Things to Consider:

1. Network start-up costs

Most affiliate networks charge an initial one-time setup fee ranging from about $500 to over $2,000. This includes the technical set-up of the account and getting new advertisers educated about the network.

Some of the smaller affiliate networks, including LinkConnector, don’t charge a setup fee, but keep in mind that the number and quality of affiliates within the network will most likely be low compared to those in the more expensive networks.

2. Monthly minimun

All affiliate networks charge a transaction fee, which is just a small percentage of the commission paid out to each affiliate for each sale. What you need to look out for is the monthly minimum, which is the amount in transaction fees an affiliate network requires each month. So if the monthly minimum is $100, and you only pay the network $75 in transaction fees, you will owe an additional $25 at the end of the billing cycle.

This varies widely from network to network, so depending on the volume of sales and revenue you expect to come through affiliates, you will want to choose a network with a suitable monthly minimum.

3. Span of affiliate network

If you have certain affiliates in mind, you’ll want to make sure they’re in the network you plan on joining. You can either look them up within each network, or you can contact them directly to find out. However, if you’re new to affiliate marketing, you’ll probably need a network that provides a large affiliate base from which to choose. As mentioned earlier, this could mean higher setup costs and monthly minimums, but it may be worth it in the long run.

4. Ease of communication

Ongoing communication with affiliates is essential to maintaining a successful relationship. You’ll need to send out regular newsletters with tantalizing incentives to ensure you stay top-of-mind within the affiliate community. Read about each network’s messaging capabilities ahead of time so you know what to expect. Make sure there are no costs involved and that the process of formatting and sending out the emails is simple and not time-consuming.

5. Tracking & reporting capabilities

The nice thing about using a network to manage your affiliate program is that they provide tracking and reporting for you. In addition to basic transaction reports, each network has their own unique reporting features, including performance by link type and affiliate first sale reports. Choose a network that will provide you with the type of reporting that best suits your company’s needs.

6. Customer support

If you’re used to running things on your own, this may not be as important, but if you’re new to affiliate marketing, you may have a lot of questions at the beginning. Read up on reviews and ask others in your industry about the customer support they’ve received on their affiliate networks.

7. Multiple networks

If you have the time and money, you can join multiple networks, widening your pool of potential affiliates. However, many of the bigger “super affiliates” are actually members of a variety of networks themselves, meaning you can find them on almost any network you select. Therefore, when managing affiliate programs on multiple networks, you face the issue of duplicate (and sometimes triplicate) transactions. So at the end of the month, there is the extra step of determining which network and which affiliate should receive the commissions and voiding the sales on the other network(s).

Reviewing Two of the Top Affiliate Networks:

Commission Junction

Pros:

• Large number of affiliates within network
• Detailed reporting
• No extra cost for sending newsletters to existing affiliates
• Ability to search for new affiliates within interface
• Ability to auto-approve/auto-decline affiliates based on certain criteria
• New PayPerCall feature offers an additional way to increase sales
• Responsive customer support representatives

Cons:

• High network setup fee
• High monthly minimum ($500 in transaction fees)
• Higher than average transaction fee (30% of commission)
• Historical reports can only be accessed for up to one year
• Cost to implement product fees

ShareASale

Pros:

• Reasonable setup fee ($550)
• Low monthly minimum ($25 in transaction fees)
• Low transaction fee (20% of commission)
• Detailed reporting
• No extra cost for setting up product feed
• Responsive customer support representatives

Cons:

• Smaller number of affiliates within network
• Cannot easily search for new affiliates within interface
• Reports must be exported as pipe-delimited files

You’ll hear several reasons why:

• Brand recognition
• Legal said we had to
• Doesn’t everyone have to ask for permission to link to another site?

Yes, there are still people out there that think linking to a site requires permission by the site owner.  And yes, there are legal departments that still want to control who links to the corporation’s web site.  And yes, there are marketing people that believe it tarnishes the corporate brand.

In fact, the opposite is true.  And requiring those who do business with you to ask permission and sign a 3-page legal document just to simply put a link to your web site is only going to discourage them from doing so.  This causes your corporation to lose out on a one-way link that can help you with the search engines.

Make it easy
Your corporation should make it easier for those who do business with them to link to their web site.  And at the same time keeping the brand in-tact.  Provide logos, content, landing pages and any other applicable items to encourage and make it easier for people to link to you and link to you correctly.  Don’t require permission or a signed legal document.

