Welcome to Affiliate Marketing Hell Week

By Managing Editor Anne Holland

Ouch. When affiliate management company Linkshare announced
their Titanium Awards Winner last week for best performing
affiliate of 2003, turns out the winner 24HourEDeals.com, was a
cookie-stuffer.

So Linkshare had to rip the tiara off the winner's head and take
back the $15k award.

Cookie stuffing is when an affiliate puts loads (sometimes
hundreds) of cookies with their commission codes on an
unsuspecting Web surfer's computer, who happened to click on just
one link the affiliate controlled. Then the next time that
surfer goes to a merchant's site of their own accord, the
merchant thinks the affiliate sent them. So the merchant pays
out a commission for the traffic.

In other affiliate news, Ken Evoy an online merchant who's famous
for encouraging thousands of mom'n'pop affiliates to market his
wares extremely aggressively, is upset because he says his own
email is being blocked by Brightmail's filters.

The thing is, Evoy says he personally doesn't send any non-
permission email, so he should not be blocked just because of a
few bad apple affiliates who may be. It appears that Brightmail
-- which is just about the most used filter in the world --
may not agree with him.

Last but not least, although Google has not made their planned
public announcement that they'll cease to honor trademarks for
AdWords, I learned yesterday that it's a pretty good bet they'll
do so very soon after their IPO this summer.

So, if you are counting on Google to stop affiliates and
competitors from running AdWords ads against your trademarks,
watch out.

Got an affiliate program? Perhaps you should have a quick
meeting with your team to make sure they are taking active
measures to protect you on these three fronts.

UPDATE: Several of you have written in since I posted this article a few hours ago, wanting to know how to detect cookie stuffing. I asked Brian Clark, who as Publisher ReveNews.com is a real expert, for some advice.

Here's what he says, "Only real ways of detecting it are:
1) watch for affiliates that seem to have an abnormally high click thru quantity but with an abnormally low conversion rate.

2) go to the affiliate's page with a cleaned out cookie folder, then look and see what cookies have appeared."

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