My Love / Hate relationship with PPC Affiliates

Another one of these days where some affiliate is not only taking my display URL but is also calling himself an official site. I know this is early morning but I am NOT dreaming. Despite a good ppc agreement between myself and affiliates I still have a rogue one thinking he is above the law.

I love affiliate for what they are great business partners and this is why I always recommend to my clients not to trademark their terms or have strict policy in place. PPC affiliates are real allies especially if your product or brand is facing strong competition.

By having PPC affiliates, you can create a wallpaper effect on search engines and make it even harder for your competitors to highjack your brand. As Google and Yahoo! have quality scoring in place good affiliates will raise brand exposure through quality websites and of course increase your revenue by creating a non financially risky revenue stream.

So yes all smart advertisers need PPC affiliates, but my morning example is stressing the fact you also need to keep a good eye on them and take measures for them not to push your price up and ROI down.

For this reason I do not agree with affiliate experts asking for brands to let affiliates being in charge with the whole PPC strategy.

If there are 6 reasons to have an open keyword policy for affiliate there are also many reasons to keep some control over PPC either in house or via a search specialised agency.

1) Google is only allowing one ad per search for a given display URL, this ad should be yours and not your affiliates, you know your brand better than your affiliates and can control the overall customer experience. Plus as you will grow dependant on this given affiliate it will be difficult for you to get ownership back.

2) Let affiliate link directly to your site. I would say this is good but there are certain feature on website affiliate do not like like phone numbers. My advice will be more to create affiliate dedicated landing page and let affiliate link not to your site directly but to an affiliate friendly page.

3)  There are now so many agencies specialised in good PPC campaigns that you could get a better price and a flexibility an affiliate will not give you. You generally pay an agency a % of the budget spend and not of the revenue.

4) If your brand converts well the agency business model (budget + agency commission) can prove less expensive than CPA (affiliate commission on revenue, overid fee from network, network access fee and all other consultancy fee you may pay the network). ROI is now a KPI agencies understand well. Plus if you select your agency well, they will work with other brands in the same business as yours and be able to apply best practices on your account.

5) If you do not have anybody experienced in house, use an agency (Google certified), make sure you are involved at all stages so you can share the experience of your brand, products and market with the agency to increase performance.

6) Affiliates are your allies but work with them just like you do with your business parners, define rules everybody is happy with in YOUR best interest.

I will cite Craig Alinder ”Buy up domains with your brand in them and offer landing pages to affiliates that are mirrors of the site itself, but are on different domains.” Unfortunatly not many merchants are and believe me if you go this extra mile for your affiliates, they will give you the attention (and performance) a good relationship deserves.