Doug’s Mouthpiece - Droug.co.uk

Take the money and run - buy.at is that ethical?

Affiliate Money Grabbers, Google written by Doug Scott

Affiliate Networks are encoraging brand bidding groups with the new adwords changes……you are taking the p**. What happened to honour, integrity etc etc etc.

Merchants if they are advising you to do it then your network has no integrity….Read Buy.at’s official line for Tyson here. Come off it mate we all know the game. Scam a stupid merchant. As a merchant ask yourself:

As a merchant you should easily be able to work out a way to protect your brand with these changes. Shane the pie man is no fool and always been a guy good at seeing an opportunity to exploit but he is even astonished. Read his views on what should happen here.

When I was a merchant we said no brand bidding groups as we thought it unfair to the affiliates who do the real work and find the ppc traffic you can’t find or the content players who bring related traffic from organic.

As a large affiliate we don’t bid on our partners brands intentionally even though we know it works well. We just feel it’s not correct and it leaves a sour taste in our relationships.

My concern here becomes the ones where affiliates who drive traffic that a merchant would have not being credited with a sale, but a brand bidding affiliate getting the sale.

If I was a “true” affiliate in that area I know I would not be promoting merchants who allowed brand bidding affiliates. The simple economics are that I would be loosing sales that were rightly mine.

Another interesting story

Doug

Tradedoubler leave London office and take our cookies

Affiliate Money Grabbers written by Doug Scott

Wow, I start writing about people and everyone comes to see me including Tradedoubler:

They all want to have their pictures on my websites. Elena and Lee kindly came to see us. Don’t actually think we decided anything, but one of my staff who is Polish was worried.

Had an interesting talk about who should the sale be attributed to in the affiliate business. This is what generally happens:

A visitor goes to a content rich site like HolidayWatchDog and browes round and clicks out to expedia.

Next day the user does a search for expedia and clicks on the ppc advert from one of the lovely brandbidding groups approved by buy.at:

Currently the brand bidding group gets the sale, is that correct?

Doug feeling hungry