Many affiliates don't realize how much the tug-of-war between the search and affiliate channels in larger corporations affects them. The channel fight over marketing budgets and trademark bidding can directly impact affiliates. Many times when commissions are cut or TOS are changed, it's not the affiliate manager that is behind the change, it's the SEM or marketing department.
If I were a marketing director for a corporation or still did SEO and SEM for a living, I'm sure my view of affiliates and the affiliate marketing industry as a whole would be very different. So I can see both sides, even though I firmly sit on the side of affiliates today. So how can the two sometimes opposing channels get learn to get along? Chief Marketer has a good article.
A Few Words in Praise of Affiliate Marketing
"In the annals of love-hate relationships, search marketers and affiliates are right up there with the classic ambivalent couples: Hamlet and Ophelia, Han Solo and Princess Leia, or King Kong and Faye Wray. The realization that each partner can be useful to the other often isn’t enough to dispel the suspicion that the partnership is unfairly skewed.
In the early days of Internet marketing, affiliates were primarily seen as productive partners... But the rise of search marketing threw a twist into that romance. Now some search marketers began to complain that affiliates were bidding against them on their most productive keywords, driving up prices and pushing their pay-per-click search ads down in the ranks, or even off the search results page entirely..."
Chris Henger VP of Affiliate Marketing at
DoubleClick Performics offers the following affiliate “wish list” designed to help advertisers strike the right balance of control and permission in their affiliate relationships:
.:. Authorization to bid on trademarks and brand names, along with guidelines for doing so
.:. Ability to link directly to an advertiser’s display URL
.:.Permission to send traffic to domains that use the advertiser’s brand, for example to “
www.eddiebaueroffers.com”, which consumers are more likely to click on
.:. Permission to lead-generation programs to host forms on their own domains and not make them send registrants off-site
.:. Authorization letters to search engines authorizing the affiliates to use the advertiser’s brand in their ad titles and copy.
That Love-Hate SEM/Affiliate Relationship
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