All questions I wish I had the answers to.

The focus of affiliate marketing is changing and as merchants become more switched on, questions about quality are being asked more and more. The last click wins model and multi channel attribution models are among the hot topics that will continue to be debated during 2010.

How does affiliate marketing solve the problem of quality traffic?

Well, what is quality traffic?

This is down to the merchant to decide what they deem as quality and how they want to measure this and reward accordingly. Some merchants simply look at the bottom line i.e. what do I spend and what do I make? If one number is higher than the other then its working.

Other normally larger merchants have new customer targets; they want to ensure that any advertising or promotion results in new customers and have strict CPA targets.

Some merchants analyse every single channel and touch point to determine its success and have the resource and knowledge in-house to manage this.

The first stage is surely to decide what you as a merchant determine what quality is to you. There is no point in a traditional network developing their tracking to reward affiliates for quality if it’s a one size fits all solutions. The network would have to determine the quality metrics and those metrics may not suite a large number of merchants.

Amazon’s affiliate programme has something called a session cookie which does exactly what is says on the tin, expires when you close your browser and end your current session. Arguably Amazon has done this from a quality point of view. If the affiliate has done a good job in the presale then as soon as someone lands on the Amazon site they should have their credit card in hand ready to buy. If not then that affiliate has not driven quality traffic and they are not rewarded.

EBay famously changed their commission model to reward affiliates for quality over quantity and no doubt many merchants would like to do the same. The eBay payment model is a CPC model that rewards affiliates more for higher quality traffic. The quality of the traffic is assessed by looking at both short term and long term value to eBay.

In a nutshell if someone lands on your affiliate site that promotes lawnmowers and then clicks through to eBay and purchases a bike, this is seen as less quality traffic than if someone had purchased a lawnmower.  There are a number of other factors involved in eBay decided what it deems quality and a great resource can be found here.

Ebay have determined there own quality metrics and this has been possible due to them moving away from a traditional network and developing their own in house network, the eBay Partner Network. Not a luxury all merchants can afford and it is why we, as industry must take measures to ensure quality can be measured.

Well worth a read and if you have any questions or problems regarding the technical side of the eBay affiliate programme then get in touch with James here.