Technology has really progressed rapidly when it comes to
Associate Program software! Let's take a look at what it does... how
it works and why it is so important.
There are many packages of software out there… and you literally
have to be a programming expert to figure out the differences,
specifically the advantages and disadvantages of each.
What is even more confusing… the prices for this type of software
range from...
$300 to over $12,000!
Yes, I am not kidding… there is that much of a fluctuation. Over
the next two articles, we will go over the pros and cons of each and
show you the most economical solution.
The main purpose of Associate Program software is...
tracking! Visitor tracking, associate tracking, sales
tracking. In other words, you need to be able to track your
associates, and the visitors they send to your site - and the
visitors who buy.
There are a number of ways this can be done.
There are many, many ways, but the most common are:
- CGI tracking
- Cookie tracking
- Hard-coded HTML tracking (this is a very old fashioned way of
doing things at this point because technology has really
progressed)
Please note that these systems have one of the following:
- An "offline" database where all of the information is stored
offline, which means the associate cannot view their statistics
but it is easy to manage for the company.
- An online database, where all statistics and associate
information can be viewed by associates, in real-time.
- Neither database, if they are really "Mickey Mouse" and
manually calculate what they owe their associates by hand (this is
the way we used to do it back in 1995 as the software and
technology didn't exist for doing this without a major
investment).
Just to refresh, in case you have forgotten, all associate
programs assign an associate a special URL, which is specific to
them so when someone links to their site, they know who sent them
the visitors and if that visitor buys. For example, with our
Internet Marketing Course, the URL may look like http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/0086/. If
someone posts this URL at their page, with a text link or banner,
anytime someone clicks through that link to our site, we know
associate #0086 sent us that visitor. If that visitor buys, we will
give that associate a referral fee as a "thank you" for sending us
the customer.
It sounds very simple, but the software is very complicated, as
it has to account for many different types of situations, which we
will go over in this article.
Tracking through
HTML pages
This basically means you are setting up mirror pages or mirror
sites. I've already described how this works in one of my previous
articles, but in case you didn't read it... here it is again. If you
already know this stuff, just skip to the next section on cookies by
clicking
here.
Basically you set up a separate page... or a separate site, for
each associate. This is a VERY time consuming way of doing
things, but there is almost no cost involved other than your time.
Here's how it works...
Using marketingtips.com as an example. You'd set up a page for
your 1st associate called http://www.marketingtips.com/info1.html.
Then, as you got more associates you'd add pages... i.e.
www.marketingtips.com/info2.html and .../info3.html .../info4.html
and so on.
These would all be identical pages. The only difference
between.../info1.html .../info2.html .../info3.html etc. is that it
has a different tracking number. You actually hard code in the
associates tracking number (i.e. info5.html would have the tracking
number or associate number of "5") so that when you get an order, a
hidden code in the order form prints the code. This allows you to
manually track and give your associate credit for the sale.
Now this does work and is great for doing a joint venture or two
with a few people… however it has MANY drawbacks.
First of all you can only sell one product. So if you have one
sales letter which sells one product, doing it this way can work
initially… but having multiple products at your website or having
multiple pages will cause you nothing but havoc.
But say I get 100 associates (and it's pretty easy to get 100
associates… in fact it's very easy to get 100+ associates in a
matter of 30 days)... now if I want to change something like the
price, or I have found a better way to sell my product so I want to
change the sales copy, or I want to add in a graphic, or whatever; I
have to go to every single webpage and change them all
manually, all 100+ of them. It's a HUGE job!
Trust me, I used to do it this way back in 1995 when
associate/affiliate software was not available. Updating the pages
ate up days of my time.
There is also the fact that you can't offer any of your
associates real time statistics. They can't tell how much they've
earned until the end of the month when you "manually" calculate it
(which can take you a couple of days if you have 100+ associates).
