Affiliate Blog

Publishers Spoke, We Listened

We just completed our second release of the year and have a couple enhancements I'd like to call to your attention.  We'll be sending a full release note out on Monday that includes some more screenshots and details on a couple other minor enhancements.  But I couldn't wait to get the word out on these two, so here you go.

We've been getting lots of positive feedback on the newest links UI.  But several  publishers suggested that they'd like to see a view of this feature that included links from only those advertisers with whom they have a relationship.  I'm happy to announce that this feature is now available.  Now you may view links added to the network in the past seven days for all advertisers in the network or for only your approved advertisers.  You can further filter the list by link/banner, banner size, promotion type, and for short term promotions.

We've also heard from many publishers that they want more direct contact with our advertisers.  To that end, your primary email address has been available to your approved advertisers for over a year now.  We are now also offering an option on your communications preferences page that will allow you to expose your email address to advertisers in our network with whom you are not currently working.  You will need to opt in to this setting to begin receiving direct communication from non-joined advertisers; all publishers are opted out by default. 

We will soon be releasing a feature to advertisers that will enable them to recruit our network and view the contact information of those publishers that have opted in for non-joined advertiser communication.  We think this will help to open up our network and facilitate many more relationships than we could establish through our own recruiting and matchmaking efforts.

We're very excited about this release and hope you'll find that these features will continue to improve publishers' experience with DoubleClick Performics and our advertisers.  As always, please leave comments and suggestions if you have them.  There will be a publisher webinar on March 5 to walk you through these and other recently released features, check your email for the invite.

Larry Adams
Affiliate Product Manager

Performics Releases New (and enhances old) Advertiser and Publisher Features

I'm happy to announce that we rolled out some improvements and new features to the advertiser and publisher interfaces over the past weekend.  Sam Harrelson posted on the publisher features yesterday after our release note went out.  He didn't receive the announcement for the advertiser features, so I thought I'd include a brief summary here of the whole release for everyone's benefit.

Advertiser Features:

Advertiser Categories - DoubleClick Performics defined and assigned categories for all advertisers in our network.  We have assigned all advertisers a primary and (if applicable) secondary categories to make it easier for publishers to find offers relevant to them.  We're going to leverage this information more and more in upcoming releases so stay tuned.

HTML editor for Advertiser Profile - we added a WYSIWYG editor in the advertiser profile so we can pull in images, layout complex commission/bonus structures, list top selling products, etc.  Basically its a much easier and better way for advertisers to be able to merchandise their program to affiliates.

Publisher Recruiting  - We've designed a new section of the site to allow advertisers to segment their joined publishers by business classification (assigned by our affiliate strategy team to ensure accurate data), tenure in the program and EPC.  We'll be adding more filters in the future as well as providing access to not joined publishers who opt in to be recruited in a future release.  The output includes publisher email addresses (again, those who have opted in to receive promotional messages from the advertiser) and can be exported to CSV. 

For example, an advertiser can build a custom list for an exclusive offer for Shopping and Promotions publishers with a higher than average EPC. It's also possible to generate a list of publishers who recently joined the program and provide tips for success, best selling products, etc; this tactic is effective in improving productivity rates of newly joined publishers.

Publisher Features:

Newest Links Interface - The feature enables publishers to view links added to the network in the past seven days by any advertiser in the network.  If you are in an advertiser’s program, you can retrieve a link from the interface without leaving the page; if you find a link for a program you have not joined, you may apply from this page.

This feature enables a publisher to quickly view the links most recently added to the network without having to drill down into potentially hundreds of advertiser programs one by one.  In addition, the interface makes it easy to narrow the list of links by viewing only text links or banners and by filtering on promotion type, banner size and expiration date.  For example, applying the "Expire in 7 days" filter will provide a list of all one week (or less) promotions in our network.  These are often some of the best performing creative and promotions offered by our advertisers.

We will be adding filters in future releases including advertiser categories (see below), joined/not-joined, EPC and others.  In addition, we will be enabling you to create an RSS feed of links based on any combination of filters you select within the interface so you can automate the retrieval of a list of links that suits the needs of your web site.  If you have suggestions for other enhancements please leave a comment below.

