How to deal with toll free numbers on merchant sites

One of the age old conflicts in affiliate marketing has pitted merchants who place phone numbers, especially toll free ones, on their sites.  Affiliates see this as a source of potential “leakage” or a means for the merchant to generate sales that can’t be associated with their referral.

Some networks and software solutions are proactive about this in one of 4 ways:

1. They use some javascript or other code that pulls the affiliate id from the cookie and displays it onsite as a “referral code” or “offer code” which the call center is instructed to always ask for and note.  Commissions are then manually credited at month’s end.   I work with at least 3 merchants who do this at my urging.  Shareasale does this now – and when I was with Kowabunga, MyAP had a javascript snippet that would do this.
2. They instruct their call center to walk through the online order with the caller and help them complete the order in a way that insures affiliate tracking through the existing system in real time (obviously the preferred approach for affiliates)
3. They introduce a “pay per call” offer (now supported by DirectTrack software and new in Commission Junction where affiliates are assigned a toll free number to market and are paid per call completed to the call center.
4. Affiliates are given a banner with their referral code listed with the toll free number (not scalable and rare except for with “big fish” affiliates

In many cases, the merchant simply doesn’t address this either out of  ignorance or out of malice, falsely thinking that if someone calls them, the sale belongs to them regardless of who referred the customer.

I found an example of a situation that is worth discussing today as I browsed ABestWeb in Las Vegas Perks

As an affiliate, this banner would throw some serious warning flags for me -  as there are a couple of possibilities.

-They have tracking in place (to their credit – they do) and my commission is tracked fine as long as they click the banner

-But – what if the shopper doesn’t click the banner and just calls – no cookie set equals no referral code shown could equal no commission for me.

NOTE – LasVegasPerks.com fixed this issue the same day I contacted them with the info I shared with you on the CAM Blog -  props to them.

So here is the moral to the story -

Merchants – if you feel that a toll free number is important – make sure to have some sort of phone tracking method or methods implemented. Affiliates who drive the traffic deserve to be paid for traffic that converts.

Affiliates – do your homework on merchants – if they show a really prominent toll free number – ask how your orders are tracked and make your decision to promote according to how they respond.

Happy selling and see you at Affiliate Summit. I’ll be blogging live if you can’t make it and posting video as well.