XLsuite

We've crossed something of a milestone last week.

We implemented the long awaited affiliate module. (Long awaited by me anyway).

I should say that the tracking is in place anyway, there is still some UI work to be done on the reporting side, but tracking is in place.

Our ID tracker:
Designing a system gives you a few perks that you don't get when you adopt one.  One of those is creating your own naming conventions.

You commonly see the query ?aff= in affiliate links.  While it's not terrible, I wanted to go for something a little more creative.

We chose to use the ID schema PAL.

I'm going to dub it "Paid Affiliate Link" or Pal.

Actually, we got it by going through the thesaurus and looking for a good word to compliment affiliate.  Since Associate was taken (Amazon got that one - d'oh!) Pal seemed a little whimsical. I liked the way it sounded and more importantly, to my knowledge, it had not been used so I'm officially grabbing it and calling it our own.

Deep cookie tracking
We decided to track the entire history of referrals, not just the last link followed.

I've had many discussions with marketers and advertising professionals that have led me to modify my thinking on affiliate marketing.

I'll save it for another post, but suffice to say that not acknowledging anything but the last click in terms of how a consumer is influenced in a purchase is naive.

As such, it's our intention internally to track both first and last click to award some percentage to both.

In fact, with an eye to the future and in anticipation of this topic becoming more contentious over the years, I decided that it would be best to design the system to track all of the referrals.

So as we mature the system, it'll be possible to create more variations on payment schemes than a simple 2 or 3 layer deep affiliate payment scheme.

For now we're testing the implementation on our Live In series of sites.

We'll be tracking referrals for memberships and for products in the product catalog. (Mainly ebooks.)

If all works well, we'll roll it into our BLS and BSS suites as well so site owners also have access to the module.

More Than Just Product Links
Traditional affiliate marketing systems have a specific link you can create to track with.

More sophisticated ones will allow you to append your tracking code to any page on the site, while not as common, I believe it's the logical direction to go in.

As such we've designed the system the same way, you can simply append the query ?pal=riel to any page on the site to get tracking.

Social Bookmarking Affiliate System
On several of the key pages on our system we've included social bookmarking tool "Add to Any" which allows you to share the page with many online services from twitter to xango and everything in between.



To make our tools more viral, we built the affiliate marketing into that tool bar.

So every page that has our sharing tool bar (Product Pages, Full Blog Post Pages, Real Estate Lisitngs) automatically appends a users affiliate link to the link that is being shared.

So, by signing into the site, all of the social tools (including tell a friend scripts and even the embed code generators) that are available to users, become affiliate marketing tools.

I'm excited to see the response to this, I think it's a great tool set and I'm curious to see what kind of response our users will have to it.

Got any ideas?  Did we miss something?

Let me know in the comments below, I'd love to hear your feedback.