A little insider information allowed me a sneak peak at Share-A-Sale's new feature they call “Leap Frogging” which every merchant in Share-A-Sale needs to know about. This is great news for both merchants and affiliates for the reasons described below.
In a nutshell, merchants can now submit tickets to have custom tracking set up that will credit affiliates differently according to different set rules which will significantly help with attribution.
Some of the rules created around the Leap Frog feature could include time on affiliate site, order of clicks, and so on. The "leap frog" affiliate is the one that sends traffic to a merchant first and "leap frogs" over another affiliate who would otherwise get credit for getting the last click. This makes crediting affiliates much more fair.
Because of this feature, commissions can now either go to the first affiliate or be split accordingly – say 20% of the sale goes to a coupon affiliate who got the last click and 80% goes to the content affiliate who sent the traffic in the first place, as an example.
The features is still very new and Share-a-sale is slowly rolling it out, however they are doing it for a few companies already and it seems to be working beautifully.
Why This is Good News for Affiliates
If you're a blogger, content site, PPC affiliate and the like, you're probably used to having some of the high value traffic you send to a merchant be "stolen" or otherwise credited to another affiliate who got the last click, such as a coupon site or someone using a toolbar. With this new feature, you can still get full credited for your hard work if not share commissions according to the merchant's attribution design. This means a lot more sales for you!
Why This is Good News for Merchants
Because of the last click model that's been the norm since the beginning, and since online shoppers have changed, many affiliates who are driving high value incremental sales are not being credited accordingly. This is because shoppers often check around before they make a buying decision and possibly even end up on a coupon site half way through checkout, giving credit to the coupon affiliate instead of the affiliate who sent the traffic in the first place. This leaves your best affiliates, the ones who are driving the highest value referrals in the first place, high and dry.
Too many merchants are giving full credit to the wrong affiliates, especially when the affiliate marketing strategy is to drive new customer aquisition. As a result, many merchants rely on coupon and daily deal sites to drive the bulk of their sales. This prevents many programs from effectively growing their sales because the higher value affiliates who are sending the first click are leaving programs they cannot earn from.
With this new feature, you can now keep your best preforming affiliates happy by paying on the first click or by splitting commissions instead of always crediting the last click. This will keep your program growing properly while keeping your highest value affiliates active!
The steps for setting the Leap Frog feature up in Share-A-Sale are:
- Determine the rules for custom tracking
- Determine the commission split
- Submit request to SAS through a ticket
