I was able to quickly get a few campaigns setup, lt takes about a day or so to start tracking everything, but on Day 2 I was surprised to see some data in there. I found violations, discussions on forums and more. Here are some highlights I wanted to point out about The Search Monitor:

• They can monitor an unlimited amount of social networks and blogs, if it has an RSS feed they can hook it in for you.
• Currently only monitors Google. Google regions and cities go live this month. Yahoo, MSN and few other by October.
• TheSearchMonitor can find affiliates that are linking directly to your site, through an affiliate link or other redirect.
• Daily email alerts. You don’t have to login to check on critical violations and alerts.
• Auto-affiliate detection by landing page (coming in September 08), Crawls to the destination page to automatically detect your affiliates and identify them in reports
• “Trusted Affiliates” for those affiliates that are above the law.
• $399 a month, Very reasonable

And of course I always come up with some cool ideas of my own. How could I use this?

• Great recruiting tool. What are your competitors doing or letting their affiliates get away with? No contact information is available but with some networking you can get around that!
• Use the tool to “price match”. Have a cut throat product and need to know when your competitors jockey their price?
• Test the local waters, you can easily see opportunity for products and services in the local markets

If you are interested in taking a look at it, contact me for a free 30 day trial of The Search Monitor. You won’t find mention of this on your website, email me I will put you in touch and get you taken care of.

On the flip side, affiliates should be demanding some transparency from the merchants, as most are completely in the dark on a true conversion rate, keyword/coupon performance & other metrics. Not to mention affiliates are at the mercy of inventory, demand and competition. Of course there has to be some protection on key business strategies, but what is stopping merchants from providing some demographics and performance data so affiliates can invest their time and resources accordingly? Turn it into a white paper to help promote your affiliate program, affiliates will eat it up.

Wikipedia states: A white paper is a report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions. They are used in politics and in businesses.

What questions do affiliates have and need answers to in order to join your affiliate program?

• Is the commission plan lucrative?
• Conversion rate?
• Coupons and Datafeed tools? - Include sample coupons and datafeed schema’s
• Who else is successful with your program? - Get a testimonial or 2 from your top affiliates.
• What 3rd party tools are you associate with? Goldencan, Feedshare, Popshops?
• What tradeshows do you attend?
• Policies (summary)
• Creative & Linking options
• Network options?
• And so on…

I can think of a million things to include in a whitepaper for your affiliate program, roll all of this together with a pretty layout and PDF it. Host it and link to it in your forum signatures, directory listings, email signatures, affiliate network profiles and more. You can leverage this tool in your PPC affiliate recruiting campaigns, ad campaigns and your next Revenue Magazine Ad!

Affiliate marketing is prone to fraud due to the lack of quality management, unsophisticated tracking systems, invisible affiliates and the basic principals around your links and pixels. It is the affiliate managers job to follow through with due diligence and screen out the bad from the big fish.

Not every affiliate network or platform allows a completely transparent affiliate application but those that do; you can really get crazy with your investigations. The bottom line here is that you identify the quality of the site, legitimacy of the affiliate and gauge the performance of every affiliate as you bring them on. There are several things you can do to stop the phony affiliates from entering your business, choose one or all, but instinct has become my #1 adversary.

IP Addresses – Platforms like DirectTrack and other inhouse affiliate applications allow you to capture the IP address in which they signed up. Use a tool like http://www.ip2location.com/ to get an idea of where the application is being filled out, is it nearby where the affiliate says they live?

Social security number validation – Another tool for inhouse solutions is to bounce the Affiliate’s social security number off of a validation service like: http://www.quentinsagerconsulting.com/utilities/ssn_online.php. This allows you to see if it’s gibberish, well tricked or valid SS#.

Google Maps your address – Where do they live? Take their address and Google Map it, is it a business? Postal forwarding service? Hotel? Also take and enter the address into Google and see if it comes up. I found a phony affiliate by entering their street address into Google, it returned being a doctors office!

Domain history – Plug their domain name into the Wayback machine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php, this allows you to see how far back he/she is going with this domain, is the Google PR and Alexa Rank consistent with the History of the domain or are they throwing some fluff in there to give themselves a better reputation?

