ScottKalbach.com

Affiliate Abuse Uncovered in 2009

As an affiliate network that takes ethics seriously, AvantLink employees are always on the lookout for rogue affiliates driving traffic in an unethical manor. In many cases these rogue affiliates end up stealing traffic from other legitimate affiliates as well as trumping merchants other marketing campaigns. In an effort to help cleanup the industry and raise awareness on the methods used by unethical affiliates, here are the affiliate abuses that we uncovered and fought against in 2009.

1. Trademark Bidding. Merchant trademark bidding continued to be a major issue in 2009. While we’ve always kept a close eye on analytics to help identify and root out affiliates involved in trademark bidding, our growth has made it more difficult to catch these affiliates as quickly as we used to. To help solve this issue, we launched an in house trademark monitoring tool that helps us identify this activity quickly. This tool is also available to merchants, allowing them to monitor this activity on their own as well.
2. Spamdexing. From Wikipedia: “Spamdexing (also known as search spam or search engine spam) involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.” This technique involves affiliates that use software to auto-generate keyword rich content to game the search engine algorithms. This keyword rich spam content is only shown to the search bots. In most cases you can’t even get to the affiliates page content with a browser. When you click on the search engine result records for these affiliates, instead of bringing the customer to the affiliate website, it just redirects through the networks click URL, setting an affiliate cookie and then lands on a merchant product detail page.
3. Spyware/Toolbar cookie injection. While many people are aware of the big “parasiteware” players, in this case we are talking about random, small affiliates working in concert with toolbar or spyware software providers. This software, usually downloaded as part of a browser toolbar or other software application, injects an affiliate cookie after the customer is already on the merchants website. From our experience you can identify these affiliates by looking for affiliates with no referrer information associated with their traffic stream. Usually, when asked for full disclosure on how these affiliates are driving traffic, these affiliates will claim to be using PPC and hiding their referrer information to protect their keywords. While I do accept the fact that there are legitimate PPC affiliates that hide their referrer information to protect their keywords, if an affiliate is not willing to give you any information that can help you identify legitimate PPC campaigns they are running, this is a major red flag. At the network level, it can be very difficult to get evidence for this type of abuse. We worked with a couple of merchants that were able to provide full click stream reports where we could see obvious examples of network click redirects right in the middle of the customer browsing the merchants website.

AvantLink.com has always done extensive work at the network level to filter out unethical affiliates. This gives merchants in our network a lot more protection by default from this type of activity compared to other networks. Even with our thorough screening process, occasionally an unethical affiliate will figure out a way around the network level screening. As these unethical affiliates continue to adopt new abuse strategies, we will continue to uncover and battle this abuse as quickly as possible.

Scott Kalbach

Tracking and mapping your workouts using a GPS enabled smartphone

For quite a while I’ve had an interest in mapping my bike rides and hikes using a GPS device. I figured it would be pretty cool if I could do a bike ride, have the GPS keep track of my route and then use that to publish a trail review with an accurate map.

I never really spent much time looking into it though until all the hype over the Verizon Droid phone and it’s turn by turn GPS voice navigation functionality brought it back to my attention. I have a Samsung Omnia which has the Windows Mobile OS on it.

I did a few searches the other night and stumbled across this awesome free mobile application and web based service called SportyPal. Not only does it let you track your routes and map them out, but it gives you all kinds of useful workout related information like distance, vertical gain and loss, calories burned, speed, and more.

The smartphone app is very simple and lets you choose between walking, cycling, running, or roller blading. When you’re ready to start your workout you select your activity, then it syncs with the GPS satellites and you’re ready to go. After your done, hit the stop button and it asks if you want to upload it to your free SportyPal account where you can review all your workouts. It overlays your GPS tracked route over a Google powered satellite map by default and you can switch to topo/terrain or hybrid. You can also share your workouts publicly, send them to Facebook or Twitter or embed them into a blog using some embed HTML they provide.

I just used it on a short hike today to test it out. Here is the embedded version of the hike I tracked. You can click on the grey bar on the right to see the performance stats.

