Non-Intrusive Affiliate Marketing Programs
Affiliate marketing programs can have a huge effect on
your e-commerce website profitability. For this to happen, however, your
affiliate program must be well designed and managed. Don't underestimate
the effort and time necessary to create and effectively manage any
affiliate marketing program.
One of the questions we get fairly often is "How can we create an
affiliate tracking program with out using query string values to pass the
affiliate ID?" There are a couple of reasons for this type of
affiliate program setup. The most important are:
- The site owner doesn't want the user to know that the link is
anything more than a voluntary link from the referring site. If it is
a paid link, users tend to give them less relevance.
- The site owner wants to control the link text and link to aide in
search engine optimization. With the uncertainty of the effect of reciprocal
links and link structure for search engines, this type of affiliate marketing program can
add ranking to a sites positioning efforts.
Both of these reasons can be worth far more than the additional cost of
developing a non-intrusive affiliate marketing program.
Many of today's surfers are far more sophisticated and knowing that a
particular link is a "paid" link is generally a good reason not
to use the link. This is obvious with "sponsored" links on
search engines where the "sponsored" links are only used by
about a third of the search engine users. The rest seem to prefer the
"natural", "real" search results.
The programming and site preparation for a non-intrusive
affiliate marketing program does become a little more involved
and does drive the cost of development up a degree. However, there is
little difference in the management of the affiliate program. Programmatically,
we can hide all of the work necessary to track sales by affiliate within
certain limitations.
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