They don't even know how many visitors they are getting or how many
sales they are generating... they have no way of tracking it on this
type of system. And on top of all that, they have to have 100% trust
in me that I'm not ripping them off because I am the only one who
has the "true" visitor and sales numbers… they have no idea if they
are selling the numbers as I report it to them. It's a pretty
primitive way of doing it. It was a very old way of doing associate
programs and you can "shoot yourself in the foot" because most
people will not sign up with you if they don't feel comfortable that
you are reporting to them in real-time, all the time, about how they
are doing with sales. Heck some of the associate program directories
(which I will mention later) won't even list your site on their list
if you do not have real time tracking software.
Now another problem could occur if you had a site selling four
products, and you wanted people to roam around your site, read
articles and all that kind of stuff; but still tracking the
associates visitors and sales. It's almost impossible to set up a
reliable system using this method. There would be no way to track
your visitors or associates from webpage to webpage. The only way to
do this is to set up a whole separate individual site for every
associate within your main website (a VERY big job!).
It would take HUGE amounts of room on your web server and there
is no way you could manage it. If you ever wanted to change one
small thing it would literally take you weeks to complete.
It's totally unrealistic!
In our case, with thousands of associates, this would be an
impossible amount of work!
Ok, I know I have stated a lot of negative things about this
method… so you may be asking, "What is the benefit to this method?"
The answer, unfortunately, is only one benefit… it is really cheap
for those who have no money and lots of time on their hands… as
setting up takes only your time and knowledge of HTML. But remember,
you may do more damage than good as many associates will not join
because they can't see their stats or have no confidence in you.
Also you will get a low rating from many associate related
directories as you will look like a "basement operation". But I
guess despite the negatives, having this system is better than
having no system.
You could get away with this about a year ago, but not anymore.
Some associates will not sign up on a system this ancient as it
offers them no control. But I thought I would mention it just in
case you saw a few of these floating around online. They do work,
but they are not competitive against all the other associate
programs, which have come out over the last 6 months.
Cookie Tracking
This method of tracking the visitor and sale offers some MAJOR
advantages… but a few disadvantages as well.
Let's use an example here. If you had an associate promoting your
products and you were using cookies to track that URL, you may give
them a URL which looks like www.yourdomain.com/?12345 or
www.yourdomain.com/track.x/12345/.
The associate number in the URL is a unique number, which is used
to track an associate whether they use banner ads, graphics or text
links.
In this case, if a visitor comes through an associate's link to
my site, a "cookie" is placed in their browser called "12345". A
cookie is a piece of information which stays with their browser so
if they come back to the site at anytime, we can ask them if they
have a "cookie" for our site, and the browser will tell us it is
"12345". I will get to the importance of this in a moment.
We track them as a visitor through our site. If that visitor
places an order we know which associate number gets credit for the
order and they get a commission for the sale.
In other words, the cookie, which is placed in the visitor's
browser, is the associate number... allowing us to keep track of
which associate sent the visitor to us.
Let's go over it in a little more detail (and in "laymen's terms"
so everyone understands it).
When a visitor clicks through on a banner or text link from an
associate's site to your site... the first thing that happens is our
software asks the visitor's computer... "Do you have a cookie for
our site?" If this is the first time the visitor has come to our
site the answer would be "NO" from the visitors browser... and our
website would give them a cookie which is encoded with the
associate's number (in the case above, that would be a cookie which
reads "12345"). If the visitor leaves, that "cookie" (or associate
number) will stay with them. If they come back a few days later to
our main URL or any webpage on our website, our software will ask if
the browser has a "cookie" set. The browser would say "YES" and give
our software that cookie. Then underneath all of the webpages it
"remembers" the number "12345", as the visitor surfs through the
site and if that visitor orders something, our website records the
"12345" as the person who referred the visitors to us and that
associate (associate #12345) gets a referral fee for the sale.
Still with me?
