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DISCUSSION: What would you tell your affiliate managers but you can't? (16)

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We deal with affiliiate managers all day.

Some are great.

Many more, however. are not, so good.

What would you tell these affiliate managers, if you did not have to be too polite and professional to tell these to them directly?

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I would say...

"I signed up to your affiliate network to make money, not new friends."

When you have accounts at 10+ affiliate networks it starts getting REALLY annoying when affiliate managers start small talk on daily basis when they have nothing of value to offer.

"sup?", "oh man last weekend was crazy!", "what offers are you running, I'll see if I can bring them over to our network".

I appreciate affiliate managers trying to build a rapport with their affiliates....but provide VALUE first. Help affiliates make money. Genuine rapport will follow.

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Definitely a good one. Saying "hello, how are you?" and that's it won't make me reply - there's nothing of importance there. Would be ideal if that were followed up with "I've found X offer, which I think might fit you", or "I want to talk to you about A, B, C, here's a few times I have available for a call". In other words, skip to the important part, 99% of affiliates won't feel offended that you jump to business - especially if you've met at AWA parties or so and the business makes them money.

Another thing for me is - if you know my traffic type, don't tell me what's hot on the other type of traffic and don't give me global conversion rates, that include your internal media buying team. Give me information as closely link as possible to what I do.

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I would say...

"Hey when I ask you about your top offers do not simply export a generic .xls from your system with 10 different vertical tabs and 100 offers on each vertical. Take 5 mins and do the AM, look at my history and see which offers and geos made most of the money for both of us in the past, ask me what I am looking for, combine the 2 and come with a list of 5 to max 10 offers"

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"Dear affiliate manager,

Please, no surprises.

Advertiser not happy with my traffic quality? Fine. Let me know early. I won't get offended if they say this. If I am told this early on in my campaigns, that is great. I can decide to do something about it.

But I will get offended if I spend XX,XXX with no feedback and then out of the blue get told this around the time I should be getting paid.

Yours Sincerely

C"

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In my case:

"It's really kind and nice of you to send me the FULL campaigns of your affiliates and say something between the lines "Let's kill it bro!!".

But if you are so eager to send me other people's campaigns, odds are you will do the same with my campaigns.

So, no , thank you, I don't want the campaigns and I don't wanna work with you."

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A variant on cmdeal's one for me.

"Given you are meant to be a bridge between me and the offer owner, please let me know, proactively, what segments of the traffic I'm sending are working out or not working out.

I've spent quite a lot of time carefully segmenting all this traffic, and I'm positively ecstatic about working with the advertiser to optimise it, get rid of the bad stuff and scale the good stuff. That's, you know, my job in this entire process.

So it'd be great if we could work together to make money on that, not have unanswered quality review requests for three weeks followed by "yeah, you're booted for low traffic quality". The latter helps no-one and costs all of us quite a bit of potential profit."

I know a lot of this is down to the advertiser not the affiliate manager, but given the AM's job is to be a middle-person, persuading the advertiser to give detailed feedback is definitely in the job description. I've had a couple of AMs who were really good at that!

(As a side note, this is one of the major reasons I enjoy consulting and ecommerce - in both cases, I've got direct access to all the data I need to optimise for profit right down the funnel. )

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I have some AMs that keep on hitting me up over and over and over again ... So dear AM, if after 10 attempts I still didn't start running traffic with you, there is probably a reason for it... asking 10 more times won't change this." I understand they are looking for new affiliates all the time, but there is simple a limit to how many networks any affiliate can work with

And one more : "Dear AM, thanks for lowering my payout on an offer, but please, the next time you do this, send me a skype message about it, just as you do when you want me to try a new offer "

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I understand what you are saying, but I think it is basic manners to begin a conversation like this. Imagine it was a phone conversation and you started with just a pitch. Very impersonal.

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Is Skype a phone conversation?

Do you send an email saying "Hi, how are you?" and then wait for a reply before getting to the point?

My point is this doesn't start a conversation. I instantly ignore it and go onto important things. Will only get in touch with said affiliate manager when I have something to ask - and I ask what I need, I don't wait for them to be there to ask. I've had managers ask at 5am my time "Hi, how are you?" - I'm flying dragons, fighting orcs, and for some reason, I have blonde hair - oh, that's right - I'm dreaming.

LE: If you had something important to tell someone, would you not just say "OMG, this is the news!!!" - "How are you?" without anything else is a clear sign you are "touching base, seeing if I changed my mind about the exact same offers that I said no to the last 10 times I made the mistake to reply to that"

I feel that a big portion of the population who works online, with distributed teams and partners, tries to work just like when they are next to each other in the office - it's absolutely not the same. It's the equivalent of trying to accelerate a car by whipping the engine.

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+1 for this

I usually open up and let my AM know what traffic source I am on so they can send me offers that will work for my traffic source.

I've had this small talk thing happen to me often where they later ask what I am running and I'll tell them the verictial and then they ask which offer and after I tell them the offer they go get it at a lower CPA that I am running at and tell me they are brining the same offer over to their network... perfect.... now the offer I am running is more accessible to my competition

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"learn how postbacks work in your crazy outdated backend and be familiar with setup process & tokens for Voluum"
"get off instagram and do some work"
"please understand that accounts get banned and I cant turn traffic back on instantly"
"I understand your primary job description at *every pop traffic source* is to flirt with me all day, but perhaps spend a minute to learn how to block a zone"
"add the top offers and EPC widget to cake"
"literally everything I say to you is a lie, btw I need a bump to get this campaign profitable..."
"I'm only using you to test offers, I'll go direct when its profitable"

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This is one of the many mysteries in the AM world, how aff. managers cannot know shit about the basic postback setup ... unreal, really unreal ...

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Haha, yeah, some of them seem to be much more focused managing their Instagram accounts than on managing affiliate relationships.

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Yeah, that will pretty much burn any trust right away ...

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"why is that offer that made $50 network wide last week in the top offer sheet you sent me ?"
"oh thanks, that batch export of all your offers in random order is VERY helpful"

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