In-house ppc conversions good

Should we pay affiliates comission?

[burcot]

Hi,
Hope you can help.

We are enjoying a high volume of sales from affiliate driven traffic, at the same time our in house adword campaign does really well.

Problem is - if a customer picks up an affiliate cookie, and later clicks on our ppc advert we pay the affiliate commission, and the adword campaign fee.

Assuming the cost of conversion via the adword campaign = x and the affiliate receives y the override fee to the affilate company = z(sorry about the alphabet didn't know how specific i could be)the profit margin is lowered considerably.

I suppose we could join our own affilite campaign and use the tracking code in our ppc campaigns, however we would still pay the override fee to the affiliate company.

Question is - can we avoid paying multiple commissions for a sale generated in-house?

Cheers, Mark

[loner]

Lower the cookie duration to about 15 minutes and announce it to your affliates. The sale started at the affliate site.

[Alex_Miles]

I don't understand why you are competing against your own affiliates, and neither will they.

[chief72]

Lower the cookie duration to about 15 minutes and announce it to your affliates

...then, kiss them goodbye.

[QualityNonsense]

Many merchants only pay commission to the last affilite who referred the customer, rather than the first. So if affiliate X drives traffic which later converts after clicking via affiliate Y's ad, affiliaet Y gets the commission.

I can't see any reason why the same couldn't apply to the merchant's in house PPC. Perhaps your network can set you up as an affiliate with an agreement that you get 0% commission on sales?

Obviously this is contingent on an understanding affiliate network.

[sweetpete]

i work as an Affiliates Manager and we dont dedupe against our own search campaign and I cant see the logic in doing so for two reasons:

1) We pay our affiliates on a CPA basis and our search agency on a CPC basis, so they are on different metrics, we wont turn off our search campaign so will always incur that cost. If you allocate a % cost to both as they have both played a part in the customer journey and monitor this then you should have no issues.

2) We have a ban on affiliates brand bidding (completely reasonable) and protect our term with our search ad. If we were to dedupe the sales our affiliates would lose out with the volume of converting traffic that goes through our brand bid - even if the affiliate introduced the user to our site say 15 - 30 days earlier.

I'm of the firm belief that deduping affiliate and search activity is not the best way to achieve long term growth in an affiliate channel - an awareness of the figures is key but swathing out affiliate commissions seems ludicrous.

[QualityNonsense]

We have a ban on affiliates brand bidding (completely reasonable)

Not unreasonable, but there are times when it makes sense for a merchant to allow brand bidding. If you ban brand bidding without (getting Google to strikeout your brand under their trademark rules), it's another 10 slots for your competitors to show up.

[vite_rts]

Question is do you value your affiliates an their efforts on your behalf?

This is also a question a lot off affiliates will be asking themselves, would i not be better off doing something else

I know, i ask my self that everytime