The beauty of cookies is that it makes it very easy to track,
because no matter how many products a visitor orders... no matter
how many times they come back, it gets tracked. This is not possible
in any other method of tracking… which makes it a very powerful
way to track visitors and orders. If a visitor visits the site
today, but does not order… but then returns a few weeks later (or
years for that matter) the software still tracks the "cookie" in the
person's browser and the associate who initially sent him to the
site gets credit for the order. If the person orders more than one
product over a few days or a few weeks period, using the cookie
method, it is super easy for the software to track all of this...
and the associate gets credit for all sales generated, in a timely
manner, whether he orders today, tomorrow, next week, or next
year.
As of this printing, places like Amazon.com don't do that. If you
are an associate of Amazon.com and have their icon on your site...
if someone clicks through and buys right away you get credit.
However if they leave Amazon.com and come back three seconds
later by typing in amazon.com and not linking through the
special URL they linked from in the first place to visit Amazon.com,
and then place an order, you as an associate will not get credit
for the sale. Amazon.com takes credit for the whole thing.
That's the problem with those types of Associate programs. In other
words, the only way to get credit for that was to type in the long
URL like http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1571200207/planetpatchworkA/
Now, who is going to type in that?
But with cookies, if you first link through to a site and the
cookie gets set, you can just type in the main URL and the cookie is
still there… and the associate gets credit for the sale without the
visitor ever knowing. Let's use my Internet Marketing Center® as an
example. If an associate has a banner or text link to the site and
we assign him http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/7999/ and
someone goes there, a cookie of 7999 is set in the visitor's browser
and they get redirected to http://www.marketingtips.com so
nothing looks out of the ordinary. If the visitor does not buy, but
later (days, weeks, or even years later) types in
http://www.marketingtips.com, that "7999" cookie is still in
the customer's browser and associate number 7999 will get credit for
the sale even though they just went back to the main domain name,
not the URL with the "…t.cgi/7999/" in it. Cookies are the only
tracking method that can do this efficiently and easily.
You actually want to use cookies because the main benefit
to your associate is that he will get credit for the sale six months
from now, a year from now... whenever the potential customer visits
the site again. And even if a visitor doesn't buy the first time, if
you offer good information they will come back... and buy!
You can set the cookie to expire after a certain period of time,
after 2 weeks, after 2 months, after 2 years... the cookie becomes
obsolete. After a certain period of time the associate doesn't get
credit for that sale anymore. The time period in which the cookie is
active is really your choice, and depends on how much you want to
reward your associate for referring their customer to you.
Personally I set our cookies at 3 years… so if the customer
comes back and buys within three years, the associate who originally
sent them gets credit for the sale.
Okay... so now you have a visitor at your site, and they want to
buy... let's go into more detail on how cookies work.
Now if she click through to the online order form, the associate
software program calls the cookie back from the visitor's browser
and the associate number is placed in a hidden field in the order
form... so that you can track the sale. When the sale actually goes
through, the associate's sale counter is increased by one so that
the associate can see in real time exactly when she has a
sale (assuming you have good associate software, which displays
these stats for the associates).
I won't get into the gory details, but "good" software,
like that which we use at our marketingtips.com site, will track the
number of visitors and the amount of sales coming in through each
individual associate (so you can see which associates are sending
you the majority of your visitors and making the majority of the
sales. This allows you and your associates to check and see if they
are converting enough visitors into sales. If you notice that they
aren't, they can change their banners, text link, etc. to be more
effective.
Okay, what about offline orders (800#, mail, fax)… how do you
track those?
Off-line orders do happen, as some people don't trust the online
ordering process even if secure servers are used. So you will get
orders via fax, mail and through your 1-800 number... and you want
to give your associates credit for these orders too! Not that many
associate programs DO… so features like these will separate you from
the competitors.
This is just one of the hundreds of little "tricks of the
trade" that I reveal in my Internet Marketing Course... and in
my new course "12 Secrets and Tools to an Outrageously Successful
Associate Program" (which I will mention later). It is easy to track
all of your mail, fax, and phone orders for associates once you know
how to do it (which I reveal in one of the two publications
above).
This can be a very important factor to get associates to join
your associate program as they have to feel confident that they are
getting credit for ALL sales generated (not just online sales). So
make sure you know how to do this.
