Just Silly - the Angie’s List Affiliate Program
I occasionally flip though Commission Junction looking for interesting merchants to promote and found Angie’s List. Why Angie’s list? Well it has some possible opportunities to experiment with local search and drive some business to some plumber in Santa Monica or a roofer in Nashville but did I apply? Nope.
Well why not?
When I got to reading the commission terms and “Search and General Promotion Rules” I saw the following amature and generally onerous paragraph (emphasis mine):
Search and General Promotion Rules:
* Search Policy - Bidding on Angie’s List trademarks or use of our trademark in domain names is prohibited, unless you have approval in writing from Angie’s List. To protect profit margins, your PPC Search listings must not rank into a higher PPC Search placement than the in-house listing with the display URL of www.angieslist.com. You may apply to be a part of our special group for search by contacting angiesaffiliates@gmail.com.
* General Promotion - Compensation for promoting Angie’s List is only available to publishers delivering US traffic who are not listed within Angie’s List.
Affiliates have been leveraging paid search for many years and along come merchants (like Angie’s List) who finally figure out how affiliates work and write onerous terms like that. I really wouldn’t have a problem with it if the bold sentence if it didn’t begin with “To protect profit margins”. Now why doesn’t the affiliate manager of Angie’s List simply write “we don’t want affiliates who use paid search because our margins are thin and we are afraid to get beat by our affiliates”?
What’s the lesson here? Well there are a number but here are three:
- Learn how Google works before writing antiquated rules like the above. The basic paid search equation for Google is CTR * Bid= ad placement. If you ad sucks, Google will make sure they place an ad that pays them more money above yours. So Angie, it doesn’t matter what an affiliate bids. They could be bidding a penny but still have a better paid placement than you because your click though rate is poor.
- Do the math before you write stupid stuff like the above. Writing stuff like that tells me and potential affiliates that you have little experience working with affiliates. Like I said above, affiliates have been doing this paid search thing for a long time and more times than not, they will have more experience with paid search than you do (or can afford). Think about your ROAS and don’t forget to include salaries and benefits for your SEM manager. Compare that to a decent affiliate manager or OPM and see what you get. The numbers won’t lie but it will help you make a rational decision before you give your affiliate program a bad reputation.
- Never, never forget your current or future affiliates aren’t the enemy. They should be viewed as partners — an outsourced sales staff. They can make your business if you help them and avoid saying things like the above. Never forget affiliates are bottom line, ROI focused folks. If you create a program that prevents them from achieving their ROI expectations, they’ll drop your program like a bad habit.
