Some Details on HouseLinks

Several people have speculated and/or inquired about our recent platform enhancements to support direct linking.  I wanted to give you a little bit of information here. 

To start, we've named the feature HouseLinks.  The feature evolved from conversations I had with a new customer we will be launching shortly, Barnes & Noble.com.  We will be announcing the launch date early next week.

They were considering options to increase the value of inbound affiliate links to their site as well as reduce their affiliates' exposure to ad and cookie blocking.   To that end, I suggested that we could support an affiliate program where we provided links to affiliates that would appear as if B&N.com deployed an in-house affiliate program.

The solution we have developed enables Performics to provide links that contain the B&N.com domain instead of our tracking domain.  The workflows for building links (for advertiser users) and retrieving links (for publisher users) have not changed; links retrieved from the interface, by creating/upload Build Your Own Links, downloading links from the interface, and from OrangeLinks subscriptions will all contain the direct link for B&N.com and standard tracking links for the rest of the advertisers in the network.  If you have validation in your system to check that links from Performics contain our tracking domain, you will need to update this validation routine to accept *.barnesandnoble.com as well.

All links for the B&N.com program will be in HouseLinks format (i.e. direct to bn.com), no other advertisers in the network will be implementing the feature at this time.

The tracking is facilitated by appending Performics-generated tracking IDs to landing pages on B&N.com's site.  This means that a publisher can take the details of their primary link ID (or any other link ID for that matter), append it to any URL at B&N.com and the traffic will be tracked.   B&N.com captures all relevant tracking information in their cookie and transmits order activity to Performics in batch.  A detailed FAQ will be posted next week for Performics affiliates that will include examples of each Performics link type.

Note, that the conversion tracking in place for B&N.com's program with Performics is virtually identical to the process B&N.com is using to capture activity for their BeFree program; they have never used pixel tag tracking.  Orders will continue to be batched nightly to Performics; I anticipate that these transmissions will occur several times a day in the future. B&N.com has also tagged the landing pages of their sites so that when a visitor lands on their site via a HouseLink a tracking tag is written to the page so that Performics can record the visit in real time.

Before I sign off, I'd just like to commend our development team that managed to build this feature over the course of a single 30 day development iteration.  We've been making huge strides in improving our platform's scalability and flexibilty over the past twelve months.  That HouseLinks was developed in such a short time frame is a testament to the quality of their work.  But we're not resting easy; we will be making a release every month for the remainder of the year.

This is the first post on what I hope will become a useful source of information about our technology, our network, and affiliate marketing in general.  I'll be using this forum on an ongoing basis to keep you informed on new product developments and to solicit feedback on how we can continue to improve our platform.  Others from the organization will be posting less technical material as well.  Stay tuned for more interesting developments in the coming months.

Comments are open on this thread and will remain so unless the conversation gets too far off topic.   

Larry Adams
Affiliate Product Manager
Performics