Merchants - Ditch Adware Parasites - Increase Affiliate Sales

[Linda Buquet]

Merchants and affiliate managers are often afraid to clean up their programs. Sounds odd, but it's true. Many times they are getting pressure from upper management to work with big name adware affiliates because all their competitors work with them. Sometimes managers wrongly worry that their numbers will go down if they expire these shady partners.

When I managed Irvs Luggage many moons ago, one of the 1st things I did was clean house. That move did nothing but strengthen the program and increase sales month after month.

Listen as Angel Djambazov the affiliate manager for Onlineshoes.com (Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award finalist for Exceptional Merchant) shares his insights about cleaning up your program and the positive affect it can have on ROAS and revenues. Kelly over at AffiliateFairPlay just launched a new podcast called Affiliate Salon and this is the 1st one of the series.

Keeping It Clean: Achieving High ROAS Through Affiliate Channel Integrity
"Angel Djambazov, Onlineshoes.com Affiliate Manager, talks candidly about growing the OLS program after removing adware partners, the impact on the ROAS of the affiliate channel and other marketing channels, educating corporate management and impact on revenue."

[AffiliateGuild]

Wow, good for Kelly!
This is a great topic to do podcasts on.
I'm really glad to see it happening.
I think a lot of the AMs don't even know they those bad affiliates onboard.
But, others do.

[Liquid1]

This is something near and dear to me as I am a firm believer in protecting my clients and my affiliates. I have helped to clean numerous programs and have a few major name brands now under my belt which are clean or are being cleaned.

When upper-management wants you to partner with various parasitic and adserving applications, what you should do then is take them to affiliatefairplay.com and have them watch the various video tutorials on how adware works and how it can steal from your bottom line and internal marketing efforts.

Some things you may also want to point out to them are:

With a slowing economy, it is important to make sure each sale is accounted for so you know where to spend your dollars. By allowing adserving adware applications within a program, you will now be crediting the wrong channel for a sale, double crediting the same transaction, etc...

Another thing to point out is an example of how adserving applications can overwrite your internal marketing efforts. A good example is PPC. You pay for the click and when the user who has the parasitic application hits your site off of the click you paid for, you now not only paid to bring in the sale yourself, but you are now paying for the parasite to get a commission of the sale you generated internally.

Parasitic applications hurt everyone except for the network that allows them, the parasite and the AM/OPM who gets commissioned off allowing them to steal from the company and from the company's affiliates.

If you are a manager and you find out employees are stealing money or merchandise from the company, would you:

A Congratulate them
B Ask them to find more people to do the same
C Fire them

Think about that then apply it to parasites and then rethink your decision of partnering with them.

One thing though, not all applications are parasitic, it is the adserving ones and cookie stuffing ones that are bad. Just wanted to point that out. Some toolbars are only used for search purposes and have deals with search results companies and do not set cookies. I'm not going to say which ones they are

Great thread Linda!

[Linda Buquet]

I was super happy when I saw you join and get active over here
and now am even happier because you weighed in on this thread,
a topic near and dear to me too.

Great feedback and so true!

[Liquid1]

No problem, it's nice to have numerous forums to participate in and to help build a stronger and more ethical industry as a community.

Threads like these help to educate Merchants and Firms about various issues which effect all of us. By educating the community about parasites, we will not only help to protect our clients and our affiliates, but we can begin to create a fair playing field and rebuild the good name of affiliate marketing.