Should Affiliate Managers Run Their Own Campaigns?

Posted on June 24th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing

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When Nickycakes signed up to his first affiliate network, he had a lot of questions.  One of the first ones was something along the lines of, “Do you have experience doing PPC campaigns yourself?”  The answer was no.  He said his company wouldn’t let the Affiliate Managers run their own campaigns.  It made sense at the time, so the Cakes figured this was the rule at all Affiliate Networks across the board.  WRONG.

At some networks it is perfectly OK for Affiliate Managers to run their own PPC Campaigns.  It’s up to the company to decide the rules for the Affiliate Managers, after all, and most justify the decision as good experience for the AM which will allow them to better guide new Affiliates.  Great for new affiliates, not so great for experienced ones.

There are already plenty of reasons not to trust Affiliate Managers in general.  (Please keep in mind that this doesn’t mean they are ALL untrustworthy.  Nickycakes has great relationships with many of them.)  These reasons have been detailed in a few past posts, but the major one is that by sharing the campaign data of a successful affiliate with all the unsuccessful affiliates, they can generate more income for themselves since they’re working on commissions.  This means that there is almost no incentive for the Affiliate Managers to keep your campaign info private other than the extremely unlikely event that they will lose you as an affiliate if by some miracle you were to find out about it.

But Affiliate Managers running their own personal online marketing campaigns can add a whole new level of distrust to the game.  Any information you give to such an Affiliate Manager about any of your campaigns, can and will be used against you, period.  Sharing any of your campaign info with an AM does absolutely nothing to help the affiliate at all, and it’s a complete shock that they, most of the time, just give the info up like it’s a normal thing for your AM to be asking you what keywords are yielding the most profit.  Seriously folks, get a clue.

Countless times, Nickycakes has been asked like…”Yo, why does my AM at X network keep asking to see my landing pages?” or “My AM at  X network wants to put a tracking pixel on my landing page, whats up with that?” or the absolute best was “My AM suggested I send him the list of keywords I’m using so he can help me come up with some better ones.”  Seriously, how do you people sleep at night?

So what information are you required to give to your affiliate network?  F-ing NONE.  NADA.  Do not tell them ANYTHING unless it’s a matter of you getting paid your commissions or not, and even then you had better raise a big ass stink about it.  You should be cloaking your referer data, because if you don’t do that, all your traffic sources and keywords are there for the affiliate network and merchant to see, plain as day.  If you’re unsure how to do this, the prosper202 (or tracking202) software will do it for you, for free, as well as track your campaigns really damn well.  But yeah, your AM’s don’t need to know ANYTHING about where your traffic is coming from, period.  If they give you a reason such as “The merchant is unhappy with the lead quality.” and you have been running the campaign for less than a month or two, they’re likely LYING.  Merchants usually take a few months to be able to get an idea of lead quality from a specific affiliate.  If they still insist on getting the details, go elsewhere.  There are hundreds of affiliate networks out there, and most of them have the same payouts and the same offers.  If you don’t know where to find a network that isn’t going to try to steal your campaigns, jump on irc and the Cakes or someone else will be able to point you in the right direction.

Alrighty, cue the deluge of msn messages the Cakes gets from his AM’s every time he mentions that some affiliate managers are shady.

Keep it real.