in 2005.

But, despite the marketers’ rosy view, challenges loom for 2005. For one thing, the industry has not yet resolved several of the high-profile hiccups that appeared in 2004–widespread reports of illegal cookie stuffing, adware and spyware companies’ use of duplicate pages and invisible redirect tags, compliance problems with the Can-Spam Act, and click-fraud, to name a few.

Another potential problem area for affiliate marketers is paid search, especially if Google decides to crack down on affiliate marketers for bidding on trademarked terms in 2005, as has been widely rumored. Last week, Google won a closely watched trademark infringement trial against insurance company Geico, which had sued over Google’s practice of allowing advertisers to bid on their rivals’ trademarks.

Complete article at http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=283768