Affiliates vs. Adwords

what's the added value from an aff program?

[RossWal]

Why would a mercant want to go with an Aff program vs. PPC campaigns from the SE's. I'm guessing that the general idea is a more reliable stream of highly qualified traffic (affiliates), vs. the ease and flexibility of an Adword program.

What about cost differentials. Since the aff program will most likely bring more highly qualified traffic (am I correct in that assumption?) will each visitor (incoming click) cost more?

[briggidere]

One way to look at it is "they do the hard work, so you don't have to"

It all depends on what kind of affiliate program you are running. If you are running one where you pay for the completion of a form, you need to be very careful about. We tried it once and all we got was a load of affiliates signing up and entering non qualifying clients details, most of which when we contacted them, didn't even know who we were and hadn't been to our affiliate pages to even fill the form in.

We had to monitor is so close and only about 3% were accepted so we decided to stop it completely. It was not worth employing someone to sift through the crap and call all these people, who understandably, were a bit peeved off that we contacted them.

We do PPC because we have control of them.