NOW Is the season to be jolly

Well, Christmas isn’t normally that kind to travel affiliates, who contrary to most other types of affiliates see a drop in traffic and conversions in December. January 2010 has been great though…

• High Basket Values – It’s normally families booking and often for school holidays so it’s not unusual to see £2000 bookings coming through.
• Increased Traffic – Simply the searches go through the roof compared with the preceding months. I love it.
• Good Conversions – Normally travel sites don’t convert that well. Customers search and search but in January most sites have strong call to action and time limited offers so conversion improves.

As far as I can tell from my little patch, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year for the (beach) travel industry, unless they go and do some crazy capacity increases, but I reckon that will also be under control and helped by the big four becoming the big two. My guess is that :

• The snow helped. It was pretty cold there for a while, which can really drive bookings.
• Low interest rates helped. Even if we don’t exactly have consumer confidence back 100%, the low interest rates probably helped people whack a fortnight in Cyprus on their Mastercard.
• People are more happy than ever to convert online (and call centres can end up with calls queueing), Moreover, certain holiday companies are better than ever at converting their traffic online with less people reverting to the phone.

Marketplace for niche holiday companies

In an interesting move for the niche tour operator market, TourCMS has launched a marketplace to connect their large number of niche and adventure specialist travel companies with distribution partners including affiliates and travel agents.

Rather than creating something like an affiliate network (charging the suppliers and paying the affiliates but keeping a cut), the TourCMS marketplace will instead be “just” a marketplace and technology provider to connect the holiday companies with the partners.

TourCMS will be charging a monthly access fee to make ends meet. This will likely put a lot of “grass-roots” affiliates off but there is a whopping 120 day free trial so still worth a look. I think they should make it free for partners to access though – the same as how Ritzy’s nightclub lets girls in free before 23:00 – they know the guys will be happy to stump up a fiver to get in!

One thing I like is that there’s an RSS feed for keeping up to date with the latest suppliers available to promote. It’s a little bit like what Affiliate Window is working towards with their Darwin administration area – merchants can get to know more about the affiliates – promotion methods etc.

One issue with these specialist tour operators when  looking at it from a pure affiliate standpoint is that many of the products won’t convert online – even if the booking functionality exists there will normally be many questions and details that come up and the phone number will end up being used. However I this marketplace presents interesting opportunities for online marketing specialists. As Alex Bainbridge, owner of TourCMS points out :

Take the example of someone wanting to provide PPC management services to a travel company. They can take the tour name / lead in price data from the marketplace – and create PPC adverts from that…. if that marketing person charges on time spent (rather than money made) then that is fine by us – as we are not earning money from the value of the transactions but from the sharing of the data.

Travel Affiliate Marketing Glossary

I spoke to someone recently that said they would like to know more about affiliate marketing but couldn’t get their head round all the jargon. So in this little glossary I have tried to decode a few of the frequently used terms you hear in affiliate marketing. Not sure why there are so many that begin with C…. Please leave a comment to let me know the ones I must have missed!

Affiliate Marketing Terms

Affiliate - Also known as a “Publisher”. An affiliate promotes goods or services on behalf of a provider in exchange for a reward which is almost always cash and can be a percentage of sales value or a flat fee. It is fairly common to have a tiered commission scheme where the more sales are generated the higher the commission awarded.

Cancellation – Also known as “Reversal”. When a sale has been recorded by an affiliate but the commission is taken back. This can occur if the transaction turns out to be fraudulent or is cancelled for some other reason.

Cookie – Non edible. A cookie is the thing that is used to track the visitors that are sent to the merchant site from the affiliate site and if they buy something / sign up information is sent back to the server so the affiliate can be remunerated. Cookies have varying lifetimes – a longer cookie lifetime means an affiliate is more likely to get paid if the visitor doesn’t buy immediately but comes back to the merchant site later. Most sales occur the same day or within a few days though.