Find Advertisers/Advertiser Profiles - You can now quickly and easily access critical information regarding joined advertisers and learn about new advertiser programs you may want to join.  We have placed short cuts below each advertiser’s name to view their profile, commission structure and any additional terms defined by the advertiser.  This initial list can be filtered by category. When selecting a category in the drop down displayed above, any advertiser who’s primary or secondary category match the selection will be displayed.  We have also added a column so that you may view and sort by an advertiser’s primary category. 

All advertisers’ categories have been updated to reflect a primary category and secondary categories and publishers can search for advertisers by category.  These categories will be reflected throughout ConnectCommerce. The categories have been selected by the DoubleClick Performics affiliate strategy team in order to ensure quality and consistency.

From the advertiser profile, you can access details regarding commission structure and view any special terms and conditions for that advertiser’s affiliate program.   The page also provides links that enable you to download and view all additional terms for all advertisers on a page.  Publishers may also quickly see whether or not an advertiser provides a data feed as well as view EPC and other critical information, including contact information.

Enhanced Site Description in Publisher Profile - The publisher profile page has also been improved and we encourage you to review your profile and take advantage of the real estate to help advertisers evaluate your site.  There is a simple WYSIWIG editor available and you can add screenshots, press articles, links or any other interesting information.  This is a great place to link to all of the web sites that you operate as well as provide information about unique promotional opportunities your business can provide our advertisers.

As always, we value your feedback.  We're looking forward to many more big releases this year as we build on the groundwork we laid this past weekend.  Thanks to our wonderful engineering team for all the hard work and dedication in getting this in the hands of our users.

Larry Adams

Affiliate Product Manager

Take Advantage of Last Minute Offers - New Links UI Beta

Last month we released the second in a series of improvements to our links interface for publishers.  I've been keeping quiet about it until now because we weren't happy with the performance of the feature out of the gate.  We've recently tuned it up a bit and while it's still not as fast as I want it, it is a lot more usable now and I'd like to get some fresh eyes on it.

If you haven't tried it already, login to ConnectCommerce and take a look at Get Links > newest links (you have to be logged in to use the link).  The page will display all of the links that have been added to the network in the past seven days, from all advertisers in the network.  As of the time of this post, there are 500+ links in there and many are limited time offers meant for those last minute shoppers.  I also think this feature will be very useful as you start to refresh your links after the holidays.  This page will have all of the post-holiday creative in one place so you don't have to visit each advertiser's link library individually.

You can choose from a set of filters to narrow the list down to the offers that are most relevant to your site.  You limit the view to text or banners and filter each list by expiration date, promo type and size.  You can also select the "links you created" filter to see only the links you created (BYOLs, a.k.a. Build Your Own Links) in the past week. 

My favorite view of the data so far is to look at links expiring the next seven days.  Since the UI already restricts the set of links to those added in the past seven days, using this filter narrows the list to those links that are live for a week or less which are usually the best deals.  There are more than 250 links using this set of filters and many include great shipping/percent/dollar off promotions.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.  We have a long list of enhancements we want to make already but we're always looking for good feedback that will both add to and refine the priority of the list.

Thanks, and have a great finale to your holiday season.

Larry Adams
Affiliate Product Manager

New Links UI Beta Release

I'm happy to announce that we've released a major redesign to our links interface for affiliate publishers.  This UI is being made available concurrently with our legacy links interface in order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season.  But I strongly encourage you to take give it a try; we've done a lot of user testing with this interface and most tasks take far less time in the new UI.

To view the new UI, select Get Links from the top navigation and choose Get Links Beta from the action list drop-down for any of your approved advertisers.  We expect this UI will be in a beta state for the next two to three months.  In that time, we will be taking your feedback and making improvements to the UI.  In fact, our next update is due in roughly twenty days.  Until then, please take a few minutes to kick the tires and let us know what you think.

Larry Adams
Affiliate Product Manager

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