Is affiliate marketing a fair chance for beginners or is it just being ripped off by the info marketer cartel?
A lot of money can be made quickly with affiliate marketing. The advantages are also obvious. You don’t have to worry about costly matters such as warehousing, ordering or dunning, and you can concentrate on the essentials, promoting the products. A so–called “cookie” provides the provider with information about which affiliate a specific purchase is to be assigned to.
The different tracking models:
However, there are different tracking methods here, all of which have their “quirks“, as we Baden people would say
- First cookie
- winsLast cookie wins
- Postview tracking
These are the 3 most popular tracking methods. The easiest way to act is method 2, the “last cookie wins” . Here things are simple. The affiliate through whom the sale was made, who had the last customer contact, wins the race and collects the commission. This method is now also the most common and is felt by most to be the fairest.
However, the other two methods are very tricky. Post view tracking , in particular, is often fatal for “small” affiliates with poor reach . With postview tracking, the cookie is already set when you look at the advertising banner. In other words, the one who made the first “visual contact” wins, it doesn’t even have to be clicked. Post view tracking does not really play a role in info marketing and can therefore now also be neglected here. Anyone who works in other niches, as a small affiliate, should avoid anything that says “Postview Tracking“
The insidious thing about “First Cookie Wins“
Time and again, the “First Cookie Wins” leads to confusion and errors in information marketing. The principle that the affiliate who makes the first contact also makes the sales. In principle, this prefers “high–reach” affiliates with high–traffic websites or large email lists. On the other hand, it disadvantages niche sites and small affiliates.
I’ll take a little example. We have 2 affiliates. Affiliate A has a list of 10,000 recipients, Affiliate B runs a high–quality small niche site in which he presents, compares and tests products. Now we still have the provider. Let’s take an autoresponder service called “Klick mit“.
Affiliate A sends an email to 10,000 recipients and advertises this autoresponder service. 1000 people click on the links in the mail, 1000 cookies are set. Affiliate A wrote the mail in a few minutes.
Affiliate B operates a small website “goldschnute.com“, for which he sets up a comparison test for autoresponders and compares the 4 most common German autoresponder solutions. After hours of research and with a lot of effort, he wrote the article. Since the operator of the site goldschnute naturally also wants to earn something, he links to the compared autoresponder services via an affiliate link.
The result: 10 people bought the “Klick Mit” autoresponder based on the comparison test. Now does Affiliate B get 10 times the commission? Unfortunately not. He was unlucky that 6 of these 10 customers were also entered in Affiliate B’s newsletter list and had already clicked on the affiliate link there. They were still undecided and wanted to find out more and ended up on Affiliate B’s page. Even greater bad luck for the operator of Goldschnute was that there were other affiliates who also advertised the autoresponder service with lists that weighed a lot. In the end he had a lot of work for little profit. With the Last Cookie Wins he would have had 10 sales and with the First Cookie Wins method there were only 4 sales.