Okay… we've talked about how powerful and useful cookies are...
but there is a downside.
Some people turn off cookies on their browser, or they may have
older browsers which don't accept cookies. Additionally we have
encountered some cookie bugs with older versions of
Netscape... and we don't want to place cookies on those
browsers.
About 20% of the people online either don't have a browser
which accepts cookies, have cookies acceptance "turned off" on their
browser, or have an older version of Netscape with cookie "bugs" in
it.
So when these 20% come to the site... if the software you are
using only operates on cookies (which many do) your associates would
lose these sales because their visitors can't be tracked. This is
not good and will not only make associates lose faith in you, but it
can create a lot of "explaining" to associates if they don't get
credit for sales. This may even stop many people from signing up if
they know how you are tracking and have experienced difficulties
with similar software.
But the good news is I have a solution to the problem (we
will get to that in a few pages!).
CGI
Tracking
Tracking programs that utilize CGI scripting actually put the
associate's code right in the URL as he is surfing through the
site
Note: I categorize this type of tracking as "CGI Tracking",
but it can be done through JAVA script or another programming
language. It has virtually the same functionality as I am describing
here, but I use "CGI" as an example as it is by far the most
commonly used.
Basically the URL is hard coded into the appropriate pages so
that the associate can still get credit for the sale.
The code is visible to the visitor because it becomes part of the
URL. For example, if the visitor bookmarks the site... they wouldn't
just bookmark the URL www.yourdomain.com, but they would bookmark
something like www.yourdomain.com/index.cgi?54321 or
www.yourdomain.com/tracking/reseller.cgi/home/54321.html, the
possibilities are endless as to what the URL could look like…
depending on how they set up their scripts.
The point is the URL is VERY long and it has the associate's ID
in it.
The associate code is not hidden, it's still in the URL and it
still puts the code on the appropriate pages so that the associate
gets credit for the sales.
However, if someone leaves that page and remembers the main
domain name (i.e. www.yourdomain.com) and they type that in later to
revisit the site, the associate will not get credit as there is
no way to track the visitor or sale if he does not re-type in the
full long URL (which is almost impossible most of the time).
This is the down side to CGI scripts.
You will also find some people will notice the long URL with a
lot of "codes" in it and erase the extra codes in the URL and just
go back to the root domain (www.yourdomain.com) to see if something
is different there. If they do this, the tracking is lost and the
associate will not get credit for the sale.
Many associate software programs use this method, so be careful
which associate program software you choose.
It is a "messy" way to do associate tracking. It is clear that
you are tracking something and many people are curious as to why the
URL on the webpage is so long and full of funny numbers/names.
A Solution - The
best of both worlds!
From the article above you can see why each system has faults by
themselves.
However the power is in using them TOGETHER!
I highly recommend using a combination of both cookies... and
CGI scripting for backup.
Let's use the associate software we use for Internet Marketing
Center® and our Internet Marketing Course.
Why do we want to use a combination of both methods of
tracking?
We want our associates to get credit for every single sale
they are entitled to. We want our associates to have confidence
in knowing we track everything, no matter what happens.
So what do we do?
We use the power of "cookie tracking" and have a backup CGI
system, just in case a visitor's cookies are turned off, they are
using an old browser which doesn't accept cookies, or they are using
a version of Netscape which has a "cookie bug" in it (this is a
little secret we learned from experience and hard knocks).
If we cannot put a cookie on their browser for some reason
(remember, I said that about 20% of all people online cannot accept
cookies in their browser), our software automatically backs up to
CGI and puts the code right in the URL through CGI scripting. So it
still tracks the visitor and sale. In other words, we track all the
visitors and sales to the best of what technology will provide us to
make sure every associate gets credit for the sales to which they
are due.
Probably the most common method of tracking out there on the
Internet is through cookies. But by using this system in many
Associate Program sites, the 20% of visitors who cannot accept
cookies get defaulted to the program owner's associate number and
the associate who actually sent the visitors doesn't get credit
for their sales.