DirectTrack’s Login Manager – For DT clients Only. Look for the Login Manager under Affiliate Management. This will give you a snapshot of how many times a specific affiliate has logged into their account and from what IP Addresses. Are they consistent? I found an affiliate had logged into his account from 3 different cities in China, Texas, Colorado, 3 cities in California and Australia all in 10 days. He travels more than I do!

Whois.sc – A very cool set of tools every affiliate manager should already know about, but cannot leave it out. You can check domain name registrar information, how many domains are hosted on IP and Server as well as see how may other domains an owner owns.

Phone Calls – Very few networks or programs are picking up the phone. This is probably the easiest and most effective way to control fraud. CALL THEM! Your reaction, instinct and conversation will take over the decision making.

How quickly they start earning money – Once they are in, are they driving sales immediately? Dig a bit deeper. Most legitimate affiliates need a week or so to get started. Instant sales could mean they are grabbing tracking pixel code.

Payment methods – Have an affiliate insisting on PayPal or other strange and not so business friendly payment method? Be careful, stick to your policy and keep your payment methods in the box.

International – I do NOT forbid affiliates from other countries but their tax system and US laws don’t necessarily protect you against damages done by affiliates in foreign countries and I would consult an attorney before making a decision on how to interact with international affiliates. Know them well, require additional information and communicate often. They can be your largest affiliates as well as most damaging.

Make the affiliate run a test order. If you are still having doubts, ask the affiliate to run a test order through their affiliate link. Credit the order or pay more commissions to balance out their cost but doing this opens up an entirely new set of data to help you stay protected.

Look for sites linking to the affiliate site: Another helpful tool is seeing how many other sites are linking to the affiliates website. Who is linking to it? Are the links full of article databases or social networks? Those are pretty easy to get, decide based off quality of links, not necessarily quantity. We ALL like new affiliates! Here is a great tool to help find links: http://www.linkpopularity.com/.

Much of the information you need to run these checks are just not available to all managers nor do we have the time to run thorough investigations around every application. Use your instincts and clever ideas & tools to get the scoop on your affiliates.

What are you doing to prevent Affiliate Fraud for your affiliate program?

You can generate RSS feeds easily through your blog software. Many solutions like Wordpress and Drupal have plugins or other solutions for generating feeds per category or topic. This works great for distributing different types of segmented communications to different types of affiliates. Here is just a small list of different uses of RSS feeds for your affiliate program:

• Distribute Coupons and Deals
• Policy Changes
• Monthly Newsletters
• Announce PPC opportunities (share your “holes” with affiliates)
• New product listings
• Datafeed updates
• Sale & Commission Announcements (Automate this through your network’s Webservices)
• Distribute FAQ’s
• Commission “payment sent” announcements
• Email suppression list updates (for those merchants that have integrated their suppression files)
• Beginner affiliate Tips, Tricks and Instructions
• Industry & Merchant Press Releases
• Pricing Changes
• Translated messaging!
• New banner and creative asset addition announcements AND distribution
• Special incentives and bonus programs

Be creative & aggressive with getting your affiliates to signup for these RSS feeds It is 100% deliverable yet takes unique content and incentives for affiliates to signup, but can become an effective communication tool for your affiliate program.

In the search for more tools and tricks to add to your affiliate business don’t dismiss the power of a datafeed because you can’t code, here are 15 uses for datafeeds to get your juices flowing.

1. Comparison Shopping engines – There are a ton of these out there, I’m sure are all fed by merchant datafeeds.

2. Build single, static content pages – Affiliate networks like Avantlink and Shareasale have great tools to help you build quick product display pages and easily embed them into your site, blog or social network profile.

3. Niche stores – create small stores based off of product category, price, brand, etc…If you can keep it small enough you don’t need to be ultra sensitive to automated updates.

4. Widget & Dynamic Creative development – dynamically feed product details into widgets, search boxes or other small “plugin” type creative.

5. Featured products – Create daily, weekly or monthly featured products based off of brand, category or product.

6. Discounted products – Almost every feed I have seen has a price and a sale price. Identify the deepest discounts, compare and promote through your email lists or SEM. Combine the sale price with affiliate coupons for an even bigger advantage!