Conversion Rate – Also known as Look to Book. Normally expressed as a percentage – The number of sales divided by the number of visitors. Can be some confusion in travel about this when for example an airline might be measuring passengers booked / total visitors while an affiliate will normally look at absolute bookings / total visitors.

CPA – Cost per acquisition. Normally used to measure how much was spent to “acquire” a sale e.g. a spend of £10 on Adwords generated £15 in affiliate commission. I have also seen this used to express the cash incentive for a sale / sign up. Usually a sign up e.g. “80 pence CPA for valid email address that signs up” (to a merchants website).

CTR – Click through Rate. Another % which is the number of clicks generated by a banner divided by the number of impressions that were served up. CTR can be increased by the relevance of the banner, the design and sales message, the location on the affiliate site and brand perception / offline marketing.

De-Duping – De-duplicating for affiliates is where a number of online marketing techniques have been involved in a sale and the merchant chooses to de-dupe the referrers so only (usually) the last refferer gets rewarded. Lets say an affiliate refers a visitor to a merchant and the visitor books a holiday, but the visitor has also clicked a PPC ad for the merchant (different cookie, different network), a de-duplication process may see the affiliate lose the commission. De-duping is also a process where email databases are checked for duplicates in order to reduce costs or improve reporting.

Deeplinking – Linking to a product page within the site. Example this instead of this. This can be a way to increase conversion rates. Not all merchants support this so be careful or your sales won’t track. Deeplinking can help your conversion rate by bringing your visitor to a relevant page, a page closer to the checkout process or a page with attractive deals.

Impressions – The number of times advertising material e.g. a banner was viewed. Not that interesting – it’s conversions that count!

Incentives – Sometimes merchants, in conjunction with networks, run incentives in order to boost sales or awareness of their campaign. Some incentives require nothing more than sales generation or even just to add a banner others require more creativity or effort such as a specific volume of sales. The best incentives (in my opinion) are pitched in a way that everyone can think they have a chance so has a go. This could be an incentive with different tiers or with a number of ways to gain entries. Incentives can include cash, holidays and other cool stuff.

Merchant - Standard affiliate speak for the companies that actually provide the products. Example Thomson.co.uk is a “merchant”.

Network – These are the companies that are the go-between, they take money from the merchants for delivering the sales, keep some of it and give the rest to their affiliates. They provide the linking technology, reporting and in many cases the account management and admin. Here are some British affiliate marketing networks.

PPC – pay per click. It’s not very common for affiliates to be rewarded on a pay per click basis, pay per sale (fixed £ or %) is much more common. Some affiliates and merchants use PPC products like Google Adwords to drive traffic to their sites.

ROI - Return on Investment. Important for all involved in marketing. One of the attractions of affiliate marketing for many marketing managers is that it is at least easier to measure the ROI of an affiliate marketing campaign than say a TV advertising campaign.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation, widely used term to describe traffic gained through visitors that come via organic search engine results. The term SEO actually means having your website in the best possible shape for search engines to give it a good ranking for the keyword / phrases your site is all about but is also used to describe other off-site factors.

Blue Chip Vacation Voucher Code Changes

Keeping on the topic of voucher codes in affiliate marketing brought up by the post on changes to the Hoseasons affiliate programme here are some interesting changes to the Blue Chip Vacations affiliate programme announced this week :

1. All sales from voucher code sites will be de-duplicated against our own site analytics.  If another affiliate is implicated in the sale and no voucher code has been used, then the commission will be split 50/50 between the Voucher Code site and the earlier referrer.
2. If elapsed time from click to sale is less than 15 mins and no voucher code has been used, then no commission will be awarded to the voucher code site.
3. Only live offers are to be displayed, and must carry full terms and conditions.  All expired codes and offers must be removed from the site within 7 days.

It seems like the changes are designed to stop any dodgy tactics by sites that might rank for voucher codes for Blue Chip Vacations without actually having any valid codes for customers to use.

I also note that Blue Chip Vacations has taken the trouble to create this promotional code page on their site, which seems like a clever way for merchants to rank in the search engines for voucher code + their brand. Well played.

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