Rob - Great heads up. buy.at looks very promising, if only for their approach. I do wish, however, that they'd say who their 300 programs are (instead of a sampling) because, in keeping with our methodology, we are product driven, not program driven so we have to have merchants that carry products we care about. Now I am forced to join just to see who the merchants are. If they aren't appropriate, I joined for no reason.
rdeichert
· 9 months ago
Great point Mike - I'll let the product manager know.
Evan
· 9 months ago
wow great post Mike. Check out Linkshare's new deep linking interface. Also you should check out Popshops.com it's free and lets you pull product code into posts...keep up the great work! Maybe we can work together, my company manages several large affiliate programs in CJ.
Michael J. Pratt
· 9 months ago
Thanks, Evan - I was browsing my Linkshare account just yesterday and must have missed the "deep linking interface" part. Of course, Linkshare's own web design team isn't huge on usability :-). I will check out PopShops and give you a shout.
Facebook User
· 9 months ago
It's my understanding that deep linking still is VERY slow on linkshare. We need a master search like cj.
Facebook User
· 9 months ago
This is all the things I think about affiliate linking every day. Well put. Have you seen Skimlinks? I'm looking into them for SheFinds, they've found ways around some of this that seem viable, at least at first gloss.
Michael J. Pratt
· 9 months ago
Thanks, Rebekah. I will def check out Skimlinks as well. It's all about making it easy for the person creating content as their primary objective, not just slapping up sites with links. I know you guys appreciate that at SheFinds
LSuser
· 9 months ago
Merchants enabled for LinkBuilder on LinkShare allow you to build your own textlinks or product links with a specific landing page! Great for content sites!
Michael J. Pratt
· 9 months ago
We are enabled for Linkbuilder but it is a mess! It fails to generate the proper code half the time. Often kicks you out of the merchant's site and the problems of link management and reporting still remain. I suspect that, given it doesn't appeal to LinkShare's primary audience and only those of us who build links one at a time, that's the reason. Just a guess.
Patrick
· 7 months ago
Mike,
One of the greatest problems plaguing affiliate sales reporting is the lack of standardization. One network might track record visits as clicks, another might report page views as visits and clicks as actual clicks. This creates a mishmash of data that is very difficult to integrate.
Additionally the abundance of clickfraud that I've seen on most of the 1st and 2nd tier media outlets render the EPC data provided by the affiliate network close to useless.
If the affiliate networks you are using are open to placing a tracking pixel for you (most are) you can use a hosted Ad Tracker like Prosper202 to create your own reporting system, use your own product names, and track the ROI on each traffic source and each product you are selling.
All Comments
One of the greatest problems plaguing affiliate sales reporting is the lack of standardization. One network might track record visits as clicks, another might report page views as visits and clicks as actual clicks. This creates a mishmash of data that is very difficult to integrate.
Additionally the abundance of clickfraud that I've seen on most of the 1st and 2nd tier media outlets render the EPC data provided by the affiliate network close to useless.
If the affiliate networks you are using are open to placing a tracking pixel for you (most are) you can use a hosted Ad Tracker like Prosper202 to create your own reporting system, use your own product names, and track the ROI on each traffic source and each product you are selling.