Here’s one: imagine a world where merchants are receptive to, indeed even suggest the idea, that they are conscious that there is more than one affiliate responsible for a sale and the merchant would not only like to acknowledge that point in principle but actually pay out a share of the commission to more affiliates.
So in the example as follows, a brand affiliate is reported as last referrer, and the cookie one click upstream was a content affiliate. The merchant is prepared to pay both affiliates a proportion of the commission. Equally where an email affiliate’s cookie has overwritten that of a generic search affiliate, he/she would be prepared to pay both affiliates.
I’m also aware that there is a lot of talk and conjecture about how unfair it is that brand affiliates cookies are highly likely to overwrite hardworking content affiliate’s cookies, and this is partly why we are looking at opening this out with a live merchant.
The structure we are looking at is as follows:
- pay out on every multiple referrer sale under the following conditions:
a) pay last-click and last-click-but-one affiliates only
b) not isolate brand affiliate activity for this structure
I’d hugely appreciate some feedback therefore from anyone at all on the forum with a view, or any experience, or any other thoughts on the subject.
My question to affiliates is:
1- Has this been done?
2- Is this attractive to you?
3- Is it fair to create a structure where last-click affiliate and last-click-but-one affiliate are each paid a proportion?
4- What should this proportion be and why?
5- Would this sort of structure affect affiliate effort (because of a lower commission payment)?
My question to networks is:
- Do you have the technology to report this data?
- Are you prepared to share this data with your merchants? (the merchant would own this data wouldn’t he/she?)
- If so, do you have any live merchants currently doing this?
- Do you have the technology to support a structure such as this? If you had to rely on merchant data?
- What has stopped you doing this (if you haven’t yet tried this structure)?
I’m trying to gauge the feeling in the industry really. I believe the thing holding us back is access to reliable data mining which would allow us to a) understand and acknowledge muliple sales referrers and more importantly then b) attribute revenue to these referrers.
I’ve asked a couple of networks if they can provide the us with that kind of data. At this stage I’ve had limited positive feedback. Even from the network (who will remain nameless) who actually suggested we encourage one of our clients to adopt this model, before then telling us they didn’t have access to the data we’d need to support this theory.
We’d love to do this, and we just want to see what people out there think about it first, and ultimately if we are shooting ourselves in the foot by suddenly marginalizing the value, to affiliates, of every sale by sharing out the pie.
