Forum Moderators: skibum
We recently started trialling clixgalore (we run a online retail store). We have had a number of affiliates sign up in the first few days and getting over a sale a day already which is a good start.
OUr first sales looked fine (the referring click was frm affiliate website URLS).
Now though we have had a number of sales that have come from some new affiliates that show a referring click from google, but these sales have been assigned to affiliates?
It looks like customers have been searching in google for our business name, found us, bought a product and somehow this click has been assigned as an affiliate sale?
Also, we received a sale via our ebay store that was also assigned to the same affiliate? (our ebay sales go through the same checkout as our online store).
Has anyone else had this before? on CG or other affiliate networks?
I don't see how the affiliate can claim sale when the customer found us via ebay? or via google?
I called on of the customers to ask them how they found our store, and had never heard of the affiliate domain name, and told me clearly how they found our products (via ebay only). So I am a little confused...
What's happening is that people are probably advertising your site using Google Adwords, the ads you see on the top and left hand side when you search in google. So they are paying for google for clicks to their Ads which is the affiliate link to your online store.
I believe it's up to the merchant if they want to allow this or not. You just have to state it in your terms and conditions on your affiliate network setup (clixaglore in your case)
True you can pay for Adwords advertising yourself but think about this. Do you want to spend the time and money doing keyword research on Adwords to see which keyword are converting for you all the while paying Google for clicks, and it's not an exact science, you're never gonna find which keywords will make a perfect sale. Many Adwords newbies rack up a huge bill because they don't know how to play the game.
Where as your affiliates are paying the Google advertising for you and true you must pay them their commission bu you may end up saving more time and money.
You just have to work out which is more cost/time efficient for business, paying the commissions or managing your own Adwords campaigns. Unless you have the time and money to become a real Adwords wiz then you're probably better off get the free traffic from your affiliates and paying the commissions when a sale happens
By the way good to see another Aussie Merchant getting into the affiliate biz, we need more :) I'll be happy to explain more if you PM me
We have run adwords campaigns for our other network sites and spend many thousands per month. have done for years.
I think we do a reasonable job, so I had stated in our terms that advertisers weren't to be using our trademarks in ads. Turns out they probably were.
Whether they were testing us our or not im not sure because I had tried to see if they had ads running by using some US proxies etc but I could only see our own ads running.
Anyway, I mentioned it to CG, and they canned those affiliates.
Why can people that make you $$.........?