But legal still says…
Keep in mind our discussion here centers around a direct link to a page on your web site where the link clearly indicates to the user they are leaving the web site currently being viewed and onto your web site.  We are not discussing inline links where another site is ”stealing” your images or content and making it look like their own by appearing on their web site.  A pure and simple link like:

We are an authorized re-seller of Lever Interactive services including SEO, paid search management and conversion optimzation.

The question would be how can your legal department argue with that? Most times, the issue is the legal department does not understand what is being requested. They’ve heard about cases where one site is stealing another site’s content and presenting it as their own.  Or the reverse link, the corporation links to another site for information, and it turns out to be false or mis-leading information, and customers hold the corporation responsible for providing false or mis-leading information (thus invented the dislaimer interim page of “You are now leaving thiscompany.com web site and we are not responsible for the content”).

The bottomline: Stop the roadblock!  Encourage those who do business with you to link to your web site. Your company will benefit with increased visitors, possilby conversions if applicable, as well as the search engines.

But how? This can be achieved in a many ways – some more exact than others. But using one of the few methods should provide you with enough guidance to understand the impact of phone sales on your paid search ROI. Here they are (in order of accuracy):

Ask the visitor: Often time this is overlooked as an option, but simply having your call center team ask the visitor if they found you by Google, Yahoo or MSN should provide you with some indication of where your traffic/sales is coming from. Many marketers struggle with getting this information provided back, but this can definitely work, especially with smaller web sites that only have a few folks taking phone orders.

Turn off your paid search campaigns for a few weeks: While this is NOT RECOMMENDED, this is a fairly straight-forward way of determining the impact the loss of paid search would have on your phone sales. Although probably not realistic for most sites, we have actually seen this technique used to settle disagreements between SEO and PPC teams about the impact of paid search on how paid search and natural search work together. The impact was clear, not only to the SEO team, but also the call center.

Apply a percent of overall orders: Determine the percentage of overall orders your phone sales make up and apply that percentage to your paid search campaigns. For example, if your site get 100 orders in a month and 20 came from the phone, apply at 20% bump to your search orders revenue.

Apply a percent of overall traffic: Determine the percentage of traffic paid search drives to your site and attribute that amount of orders/sales to your paid search campaign. For example, if paid search drove 15% of your overall traffic, take 15% of your phone orders and attribute that to paid search.

Compare geographic data: Assuming you are using some type of web analytics tool (if not, get Google Analytics on your site ASAP. It’s free and very easy to install), you have a good indication of where your search traffic is coming from. See if there is a correlation of location source of traffic and location source of calls/orders. If you see that 20% of your orders come from a specific state, and your paid search campaigns are driving a good amount of traffic from that area, some assumptions about the source of those orders can be made. Although not precise, you can evaluate

Use unique phone numbers: This technique takes some technical integration, but can be very valuable. Set up your site to identify the referrer and/or cookie of a visitor. If determined that the visitor came from paid search, you can display a unique phone number and track calls/sales through that number. Use one number for all paid search traffic, or if you need further segmentation, use a different number for each engine. There are a number of lower cost service providers that provide call tracking (ex. Voicestar) and may be worth a look. Typically they can manage all of your unique numbers and provide some useful reporting.

Include unique tracking code on site: A tactic that has been used by direct mailers for years, you can include a unique code at the bottom of every page that is derived from a visitors cookie. Like the unique phone number approach described above, this technique would assign a code to a visitor (cookie or session ID) based on where they came from. This takes some technical know-how but can be very effective, especially in helping your call center identify these visits for you. Your phone team can simply ask a user to scroll to the bottom of any page and the code provided can be captured.

Our team at Lever Interactive used this technique for ThePetStoreOnline.com through a combination of JavaScripts and a customized code for each visitor based on the source and medium of their first click. The first script we created checks to see if the visitor has been to the site prior while the second script reads the new cookie and writes a code visible to the website viewer. The code visible to the viewer is a two part code consisting of a letter for the source and a three digit code for the medium. By using this technique, Lever was able to attribute a large portion of phone orders to the appropriate source and medium and was able to gain insights into the relation between keywords and products purchased via phone orders. This information allowed Lever to use different techniques to significantly improve ThePetStoreOnline.com’s conversion rate.

Below is a snapshot of the code for ThePetStoreOnline.com.  This is the code after clicking through a paid search ad: 

Tracking phones sales to paid search is not easy, but hopefully applying one of the methods above will give you better insight into the true cost and benefit of paid search.