Posts Tagged ‘affiliate tracking’

Ask Wade - Why do you recommend AvantLink for catalog retailers?

Mar 20, 2008 Ask Wade

The question today comes from Samantha at Fingerhut.com

What are your reasons for recommending AvantLink for catalog retailers?

Best,

Samantha

Samantha, nice to hear from you. There are a few reasons why I recommend that any catalog merchant that uses product feeds to promote their products should take a look at AvantLink.

Their datafeed tools for affiliates are absolutely top notch- and they don’t charge anything additional for set up on either the merchant or affiliate side to use them. They make it easy for affiliates to merchandise products, and have some awesome features as well like coupon feeds that you can use to traffic specials on affiliate sites and update on the fly.

They have also just recently ( at Summit) added on board support for video creative - which is ahead of the curve.

And my personal favorite - they make all affiliate contact info (email, name and phone) available by default.

Their roots are in working for a catalog retailer in Backcounty.com and they have built the tools that affiliate managers need (and affiliates need) to get the job done. They have really focused on working only with retail, feed-based merchants and developing a feature set that would be just what the doctor ordered for them.

They also do some cool innovative things like RSS based reporting for the affiliate manager.

Check them out :)

God Bless,

Wade

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Ask Wade - affiliate tracking for merchants with no program

Mar 19, 2008 Ask Wade

Hi Wade,
I have been a subscriber for a while and I first want to thank you for your blog. I appreciate it and I have started to get my feet wet in Aff marketing… But, the one main problem that I am running into is conversion tracking. I tried hitslink and conversionruler, but all of the affiliate links on my pages link to the manufacturers page - so I don’t have the BUY page on my site. Both hitslink and conversionruler seem to only be good if you can put the code on your purchase confirm page (which I don’t have)

So, what I really want to know is if there is any way to follow the user from the Google search to the purchase, IF the buy page isn’t on my site?

I appreciate any thoughts you may have on this
thanks,
bob

Hi Bob, and thanks for the question.  I am going to assume some things here -

  1.  The merchants you are working with have no affiliate program in place
  2. They have no interest in adding one at this tim

I have heard some super affiliates talk about requiring merchants to place their  own conversion reporting for them to allow them to effectively audit their PPC affiliate efforts.    In either case, there will need to be either an affiliate system integrated or some of your code placed on the site.   There’s simply no way that I know around this.  If the transaction is taking place on the merchants page - you need to have code there that will report when a conversion is successful.

Let me see if I can ping some super affiliate buddies to see if we can get you a hard fast answer on this.

In the meantime, if the merchants you are working with actually do their job of selling online effectively, you may want to steer them towards launching a low cost affiliate solution.   You can pick up software apps like GroundBreak or PostAffiliatePro that are pretty effective and feature good reporting.

You could also steer them towards a network like Shareasale or - if they are a nice online catalog retailer, AvantLink

Anyone have suggestions?

God Bless,

Wade

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