Scott Kalbach

Affiliate Paid Search Monitoring in AvantLink.com

One of the major business issues we find ourselves battling every day at AvantLink.com, is the problem generally referred to in the affiliate marketing industry as “Trademark Bidding” or “Trademark Poaching“. This practice involves affiliates placing Pay Per Click (PPC) ads on the major search engines using merchant trade names and/or domains names as the ad keyword trigger.

For example, if an affiliate buys ads on Google for the keywords ‘AvantLink’ or ‘AvantLink.com’, we would end up paying affiliate commissions for customers we would get anyways. The customer was entering our name directly into the search engine and as with most businesses, our website will be the first in the natural search results. Believe it or not, a large number of people enter business names or domain names into search engines rather then typing the URL directly into the browser address bar, even when they know it.

From our perspective, this form of advertising provides little to no value to the merchant. Many merchants don’t understand that if they don’t specifically prohibit this activity in their affiliate program terms and conditions, some affiliates will take that as a green light to trademark bid until they are told otherwise. This is the reason that AvantLink.com decided to prohibit this activity by default in our network level terms and conditions. We’re the only affiliate network that has this default policy.

We have been enforcing this policy right from the beginning, providing AvantLink.com merchant advertisers with a much higher level of brand protection while keeping their affiliate marketing costs down significantly. Many of our competitors are happy to turn a blind eye to this activity because it drives a lot of sales through their networks. And since many merchants are unaware of how these sales are are being driven to them, they are left with the false impression that the large volume of sales must be coming from performing affiliates who are harnessing their own traffic streams.

While it used to be fairly easy for us to monitor this activity manually when we were a smaller network, it has become increasingly difficult now that we’re approaching 200 merchants in our network. That’s why I’m very pleased to announce that we’re currently testing our own fully integrated paid search monitoring tool. This tool was inspired by code initially written by Mark Silliman, available at iTrademarkBidding.com. Our CTO, David Clark, took the general ideas in Mark’s code and has been developing our own keyword monitoring tool over the last few weeks.

The results of our monitoring will be available as a standard report and will provide the following information: merchant name, search term (ad keyword trigger), search engine, affiliate network (including other major affiliate networks the merchant has affiliate programs in), affiliate tracking parameters (If we find an instance of an AvantLink affiliate trade name bidding, we show you the actual affiliate with a link to that affiliates detail information), ad landing page (affiliate website URL or affiliate network click URL), first observed occurrence date and last observed occurrence date.

Currently, we are only monitoring the merchant business name and domain name during our internal testing phase. When this tool is released to AvantLink.com merchants, they will be able to add a custom list of additional keywords that they want monitored by our service. Since we present the paid search monitoring results to merchants in our standard reporting system, merchants can subscribe to these reports as they would any of our other reports and have them delivered via email, RSS, etc. And of course, this tool will be available for free as another value-add service for merchant advertisers in the AvantLink.com affiliate network.

Be sure to keep an eye on our network blog, AvantShare.com, for the public release of this tool.

Scott Kalbach

Spending Shock and Awe

Okay, I’m wondering how many people out there are thinking like I am that our government is completely out of control and putting us on the fast track to economic disaster?

First off, I want to say that I do think the Bush administration shares some of the blame for setting the initial precedent on this bailout madness. While Bush didn’t even come close to spending what the current administration has, he did open the door and he certainly wasn’t a conservative when it came to economics.

However, the current administration and party in power are spending so much money it boggles the mind. Most of us can’t even comprehend these numbers. I heard a guy from the Wall Street Journal say that we’ve spent more in the last three months then we have in the last thirty years. Then there’s the never ending bailouts. Do you realize that Obama has basically nationalized our auto industry and that some of the big banks are in their sites next? Obama says it’s just temporary, but he knows better. Amtrak was nationalized back in 1971 and we’ve been subsidizing them with billions of dollars a year ever since. Profitability is right around the corner they keep telling us. The same thing will most likely happen with GM and the banks.

On top of this they want to add nationalized health care and then jack up all our energy costs sky high with cap and trade. Which some estimates say would cost the average American family an insane $3900.00 a year.

