1. CCT356: Online Advertising and Marketing Class 4: Affiliate Marketing

2. Admin Online ad campaign critiques due two weeks from now – questions? Annotated bibliography coming along well – post to page please

3. Affiliate Marketing Well before social networking technologies, the power of leveraging contacts was understood and leveraged WOM monetized – on completion of referral (actual purchase) referee would receive a small payment

4. The Internet is for porn As with much online marketing, the adult industry was at the fore of early innovation Other examples?

5. Early affiliate programs Amazon Affiliate program – allows individual users to set up their own “mini-stores” on their sites/blogs Multiple points of presence, all centrally serviced – drives content Good for small/independent publishers – challenges for such groups?

6. Types of Reward Cost per acquisition Cost per lead Revenue sharing Cost per click All possible, depends what you’re trying to do

7. CPA As with online ad models, acquisition can be anything – but it is a positive action (e.g., downloading a paper, signing up to a mail list, buying a product)

8. CPL Sometimes, potential leads are enough Benefit to affiliates? Benefit to merchants? Example: HR recruiting

9. Revenue Sharing Benefits both merchant and affiliate Can be tiered to encourage and reward affiliates who drive revenue – e.g., Amazon tiered rates example

10. CPC Simple clickthrough awarded Used early when infrastructure was less sophisticated – used less used due to click fraud Could still drive a lot of traffic and awareness, but if clicks are garbage, more traffic is a net loss Still handy though – e.g., blog traffic networks

11. Tracking Tracking URLs with specific start and end points URLs carry information – affiliation network, ID of affiliate and merchant, other relevant information to a given campaign Supported by cookies to track behavior for given period of time determined by merchant Allows for tracking of success by merchant and affiliate alike

12. Issues Case: affiliate clickthrough leads to exposure, but conversation happens after cookie timeout or through other means Cookie reputation – blocked or deleted cookies = no tracking = no commission Offline purchasing = no easy way to track Mobile devices = different levels of cookie support

13. Affiliate Marketing Concerns Good affiliate marketing = supplying merchant ads that are relevant to topic and focus of site Bad affiliate marketing = accepting any old ad, creating a cacophony of advertising and no consistency Issues of competition – as an affiliate, you probably don’t want to host ads to competitive sites Issues of stickiness – if affiliate program makes viewer leave your site, not effective

14. Affiliate networks Amazon, Google etc have the resources to run their own affairs Smaller companies use affiliate networks – middlemen who collect potential merchants and affiliates and try to make good matches

15. Setup considerations Clear identity of business identity, goals, market Clear identification of affiliate campaign goals – leads, acquisitions, simple exposure? Run your own program or join network? If latter, what are costs associated, benefits? Prepare data for feeding to affiliates – and provide copy/banners for use (e.g., download Firefox banners – designed by Firefox for consistent look/feel, ease of use)

16. A note on MLM Multi-level marketing – a form of affiliate networking, but a problematic one How it works – levels and trickle-up effect of commissions Why are they problematic?

17. Next week Search Engine Optimization – Search Engine Marketing