7. Identify and leverage trends. I guarantee the hottest products get loaded into the biggest merchants’ feeds. Keep an eye on new products!

8. Keyword list building – many datafeeds have a field for keywords, even if yours is missing this you can still combine categories, brands, product names and other fields to come up with a creative keyword list.

9. “Adwords Editor” imports – if you have permission to direct link the merchants datafeed Is a great start to a Adwords Editor feed, tweak the format and import.

10. Build “lists” or product bundles – For example a list of all the back to school supplies kids will need this year, favorite music or video playlists or father and mother’s day gift idea lists.

11. Incorporate product reviews into your site – not all merchants have review feeds and most of the time you HAVE TO ASK your program manager!

12. Quickly find product specific links – easily plug a link into your next blog post or article, open feed, find product, copy/past link…

13. Shopping website – I had to throw this in as some people have the resources to build around a feed.

14. Product Review Blogs – Start blogging about product categories (“new womens shoes”), utilize the datafeed as a link and product information source.

15. Grab the optional data! - Altrec.com has a datafeed in the Avantlink affiliate network that has product video links, sizing charts and other information you can clip out of the feed and incorporate into your content.

Next time you are in Shareasale go apply for some feeds, download them and start playing with the data. You will be surprised at the volume of information and hopefully the ideas above will give you inspiration to get creative!

Here are a few things I do to educate & motivate within an affiliate interface:

1) Sell your product! Use Investor Relations, Product information, Media Kits and demographic information throughout your site so affiliates can learn about YOU. This is just another way to stay connected with your affiliates in hopes of a long term relationship.

2) Use Video that talk about your products, tools and FAQ’s. Take a look at the image below, it’s a screenshot of how I have incorporated a Doba overview video in the advertiser information page. This is great within CJ as affiliates that have NOT joined also get the exposure.

Image of how video looks inside of the CJ Program Detail Page. To see it in full action, log into CJ and find Doba in the advertisers section (under Auction).

3) Archive your newsletters. This is an easy way for new affiliates to dig around and learn what you have been up to over the last several months, past contest information and whatever else you may be sharing in your newsletters.

4) Build out an FAQ. I don’t know about you but I get a lot of great of email questions, document them, record your answers and build out a simple FAQ. This can act as a “getting started guide” as well as a first round support tool.

5) The obvious: Focus on your tools, 3rd party tools, have plenty of support options, forums & blogs, communities and other essentials.

6) Visual Aids for your compensation plans. When I was at oneNetworkDirect we needed an easy way to explain our rewards program (see it below) so we built out a nice visual aid. As hybrid compensation plans become more prevalent you need a better way to explain the deal…

If you are relying on an affiliate network that doesn’t support these kind of customizations, then take the time to build out an affiliate portal attached to your main site. You can even rely on a social network such as Facebook or Myspace to host your affiliate portal, a great way to tie in the social aspect and encourage your recruiting efforts.

You must have some good ideas, what would WOW affiliates and encourage their return?

If you are DT client these features already exist in your network, you just need to learn how to use them. If you aren’t a DirectTrack client, I would encourage you to take a look at the capabilities around link protection and think if a standalone separate tracking tool for your coupons and offers is a good idea. You can easily (and inexpensively) launch a private tracking system for your coupon tracking in just a few weeks.

I have identified 7 features of DT that aid in the protection of links and can easily be adapted to support coupon protection.

Private Campaigns – This technology speaks for itself, you can easily create a different program term that is completely hidden from all other affiliates. Then just add creative that drives your coupons into this campaign, let the link validation do it’s job.

Hidden Links – Should not be used alone on a public campaign but gives you the ability to hide any link from all affiliates. Doing this requires you to hand hold the creation of the links, deliver them to affiliates and keep side notes so you can easily retrieve performance data.

Passing Unique Variables in Links – This is one of my favorite features. Because DirectTrack uses a link redirection for it’s core tracking, you can setup the links to pass a number of different variables from the affiliate site back to yours after the redirection happens. Here is a sample link that I am using on a client that has a several of the DT variables being tracked as well as a few of my own.

http://www.directtrack.com/?source_key=auniquesourcekey&source=auniquesourcename&bid=%PROGRAM&aid=%ADD_CODE&dt=%DTOPT

The variable values that begin with % are DirectTrack options, there are a total of 15 known variables that can be passed through links inluding the cookie ID, link name and number, program identifier, ad pools and more.