When times are tough for you and your family, do you buckle down, cut costs and save money or do you go out on the biggest shopping spree of your lifetime in hopes that will solve your problem? Apparently the government is living in bizzaro world where you go on the ultimate spending spree to solve your problems. After all it doesn’t matter how much we spend because our good friends in China are buying up trillions of dollars of our debt. Doesn’t that make you feel better? Common sense says that this methodology just isn’t going to work. My fear is that we’ll have proof of that soon enough if they keep up with this craziness.

I don’t care who you voted for and what your political agenda is. This madness has to be stopped or we are all going to suffer. The people of this country need to come together and tell politicians of both parties this out of control spending madness has to stop. I encourage you to contact your senators and congress men and women and tell them to stop the out of control spending now.

Scott Kalbach

New Office

I recently moved my office over to Park City, UT which is about 15 minutes from where I live. I’ve only been in the new office for a couple of weeks, but I must say it’s been pretty nice so far. For those of you unfamiliar with Park City, this is a town that thrives on the outdoors and for good reason. Park City is home to three ski resorts in the winter and in the summer there are over 150 miles of public trails to hike and bike.

I’ve been doing lunch time mountain bike rides from the office several days a week. It’s pretty sweet to be able to hop on the bike at the office and be climbing through an aspen forest within a few minutes. Today I road part of the Spiro trail within the Park City Mountain Resort and then hopped on the Eagle trail until I decided my time was up and I better get back to work.

Here are a few pictures from my ride today taken from my mobile phone.

Spiro Trail - Park City, UT

Eagle Trail - Park City, UT

Eagle Trail - Coming back down

Looking down on Park City from the ride

Scott Kalbach

Important business principles

Over the last four years I’ve been pretty consumed with growing my startup on-line marketing company, AvantLink.com. I think we’ve made incredible progress in the industry so far. We’ve set new standards for ad tools, support and ethics in the industry and we’ve made some great progress branding ourselves on-line.

Here are a few business principles that have served us well.

1. Think long term. In today’s instant gratification society people tend to forget that it can take time to build a successful, sustainable company. We regularly hear about these seemingly overnight Internet sensations and sometimes it makes you wonder why it’s taking you so long to build your company. If you’ve got that next overnight sensation idea, great, go for it. For the rest of us, I would recommend that you concentrate on the things that make any good company successful. A great product that is better then what the competition has to offer and exceptional customer support. If you focus on those two items, chances are that you will create some level of success over the long term.

2. Stay focused on your core strengths and business model. If you have a better product and exceptional customer support, then the next important thing is to stay focused on your core business model. You can always consider expanding outside your core business model once your business is a big success. Until then, be careful about chasing ideas outside your core business model that you think might make you a little extra money. Usually these rabbit trails will end up costing you time and money with little ROI.There is plenty of room for innovative thinking within your core business model. So always think in terms of whether your ideas stay true to, improve on, and build the bottom line of your core business model.

3. Make business ethics a top priority. Working in an on-line industry, I see a lot of shady business practices. Right from the beginning we knew that business ethics needed to be a top priority in this company. I know it sounds like common sense, but in this industry, many of our competitors are more then happy to look the other way and allow shady affiliates to practice techniques that make them a lot of money in the short term but are actually cheating their clients in many ways. While the short term money probably seems like the way to go for these companies, over the long term they will suffer serious harm to their brands as their good customers get burned by these practices.

Thinking long term, focusing on your core business model and being as ethical as possible will always serve your business well and help put you on the path to long term success.

Scott Kalbach

Memorial Day 2009

This Memorial Day we’ll be firing up the grill and having some friends over for a meal to celebrate this great country we live in and to honor the memory of those that have died to keep us free. So many heroic Americans have sacrificed their lives in defense of this country. I’m continually amazed by the character and courage of our men and women in uniform. They really do represent the best of Americans.

With how comfortable and cushy our lives can be in this country, it’s easy to forget that our armed forces are currently fighting a war on multiple fronts. So anyways, I just wanted to take a minute to honor all those who have died in service to this country and to say thanks to those that are currently out there defending us as we speak. We’re praying for your safety and that you’ll be able to return home victorious soon!

