Evaluating an Affiliate Program
With affiliate marketing becoming one of the most efficient way of increasing revenues, hundreds of merchants are launching affiliate programs every week. Always consider these basic points when you are evaluating an affiliate program.
Verify that the company’s contact details are accurate. You need to validate the email address and phone number. Also verify that an office address is posted on the web site.
Before signing up for a program verify the commission pay out. You will come across some affiliate programs that offer less than 2 % commission. It is usually not worth your time to join programs that offer such a meager commission for all your hard work.
Check the information pages to find out the cookie length. Cookie length determines the length of time when a customer is considered a referral from your website. Most of the affiliate programs provides a 30 day Cookie period. That means you will earn a commission only when the visitor redirected from your site to that of the merchant’s site makes a purchase within 30 days.
Watch for traffic leaks on the merchant’s site. Traffic leaks occur when third-party links in the form of banner ads, Google AdSense ads, popups, popunders, text links etc appear on the merchant site. In these cases, the potential customer may click on these third party links and are taken to another company’s sites. In this case, both the affiliate and the merchant lose business.
