Affiliate Marketing

When I first heard about Affiliate Radar what intrigued me was the ability to manage reporting and convert Adwords campaigns easily into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter’s bulk upload formats. I have been outsourcing the conversion of campaigns from Adwords into Yahoo and MSN formats for a long time. ‘If there was something that would automate this process that would be great’ I thought to myself. Well that was late in the summer of 2007. I just recently subscribed to affiliate radar and I am going to share some of my thoughts.

Conversion of Campaigns to Other Formats

This is probably the best feature of Affiliate Radar to date. There has long been a need for a script that would automatically convert a CSV from the Adwords Editor format into YSM and MSN bulk uploading formats. The only problem is that both Yahoo and MSN have known this for a long time, and now they are both offering to convert them for you. Well, they claim to do it for you, but it doesn’t always work.

Yahoo’s conversion script certainly leaves the user wanting. In my experience the Yahoo conversion does not really work without assisting it with a lot of manual edits, thus making it useless. So there is a niche here for Affiliate Radar, which actually does a good job of converting CSV’s from Adwords into YSM and MSN formats.

MSN on the other hand just released this option and I haven’t had the chance to test it yet. It may be just like Yahoo’s or it may actually work.

I have tested this feature in Affiliate Radar and it works nicely. The upload into MSN adCenter went without a hitch, but you still have to set the campaign targeting and activate the ad groups manually, but that is not Affiliate Radar’s fault, it is MSN’s.

Apparently the most recent Adcenter update makes this possible in bulk. Meaning you can select all the new adgroups and activate them all at once, rather than one at a time. That in itself would be a huge improvement in the Adcenter platform, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

Reporting

The report functionality inside of Affiliate Radar was quite lacking for anyone running a significant amount of PPC campaigns. I thought someone had finally figured out a great way to track campaigns at the keyword level without requiring a vast installation of scripts on a server. It turns out that is doesn’t do all it claims to do, at least not yet.

The automatic generation of subid tracking for all of the major PPC engines is a great idea. This eliminates the need to generate unique tracking codes for each and every adgroup or for those meticulous people for each and every keyword.

Most affiliate marketers track on the adgroup level and not the keyword level, because it can become unmanageable to track every keyword. I bid on close to a million keywords. How am I supposed to track every single one? This is where Affiliate Radar is supposed to come in, and they largely do.

Once you upload a report from the affiliate network, AR quickly compiles a keyword report showing which keywords are converting and which ones are not. Awesome! I thought to myself until I looked for a place to upload my PPC report from Adwords. There was none. That is where my critique comes in.

It is nearly impossible to track and bid based on data that is generated purely from an affiliate network. The affiliate network data has to be reconciled with PPC network data. This is because there is always a discrepancy between the number of clicks an affiliate network will show in its reports and the number a clicks that are actually paid for.

Sometimes the affiliate network will report more clicks; sometimes they will report less clicks. This depends on which network you are talking about. But there is always a discrepancy, and if I am going to bid on EPC data that is reported it is the PPC network clicks that should be counted. This is for the very simple reason that: THESE ARE THE CLICKS YOU ACTUALLY PAID FOR!

You aren’t going to bid based on clicks that may or may not have actually happened. Most PPC networks filter clicks for fraud, and you usually pay for less clicks than you actually get. But in the game of PPC affiliate marketing it is the paid clicks that you want to account for. These are the clicks that you need an accurate EPC on. Not the clicks reported by the affiliate network.

So until Affiliate Radar adds the ability to reconcile reports from both ends: cost and commission; they will just be a nice way to convert Adwords files into YSM and MSN formats, which I have to admit, is probably worth the $97 per month, at least for the time being.