Picking a Good Affiliate program?

[Brett_Tabke]

We've all seen it:

10,000 impressions, $00.00 income.

Part of the problem is with most affiliate tracking programs is they only report sales a day later.

How can you prevent having to test the waters that deep in order to gauge a programs effectiveness?

[Drastic]

Actually, IMO, you need to give a program a week minimum to gauge its effectiveness/production/revenue. With some programs you can have a dead day or maybe four, but then you have that killer day that makes up for a week of little activity.

One thing you can do is contact others promoting the program. Email them and ask them if they like working with the company/program, do they pay on time, etc. Ask about conversion initially, or wait til you get a bite and go further with it. You'd be surprised how many responses you can get, I usually get a 50% response rate on this type of contact. Nice way of networking, too.

I know you didn't ask, but if I may expand on part of your post:

>10,000 impressions

Affiliate advertising is inherently different from typical banner advertising. Slapping up a few banners and calling it a day doesn't really produce much. Your average 468x60 CPM banner advertising is not good for much more than branding, and you won't get much from affiliate programs treating them the same way.

The benefits of affiliate programs lie in being able to promote them yourself. Using text ads, you can write personal recommendations, reviews, and the like. This works wonders with conversion, you can promote products/services you believe in and are familiar with. You are wide open with making a presell.

If you don't want to go that far, just plain text ads written and placed cleverly can far outproduce typical banners.

Effective affiliate promotion is a different animal than banner broker CPMs. If you just want to stick with banners and working with CPM numbers, you are probably better off with the banner networks. Unless you can find a few very targeted affiliate programs.

[Mike_Mackin]

>a week minimum to gauge its effectiveness /production /revenue.

And then, depending on the program, you must wait to see the chargebacks, if any.

[greektomi]

A more important statistic is the merchants conversion rate. Some merchants even provide statistics on their average conversion rate (god knows how reliable this is). And I think it's a good idea to question other affiliates using the same program. If you can, find an affiliate that has a different site theme so as they don't percieve you as direct competition.

The click thru rate from your site is almost entirely your responsibility. You can do quite allot to tweak your click thru rates. Is the ad incontext? Does it set nicely in the body copy flow? Does the page design lead the visitor naturally to your affiliate link? Does your link have an eye grabbing interest arousing headline, or offer a free bonus? etc..

Greektomi

[JamesR]

Sometimes it is the way the product is advertised on your site. How well does it match the content / demographics of your site? How are you delivering the affiliated product / service to your users? You need to adobt the program as if it were your own product or service you are advertising.

[Brett_Tabke]

That was just a figure out of thin air Drastic. I've had some I've sent 2-3million impressions to with very little results. It's my one problem with affiliate programs. I just hate giving away that free branding for them to find the gems from the bums.

[Marcia]

When there are several to choose from for the same product line, there's a difference in the percentage paid and the cookie duration. One may pay 17% and have a short duration cookie, 1 to 10 days, while another may pay 5% or 8% and have 45 or 180 day cookies. Is it logical to go for the lower percentage with longer cookies?

A lot are 10% with 45 days which seems fine but sometimes it's a choice between a wider spread.

How do the product sites' listings relate to the choice based on the first factors? I've checked rankings and visibility in comparing - some may be #7 or second page of search results, while others may be top of the page with sponsored listings. So they have more visibility to people shopping. To what extent do their listings compete or help?

[mayor]

Brett, some of the affiliate programs found on Commission Junction update the stats on CJ in near real time, like within minutes to within a couple of hours.

[Marcia]

mayor, CJ is one of them I was referring to with the question I asked. When a few with the same product line look equally good with equal $ figures, the decision has to be made on the other factors.

[mayor]

Marcia, if they all look similar within some broad ballpark, I'd say try them all. There are so many factors beyond the $ figures reported on CJ that I can't even list them all. So try all of them. Then the #1 producer gets your main attention and the others are your backups in case something happens to #1.

An affiliate program you can sleep on is one that has a pre-qualified backup.