Be Careful with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing can be a great way to make money for retailers online, but there are certain pitfalls and tricks that we come across and I thought I would share one that may be common to everyone else but was certainly new to my client and me. If you need more information about affiliate marketing please look here.
Full disclosure: The client discovered this trick, I wish I could take credit for it, but it was brought to my attention.
Coupons can be a very effective marketing tool if they are used correctly. Many affiliate sites are deal or coupon based and build a following through visitors looking for deals. However many of these coupon sites are really nothing more than vulture sites who are taking money from transactions that they did not contribute to. Here’s how it works:
Let’s say you are at Staples.com and getting ready to checkout. On the checkout page there is a box for a coupon redemption code. You don’t have a coupon, but you wonder if there is one out there, so you go to Google and search staples coupon (there are over 190,000 searches for variations of that search every month) and see some sites that offer a coupon. You go to the site and it says click here for the coupon code, you click, probably see an expired coupon or maybe just a special offer, and staples.com opens up in a new tab, or it just redirects through. At this point a cookie has been dropped on your computer and when you go back to the site, with or without a coupon, and complete your order, a pixel fires and that coupon site gets paid a percentage of your order. They contributed nothing to the process but get a nice percentage of the sale.
The client who discovered this did because they have not offered coupons in over six months, yet his highest grossing affiliates are all coupon sites. This client is going to remove the coupon code from his checkout cart which should alleviate the problem. But what if he wanted to use a special coupon for email customers? At that point he would have to consider removing coupon affiliates from his program.
It is kind of like the wild west out there in affiliate marketing, and while I would never recommend that businesses not use it, it is very important to make sure you are managing your program actively and watching out for fraud. It is programs like this that can keep affiliate marketing out of the mainstream and not allow many small businesses who should be affiliate marketing to take advantage of it due to the time commitment needed to run a clean mutually beneficial affiliate campaign.