Link Checking & Validation – This is my own terminology for a unique way that DirectTrack talks back and forth between affiliates and links. For example a sample DT link might look like:

http://affiliate.directtrack.com/z/24/CD1

The “24” is a unique link identifier, that is assigned directly to a campaign that has affiliates (CD1) assigned to it. If there is a kink in the chain, for example: CD1 is not associated with the campaign that link #24 is associated with, the commission will not happen.

Referring URL’s – One of the VERY few affiliate platforms that allows you dig deeper into the click referrals. If you have DO see exclusive coupon code abuse slip through, it’s really easy to see where the traffic is coming from. DT provides IP, URL strings and more information for you to find who is taking advantage of you.

Approved Website Validation – Some other affiliate networks and platforms have incorporated this technology over the years. It requires affiliates to “register” their website, if an action is tracked outside of that URL that is registered sirens go off. Another great way to identify abuse!

Encrypted URL’s – There are tons of tools on the market that do this but none will ever work as good as coming directly from the network or tracking solution.

What are other networks and solutions doing to protect their links and offers?

Analyze the data
I got into thinking about what I could do to 1) increase the amount of page views per visitor, 2) how to monetize every page view and 3) how to measure my successes and failures. My site’s traffic is all organic so looking at my analytics data is essential to really drive down into what they were looking for before landing on my site. I was surprised to find out over 90% came into the site from typing in a specific product name into a search engine. This excited me at first because I knew they were landing on the right (relevant) pages, but then quickly realized, I wasn’t retired yet. They weren’t buying.

Increasing the amount of page views per visitor for me is a technical challenge. Which I am undertaking. This is site is full of product reviews, hundreds of them. I was smart enough to include “buy now” buttons above and below the reviews but they went directly to the merchant. So a change is coming around that will link all buy now buttons in reviews to my store. I am hoping the change in redirection will help on the optimization side as well as the conversion rate (even though I am adding an extra click).

Make it easy to business with you, and they will do business with you.

Monetizing every page view is certainly unrealistic but optimizing your chances for a conversion is essential on every page. It’s not hard, make sure you have product information front and center, quality images, call to action and interactive components like reviews, newsletters, community, research, search box and anything else you can think of to satisfy the needs of your visitors. Make it easy to business with you, and they will do business with you. Of course doing all of this within the constraints of a quality, professional and trustworthy user experience.

Measuring this effort isn’t hard either, it’s the same metric affiliate networks use when reporting the success of program, Earnings Per Click. Clicks / Revenue = EPC. You could take it step further and create metrics like: Page Views / Revenue = Earnings Per Page View. And for you number nuts you can incorporate a jump script in which to measure affiliate site conversion .

Regardless of how you spin the numbers it’s important to offer your site visitors what they need. Looking at click paths, organic entry terms and site behavior you can begin to devise your website experience model.

Top affiliates like FatWallet, Upromise and even the independent affiliates (out of respect will not mention names) like CouponCode.com, TopTenReviews.com and many others, will eventually get so big they will take up so much organic and paid placement that a new affiliate coming into the category will need to have deep pockets and strong commitment to the project in order to get it off the ground and keep it going.

Industry leaders like James Martell (Affiliate Marketers BootCamp) and Colin McDougall (The VEO Report) are training new affiliates every day in their own techniques and strategies. James & Colin help affiliates identify niche verticals, processes and tools to get started in affiliate marketing. They are feeding the affiliate marketing industry, but they can’t do it fast enough or alone. The demand of the Fortune 500 companies is to high and the growth they’ve experienced over the years only fuels that demand.

So what can we do to help? If you are an affiliate, demand attention and only apply to the program when you are prepared. Be ready to explain yourself and your ideas around how to promote the merchant and your website. Merchants and program managers, don’t be rushed to decline applications because they are new or their listed website isn’t relevant to your product line. I have over 10 websites, and no network let’s me list them all nor do they give an opportunity to explain what my plans are.

We are in a state of drafting affiliates into this industry, turning major publishers into affiliates, training new affiliates and creating entirely new verticals.

~ Ian