Comments on: Should Affiliate Managers Run Their Own Campaigns?

By: SomeGuy

SomeGuy — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:03:13 +0000

Great information. I have one question about tracking though. How can we understand which keywords from Google (organic traffic) convert?

By: alexa7

alexa7 — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:36:10 +0000

I was about to post and say you needed to quit being lazy and post something here and then my feedreader suddenly anted up 4 posts back to 6-24-08. What’s the deal with that? My crap or your crap?

Any way great post. AMs should not be allowed to run their own campaigns. That is an obvious conflict of interest. It should be a no brainer.

By: RandomGuy

RandomGuy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:01:47 +0000

Ive been reading you for months, and first time i decided to post since this is some EXTREMELY useful information. Thank you Thank you Thank you.
I always thought you have to show all referers, but had an uneasy feeling about that. Thanks for the post – stripping all of mine starting today

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:26:18 +0000

@nickycakes: No, not talking about DT style networks…I was referring to Advertising.com, CJ.com, doubleclick/performics/google. They dwarf the amount of traffic any DT style network can bring and for the most part only sign top tier name brands. The brand image is so much of a concern that most of the time if they don’t know where your traffic is coming from – they don’t want your traffic.

By: nickycakes

nickycakes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:11:40 +0000

@mike: That’s why you make it clear before you work with them that you won’t be telling them shit. I’m not sure who you’re referring to as the “top 3″ but if you’re referring to directtrack style networks, then you’re pretty much wrong here man.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:06:41 +0000

Hiding your referrer data won’t work on the top 3 networks. They generally want to protect their top tier name brands. But if you are talking about some shitty green tea offer, by all means – hide the referrer. Eventually the network may try and strongarm you and say they aren’t going to pay unless you give them the URLs. I’ve had this happen to me before. In that case – you’re screwed. Have a backup clean URL if you are doing blackhat stuff – thats my only advice.

By: JustinM

JustinM — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:27:31 +0000

Ya this is one thing about affiliate marketing that drives me a little nuts.
An aff network should come out and say “We will never ask to see your landing pages or keywords and our aff managers are barred from running their own campaigns”
That be tight. I’d join.

By: MyBlogStore

MyBlogStore — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:16:58 +0000

Good idea and will follow thru

By: Todd

Todd — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:09:58 +0000

Good post. It is such a big conflict of interest if your affiliate manager is allowed to run PPC campaigns. I was shocked when I found this out. The problem is even if network don’t all their managers to do PPC themselves they can just easily tell their friends what keywords and LPs are working and indirectly take advantage of the data they get.

Do you know how the AMs commission structure works? Do they get a cut off every lead or sale or do overal revenue amounts matter more. Either way I still don’t understand why AMs will rather lose your leads than give you a higher payout. Even if they only make a little bit on you, its better than losing all the leads you can get them for that offer.