RedRichard

Hi all,

Currently, we are perfecting an independent affiliate scheme for UK based websites in order to promote jobs based within the UK. It will be available shortly.

In principle the affiliate would be signing up directly with us, displaying quality content on their own site in a choice of formats and we would be paying on a PPC basis for qualified unique users that click through.

I.e. if the affiliates own site was say “a secretarial forum” it could display secretarial jobs from us, if it was a site about say “Java Code” if could display java jobs, if it were a site about “Construction Equipment” it could display construction jobs... etc you get the idea. Basically any site with a reasonable traffic level that attracts mainly abc1 d users of working age that has users that may be interested in clicking through to related job adverts would benefit.

Our scheme is a fantastic way of monetising a website outside of adsence, CJ and other forms of advertising as it can provide an additional revenue stream for them.

We are thinking that if we could find “Influencers” within the affiliate sector that they may be prepared to write about the facility, help us promote the facility or more over help recruit websites to sign up to the facility we could gain greater impact / traction with the scheme quicker?

Obviously employing internal affiliate sales managers could help however we would rather create a network of independents that earn on results rather than paying staff a permanent wage where they might not perform.

If anyone has any ideas on this, ways to promote an independent scheme or would be interested in getting involved please reply / make contact.

Has anyone here worked on anything like this? Or knows of effective ways to structure the payment relationship between introducer and affiliate? If we paid on affiliates signed it would create volume sign ups but not necessarily volume of traffic hence it would be better to sign one site with high traffic than 50 sites with no traffic, hence we think earnings for the introducer based on volumes from the affiliate signed has to be the way, like some sort of pyramid concept?

We would be grateful of any thoughts on this, thanks

Richard

accelerator

From an affiliates point of view, getting a % of commission on a lifetime basis for any sales made by the people they introduced is the most interesting. However, schemes like this, even from the big UK affiliate networks, are rare, which I guess means it's very expensive to the network to offer them.

How are you going to track successful sales here? Performance based tracking is straightforward when promoting say iPods, but perhaps less so when promoting careers.

Rgds

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RedRichard

Hi,

Tracking works similar to having an adsence / yahoo PN account.

Affiliate logs onto own admin facility which tells them the site / page in question producing the clicks, how many total clicks and how many were unique.

The affiliate gets paid on the unique count on a PPC basis on a monthly basis.

From a security point of view we obviously have some smart technology involved to remove click fraud and would eliminate affiliates with a high/ suspect bounce rates BUT we aim to be very active to support sites that support us.

For a genuine affiliate working with us sending genuine UK authentic traffic it provides a useful additional income stream. Its a two way street, we want quality affiliates and will look after them, whilst at the same time we would remove /wont engage with any suspect affiliates.

As for paying introducers on a lifetime basis we would need to think about this. I would guess that it wouldnt be financially viable to offer a lifetime arrangement but something like a 12 month deal on every account signed could be workable, the more accounts put on over time the more this could roll up?

So to sum up, its not a % on sales its a guaranteed amount on PPC for the right partners

Rich

P.S and yes you are right its expensive to run on this basis, but hopefully it would attract quality

accelerator

The issue with time-based deals is that if you introduce a newbie, it can take them months/years to get going, so effectively there is no incentive.

Rgds

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Edwin

Do you have any idea what affiliates might expect to be paid per click? And what might a typical CTR (click-through rate) be?

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RedRichard

Hi,

Hmmm, i can see we need to think this through more, not thought about that issue, see where your comming from.

I would say a starting point of 5p a click to the affiliate.

If the affiliate site has a number of jobs listed in a widget or on a specific page of their site then they could get a reasonable amount of click throughs if they have strong traffic levels.

So... its whats an ideal incentive for an introducer?. IF we said ok we will pay you £5 or something greater for every sign up then we would attract volume sites rather than quantity of clicks. 1000 blogs with next to no traffic is worthless to us, half a dozen great sites with high traffic is worth something.

If we said ok, introducer gets 2p a click 40% of what the affiliate earns (i.e costs us 7p a click in above example) then its only attractive with high volumes.

I guess we need some middle ground.. a mix of both? or a fixed fee on sites producing more than X traffic, or some kind of scale?

Your thoughts would be appreciated, we want this to work well and be simplistic to work out. It needs to become attractive whilst workable at the same time for all sides.

Thoughts appreciated

Rich

Edwin

Ok, now there's your problem right there.

Whether you've thought about it in those terms or not, you're trying to buy very valuable traffic (jobs traffic is one of the most expensive types of traffic out there - just try bidding on Google Adwords!) for absolutely nothing.

For the sake of argument, let's say that your banners/ads get a very respectable 3% click-through rate. That means for every 100 visitors to the page, 3 will click. That will net your affiliate 15p. Let's turn that number into a more industry standard CPM by multiplying everything by 10. Now, for every 1000 visitors there are 30 clicks netting 1 pound 50.

But for the same traffic Adsense may be paying out 1 pound 50 per click. And you're looking to get 30 clicks for the same price - a 30:1 ratio...

You see, the kind of affiliates you're really looking for (the ones that with busy, high quality sites that are going to perform well for you) simply aren't out there with empty sites waiting to fill them with advertising! They already have a range of ads out there and have a shrewd idea of what they can make from them.

So to replace their existing ads with your ads they're going to have to forego existing revenue and they're going to have to make more from the relationship with your company than they lose from the ads they removed.

But with your numbers that's literally impossible. 5p for jobs traffic is so eye-wateringly low that there's no conceivable "probable" click-through rate that is going to earn them more from you than other types of ads will.

Everything boils down to this, after all:-

CPM = CTR x CPC (revenue per 1000 impressions = click-through rate x value of a click)

If you set the CPC very low (in your case 5p) then you can massage the equation all you like and it will still never return a decent CPM amount!

I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but better to face up to the market realities before you get started than down the road.

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Memorable Domains Ltd - Over 7,000 descriptive, generic .co.uk domains for sale
Please note: All sale prices over a week old are automatically invalid. No exceptions. Thanks!

RedRichard

Edwin,

Thank you for your time afforded in replying with such detail

We have much to think about, you make some valid points - we need to work around this. In principle we should be able to structure a return better than YPN or adsence and our adverts should be a heck of a lot more specific and attract higher conversions.

Will review this now in greater detail - Thanks again

Rich

wagster

Take a look at the "Indeed" (https://ads.indeed.com/jobroll/createjobroll) model, it may give you some ideas.

Publishers create ads similar to google adsense for use on their websites which are tracked in much the same way. Payment is received on a per click basis and there is also a commission for a successful job placement.