This is a poor way of running Associate Programs because you have
no idea how much the owner of the Associate Program is essentially
skimming off the top.
That's why we use backup systems like CGI to make sure that our
associates get credit no matter what. Every single person who
comes into our site is tracked and our associates have a great
belief and trust in us because we take so much effort to make
sure that no sale goes into "limbo"… all associates get referral
fees for every customer they send us.
This is one of the reasons we are so successful... we go out of
our way to make sure our associates get credit for ALL of their
sales. To be successful with your own associate program, you too
must be super-reliable. If you don't come across that way you will
not get the associates joining with you and you will not be looked
upon as a quality Associate Program. We have been consistently rated
as one of the top Associate Programs on the net so we know what we
are talking about!
So why is all of this "software talk" so incredibly
important?
The software your Associate Program owner uses is important
because you want to receive credit and commissions for every sale
you send their way!
If your Associate Program is utilizing mirror pages or sites...
they are using very old-fashioned technology! Your associates are
totally reliant on your ability to keep good records and to be
totally honest in calculating their commissions. They can't get real
time statistics... and have no way of knowing what works or what
doesn't work unless you tell them (they can't track it
themselves).
If your Associate Program utilizes only cookies, your associates
are potentially losing 20% of their sales and referral fees (and if
they are tracking offline orders… they may be losing more).
Would you join an associate program that had these problems?
Of course you wouldn't… and you can't expect associates to
join yours if you have these problems.
You would want to look for associate programs which give you
FULL CREDIT for ALL of your sales! And expect your associates to
do the same!
Additionally having good tracking systems is a fantastic
selling point when you are recruiting associates. You can assure
them that they will get credit for all sales... and you can
provide them with real time tracking so that they can test banners,
text links, etc. to find out what works best for their site, in a
matter of days!
If you are setting up an Associate Program, the software you
choose will determine how automated you can get with your program.
The more automated the better... instead of focusing on
administrative trivia you can focus on helping your associates
become wildly successful! Which means that you will be wildly
successful!
I'll tell you all about what features you should be looking for
in good Associate Program software in the next article.
To finish up this article, I would like to go over some important
points, which have not been mentioned yet.
One is the importance of tracking the number of visitors
from each associate, not just sales.
Your software program has to track visitors; as it has to
track sales. If it doesn't track visitors neither you nor
your associates can tell how many visitors are converting into
sales.
It's very good for your associates because they can see how many
visitors they brought in and how many sales have come from them. If
they are only converting one out of every 700 visitors, they will
get a little upset and will call you to go over the details on what
they are doing wrong. This is a good thing! It gives you a good
advantage because you are also seeing what associates are pulling
really well... and you can call them up and find out what
they are doing. Then you can help your other associates improve
their sites, how they are marketing... and help them improve their
conversion ratios to get them more money! And you want to do this
because the more money they make, the more products you sell and the
more money you make!
Another important requirement in setting up an Associate Program
is to make sure that your Associate Program software can track
through all of your order mechanisms. This means that you can
easily track any orders you get by fax, by mail, over your 800#, and
all of your online orders, including secure and non-secure orders.
This is not a problem with the right software!
I just want to make sure that you are aware of how important this
is... because some Associate Program software systems cannot handle
this! Your associates aren't going to be very happy if you only
track online orders but don't give them credit for any phone, fax or
snail mail orders... so make sure you are tracking through all of
them! (We will talk about software in the next article that can do
this)
From the very beginning you are going to want to set up your
Associate Program so that it is as automatic as possible. You
don't want to be spending your time and efforts on looking after
administrative trivia! Your time should be spent on testing and
improving your marketing and on helping your associates become
successful... not on filling out manual forms and dealing with
manual tracking procedures.
It's also very important to make your Associate Program easy
to join, and easy to use. You want to guide your new associate
through the sign up process step-by-step. Make it very easy for
them… all automated so that they can join your Associate Program
within seconds and get all the information they need so they can
become a part of it right away.
