The Beginner’s Guide to Working With Coupon Affiliate Sites
I go into this later in the post with ways for you to test if your coupon affiliates add value and how to remove them. With that said, as long as they are not abusing your trademarks like I mention above, there are value-adding ways to work with these types of partners. Yes, coupon affiliates can drive top of the funnel traffic and sales. The trick to having them add value instead of poaching your cart is to make sure they have an active and engaged audience and that the traffic is NOT using your brand.
There are phrases that these sites can show up for with a higher volume and this type of generic traffic is also top of the funnel and normally high value adding. The coupon site in many of these cases initiated the interest or helped to close the deal and brought you the customer. This sounds great! It is almost always inaccurate as well. The person saying this is normally leaving out one important thing. I do a ton of affiliate program audits. If the average PPC, SEO or top of the funnel customer takes ten minutes from getting to your site to finish checking out, but a specific coupon site only takes 4 or 5 minutes from the time their cookie is set , chances are they are intercepting the shopping cart and not bringing you new customers.
Ask your tech team or use your analytics or attribution tools to see what the average time from when a person reaches your coupon code box to checkout is. Instead they may be seen as parasitic because they are intercepting your shopping process and taking a piece of the revenue from you instead of introducing new customers. You could also argue that they help to close the sale and this could be true in some cases. The tests I mention below can help to determine this for you.
Affiliate Program Listings
Remember, if the time stamp is similar to what I mentioned above, they may just be intercepting and poaching the commission from you. In the image above you see the arrival time of your customers by channel. The thick black line is the time when a shopper gets to the coupon code box in your checkout. PPC takes 7 minutes, SEO takes 10 but the coupon affiliate takes 3 minutes which is also the same time an average shopper reaches the coupon code box and checks out. This is a very good indication that coupon affiliate is poaching your shopping cart.
The next step in proving this is to look at the original source. If the customer found you through PPC, SEO results, a cross promotion with another company, or even an offline ad or PR coverage, that is your customer acquisition channel.
If they left to find a coupon code at checkout, clicked the coupon affiliates link and came back to finish checking out, that coupon site was not the customer acquisition channel. If you really want to get a good feel, look for your coupon affiliates that have very high conversion rates and short click to end of sale time. If the answer is anything but that coupon site by name, the coupon site is probably not your customer acquisition channel. If these tests turn out to show the coupon site is not introducing the customer, then they are NOT your customer acquisition channel and you should begin testing where you have added value.
I have a section on this below. We get the same results almost all of the time and it saves companies a ton of money by identifying where you gain and lose money. This is when you know if they have your best interest in mind or their own. However, that takes a ton of work and effort and does not guarantee affiliate commissions. This is what you want to be careful of and avoid.
That is how they poach your shopping cart. They may also say they are driving relevant traffic or high-converting traffic. What traffic is more relevant or higher converting than people who are already in your shopping cart and checking out? Some coupon affiliates will agree to that. You can find it in Google webmaster support here. If they cannot or will not do the above, you need to make a decision on if you want partners intercepting your customers and if you want to pay them for poaching your own customers from your own shopping cart.
This is where proper multi-channel attribution is vital and to ensure it is being measured by a third party that has a lot of experience with coupon sites and is not afraid to recommend pulling them from your program. This is true, but only partially true. Some of them will still join and promote you, but when they learn more about tracking and see they could be losing sales to these coupon affiliates, there is a chance you could lose these top of the funnel affiliates and their trust forever. Others will pass you over without ever contacting you and now you lose the opportunity to have their top of the funnel traffic and sales.
Neither one makes any financial business sense. Setting the coupon affiliates commissions lower or to zero is also not a solution since the value adding affiliate will still think their cookie can be overwritten.
Affiliate coupon feed solutions
You are still missing the partners, chasing them away and stopping your company from being more profitable by having them. This is also mostly false. Attribution tracking or commissioning means that if there is another cookie from an affiliate before the coupon site or second, third or fourth click occurs , that first affiliate gets credit and the coupon site or affiliate further down does not. Another form is to split the commissions by each partner in the attribution line.
Neither of these are good solutions. Remember, the top of the funnel or value adding affiliate is going to evaluate your program without contacting you. They have no way to know if your attribution based commissioning structure will help them, if it works or even exists. By allowing coupon affiliates to show up for your trademarks, you chase them away and miss on their traffic and sales. This is a missed opportunity for your business and missed revenue you should have had. This could cause them to pull you from their sites and you lose the traffic source because you allowed someone to poach your shopping cart and their revenue.
This is another false metric. Coupon sites and trademark bidding affiliates normally have the highest. They intercept your shopping cart or customers who are looking you up by brand and setting their cookies during the process. Because these are people who already knew about you, the conversion rates are normally higher than other affiliates and channels resulting in a higher EPC.
I use high EPC as a way to detect fraud, not reward a partner.
10 Steps to Building a Coupon or Daily Deal Website
Low EPCs also do not mean bad traffic or low value affiliates. A coupon affiliate that does a newsletter drop for your company could be sending top of the funnel traffic. This results in more clicks but less sales and a lower EPC.
This is probably false. It is important to know how the coupon site or promotion is interacting with your customer. Knowing why their conversion rate is high or low is the most important thing. Once you know this you can then determine if they are a good partner or a bad one. I go into more testing options below. I answered this in the section about attribution commissioning and high-value partners. It creates more. Lowering a coupon affiliates commission or setting it to zero is not a solution.
It can be almost equally as harmful as continuing to let them intercept people who leave at checkout to find a coupon code. This is easy. There are many ways to tell.
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