For the next Affiliate Best Practices article I’d like to discuss our Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE) tool.

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Bloggers and forum owners should pay special attention to the ALE, but any Affiliate site can benefit from this innovative tool we rolled out in October of 2007. In a nutshell, the ALE allows webmasters to place one line of Javascript on any page and/or site-wide template, and if a direct link (without Affiliate tracking data) to an AvantLink merchant exists on the page, the script will automatically convert the direct link to a tracking link on the end user’s browser. The script scans the page for domain matches, than does it’s thing.

Please note with the ALE that Google and the other search engines will still see the direct link as it exists in the html code. So if you mouse over a store link on an Affiliate page utilizing the ALE, you’ll see (in the browser status bar) the tracking details. However, if you view the source code of that same page, all you’ll see for the merchant URL is the direct href link code. And if you look hard enough, you’ll see the ALE Javascript on that page as well! To see a great working example of the ALE in action check out the ALE information page on our site.

Now on to the best practices for the ALE…

For bloggers and/or forum owners, the benefits should be easily apparent. In fact, with direct input from Greg at AlpineZone.com (read Greg’s testimonial on this blog), and a few other valued Affiliates, it was apparent that they were sending loads of traffic (and sales!) to merchants without necessarily getting credit. This was because their community members would often post direct links to outdoor retailers that are a part of AvantLink. Rather than editing the content of the community, Greg was more interested in finding a way to convert the click on the fly to one that would rightly set a cookie and credit him for any subsequent sales.

So for forum owners that may be in the same boat, here’s the secret. And it’s quite complicated…not! Simply login to your Affiliate account and generate an ALE script for a particular site configured in the network. Once you have the one line of Javascript, simply place it in a site-wide template (for example, your header or footer) and wala. Instant tracking on any direct to merchant link that exists anywhere on your forum (as long as the merchant is in AvantLink). You should also note that this include ALL direct to merchant links, even archived links from months or years ago!

For bloggers, same concept. You might have years worth of archived content that can be monetized just by adding this one line of Javascript. Talk about easy money. And we do have multiple success stories already in regards to bloggers benefiting greatly from the ALE. Here’s just one example: Lou runs a legendary blog for backcountry skiing enthusiasts called WildSnow.com. Over the years, Lou has posted links to Backcountry.com and other retailers quite regularly when he reviews products, etc. Since Lou’s a blogger, and not necessarily an Affiliate marketer, the thought alone of logging into a network to generate a tracking link every time he linked to a retailer was tedious. So he added the ALE and instantly began generating revenue on years worth of archived content. Of course, this includes the links people posted in the comments’ section of each post.

General use of the ALE is also encouraged for people custom building many optimized pages. Rather than taking the time to use our Custom Link Builder tool (which, btw, is easy as pie), simply include the ALE Javascript in your base template. Once that’s in place it’s just a matter of writing your editorial, using the merchant image source for the product, and adding a deep link to the product detail on the merchant web site. No logging into the network for link code is necessary.

So there you have it! To generate the Affiliate Link Encoder for your site, follow these simple steps:

1. Login as an Affiliate, and click “Tools” from the main menu.
2. Under “Ad/Link Tools”, click on “Affiliate Link Encoder”.
3. Select your website, and add a custom tracking code (which is optional).
4. Click “Get Html”, and you’re done!

I hope this helps and Happy Converting!

We’ve added a new merchant tool in the account admin interface that allows program managers to view a spam analysis for their Affiliate email messages. We included this functionality as part of the “Email Affiliates” tool so merchants can better gage whether or not messages they are distributing to their Affiliates will be caught in various spam filters.

Merchants, you can find this spam analysis tool by following these steps:

1. Login and click on ‘Tools’ from the main menu.
2. Click on ‘Email Affiliates’ from the tool list.
3. Notice the ‘View Spam Analysis’ button at the bottom of the form.

Once you configure an email message you can view the spam analysis by clicking that button. Results from the analysis will look something like this:

Your message appears unlikely to be filtered as spam (score: 4.10 out of 5.00). Scoring details:
+1.30 - BODY: HTML: images with 2800-3200 bytes of words
+1.70 - BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts
+1.10 - HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag
Higher scores indicate a greater likelihood of this message being categorized as spam by your affiliate’s mail servers.

Note that you can also retrieve previously sent emails and run an analysis on those as well. Email your account rep if you have questions, or feel free to comment here.

Late last week we rolled out new functionality that allows merchants to create specialty subsets of their existing datafeeds in AvantLink. For example, merchants can now build datafeeds for Affiliates that feature only sale products, top selling products, etc.

Merchants, please find the Specialty Datafeed Administration in the tools and management interface. It’s very simple to configure any unique specialty feed you want, so let those creative juices flow. Follow these steps to configure specialty feeds in minutes:

1. Login, and click on ‘Tools’ from the main menu.
2. Towards the bottom of the tool list, click ‘Specialty Datafeed Administration’, where it says “You can create specialized subsets of your datafeeds to help call attention to certain products (e.g. featured products, top 10 lists, etc.)”.
3. This page will display your current configured feeds in AvantLink. Click the link next to the feed you want to work with that says ‘[Create new specialty feed]‘.
4. At this point you’ll have the option of manually adding the skus you want to include in the specialty feed, or using the search tool we added that will allow you to automatically select products.

Affiliates, by all means share your ideas for specialty feeds with your merchant partners. I am sure they would be all ears! I’ll also mention that once a merchant you’re active with creates a new specialty feed, you’ll see that option in your configuration when setting up new datafeed subscriptions. You can also use special datafeeds to create more targeted displays with the Product Display Builder.

Please let us know what you think.

Gary M

Today we rolled out functionality that will allow each merchant to utilize a co-branded application page for their AvantLink Affiliate program. These co-branded application pages pull in respective merchant logos on our Affiliate application page, as long as the link reference uses the “mi” parameter with a merchant’s unique id.

So for example if the Peter Glenn Affiliate program used the following href on their site’s Affiliate information page, their logo will show up on the application form: <a href=”https://www.avantlink.com/affiliate_app.php?mi=10242″>. Click their logo below to see what I mean.

Merchants, if you don’t know your merchant id in AvantLink feel free to email support/at/avantlink.com and we’ll send it over. Or you can just go to your public branded detail page, click the gradient yellow “Apply Now” button, then note the URL in your browser’s address bar. Your public detail page is linked up from our Merchant Directory.