Scott Kalbach

The Affiliate tool that started it all

The AvantLink.com web service datafeed client has a lot of importance in the history of the AvantLink.com affiliate network. This tool was originally conceptualized and coded by yours truly back in August, 2004. Leading up to this point I had written several scripts for affiliates that wanted to advertise via custom merchant product catalog implementations on their affiliate websites. On each of the implementations the basic underlying datafeed update, processing and page creation code was the same, with some minor customizations mainly to handle the distinct affiliate website HTML template wrapper.

I didn’t like the idea of having to maintain and support these update scripts on several different affiliates sites, so I began investigating some alternatives. At the same time, I had been doing some separate research into SOAP web services for my full time job at a Utah based marketing company. After some minor tinkering with web services, the light bulb lit up. Why not centralize the datafeed updates on a central server and just have a client script on all the affiliate websites that pulls the real time data from the central server and presents it on the affiliate website within a custom HTML template wrapper?

With this type of architecture, the downloading of the merchant datafeeds and database update processes only happen on one server. Bug fixes in these processes only have to get fixed in one place. The affiliates get the benefit of having those processes offloaded to the central server as well as always having up to date product data. The only thing that actually exists on the affiliate website are some scripts to handle the web service communication between the affiliate website and the server as well as the presentation of the final product catalog web pages.

Thanks to the magic of open source software such as PHP, MySQL and the Apache web server, it was fairly easy to put all of this together in a way that had more then acceptable performance from both the central server and affiliate website side.

This tool was originally marketed as a third party tool that affiliates could pay a monthly fee for. I also developed a version for Backcountry.com as part of their proprietary “Affiliate Headquarters”. From there, with the help of a couple business partners, the idea of a new type of affiliate network with a full suite of integrated affiliate tools was born. The web service datafeed client was our first official product level ad tool in the AvantLink.com affiliate network. (Note: Backcountry.com has since all but abandoned their proprietary Affiliate Headquarters in favor of partnering with AvantLink.com as their affiliate network technology provider).

Why am I covering all of this you may be asking at this point? Well, we just rolled out a major update to the underlying code and overall functionality of the web service datafeed client at AvantLink.com. The original underlying code base held up pretty well for almost five years, but it was definitely time for a major overhaul. This one tool has driven a lot of paying customers from affiliate websites to merchants over the years and I believe that the major improvements put together by our CTO, David Clark, will keep the sales flowing for many years to come.

So, it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the affiliate tool that started it all

Scott Kalbach

Rome Anthem Snowboard

My wife purchased the Rome Anthem snowboard this winter. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been in the market for a new board, so we had never heard of this company before. She was a little skeptical at first when a retailer recommended this board over the brands we’re more familiar with. But after reading a lot of reviews and talking with a couple different people about the board she decided to give it a shot. After one day on this board she claimed it is the best board she’s ever ridden. If you’re looking for a really good all mountain board that does as well in the deep powder as it does on a groomer, definitely take a look at this board.

From the Backcountry.com product description:

Rome built the directional Anthem Snowboard for riders who want a kick-ass high-end board that can stick with them no matter where they tear it up. If you start off the day by throwing down hard in the park but may end up hucking yourself off a backcountry cliff before last chair (or vice versa), then here’s your board. The Anthem’s Airpop Core Matrix core with glass and carbon laminate kills it in edge-to-edge transitions and decreases the board’s weight for easier spins. Bamboo inserts give you crazy pop in the park and pipe without causing too much torsional rigidity. This all-mountain board’s super-fast SinterSpeed base give you greased-lightning glide for throwing the sickest tricks over the biggest gaps.

Note: This is a sample post to demonstrate the content match capabilities of the AvantLink.com Product Ad Widget tool. In the screencast, I demonstrate how you can add the widget to your WordPress sidebar. As you can see below, I modified the configuration dimensions to demonstrate how you can also include a widget directly within your blog post.

Scott Kalbach

Product Ad Widget Screencast Series

I just published the first in what will hopefully be a series of screencasts to cover the functionality of our new Product Ad Widget tool.

I’m completely new to this screencast thing but I think it came out okay. Not bad for winging it anyways. No teleprompter required.

Here’s a link to the post and screencast over on AvantShare.com – Product Ad Widget Screencast – Product Comparison Widget
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Scott Kalbach