Creating better relationships and improving productivity

We’ve been amazed at the adoption of the recommendation engine, a new tool that helps advertisers and publishers find new relationships and links based on relevance and revenue potential. Google Affiliate Network now sees over half of all new relationships being created from our recommendations. Today, we’re excited to share new enhancements that further simplify the process of creating relationships and getting links.



For publishers:



Creating relationships

The Advertisers tab includes three sub-tabs to help you easily sort through new opportunities.

• Recommended is now the default view for the Advertisers tab, featuring a customizable list of available advertiser programs that Google algorithms predict may be a good fit for you.


• Invitations are from advertisers that want to work with you -- including those with private programs. To join, just click the ‘Join’ button for that invitation.


• Browse existing shows the status of advertiser programs you’ve already applied to.

Getting the best links

The Links tab features recommendations for links that we estimate will perform well for you, and we now include new criteria for recommendations, like Staff picks and Exclusive opportunities. You can still view ‘Browse all links’ to search for links as normal. You'll also notice three new sub-tabs – we've consolidated Products and Subscriptions under the Links tab.

• Recommended links are ranked primarily based on average earnings.


• Staff picks are curated by Google Affiliate Network account teams based on relevant performance or seasonality.


• Exclusive opportunities feature links only available through Google Affiliate Network.

For advertisers:



Creating relationships

The Publishers tab includes three sub-tabs to help you easily sort through high-potential publishers that may be a good fit for your program.

• Recommended is now the default view for the Publishers tab. New search filters enable you to quickly narrow down the list of publishers that are a good fit.


• Pending makes it easy for you to review publishers and quickly approve them in bulk. We sort publishers by relevance to help you approve the best recommendations first.


• Browse existing shows the status of publishers that you’ve already taken action on, as well as any non-joined publishers you can recruit.

Please let us know what you think by posting a comment here or in the Google Affiliate Network forum.




Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Robin Anil, Software Engineer

Launched: Switch between your preferred currency and timezone

With our international launch earlier this year, we enabled you to set your preferred currency and timezone. We’re pleased to announce that if you changed your settings, you can now switch between your preferred settings and the default currency (USD) and timezone (Central Time) when viewing reports. This enhancement allows you to view your reports in the format that's most relevant to you, and is available for all reports except for payment reports.



 Switch between your preferred and default currency:

Switch between your preferred and default timezone:

If you're a Google Affiliate Network publisher, please note that you can only view the reporting currency you’ve chosen in your AdSense account. It’s not possible to change this once you’ve set it.



Posted by: Kurt Spoerer, Google Affiliate Network Product Manager

Recommending the most relevant advertisers, publishers, and links

Over the past year, we've heard from publishers and advertisers that they want a network that can help them create meaningful relationships. We've listened, and today, we've released a completely new recommendation engine that redefines how you can find and take advantage of affiliate marketing opportunities.



Publishers can find advertiser recommendations under the Advertisers > Recommended advertisers sub-tab. This is where they can find a list of available programs ranked based on relevancy and predicted performance. Each recommendation also shows why the recommendation was made, along with an estimate of earnings potential for that advertiser. We display advertiser recommendations based on the criteria below:

• Similar category: Advertisers are ranked by relevancy to your publisher category.


• Revenue potential: Advertisers are ranked primarily based on estimated payout fees.

In addition to the average advertiser EPC, each recommendation has an estimated advertiser EPC. Estimated EPC is a brand new metric designed to help publishers understand how much they could potentially earn with that advertiser.

Advertisers can now see publisher recommendations, too. Using the recommendation engine, the Publishers > Recommended publishers sub-tab shows a list of publishers that Google algorithms recommend as a good fit based on similar categories and revenue potential.

We've also brought the power of recommendations to the Links tab to help publishers find and promote the most relevant ads with the highest performance potential. Under the Links > Recommended links sub-tab, we display recommended text and banner links that Google algorithms predict may perform best for each individual publisher.

For more details, we suggest reviewing these Help Center articles:

• Recommended advertisers


• Recommended publishers


• Recommended links

Sign in to your account and try out recommendations. After you’ve taken a few minutes to review, we’d love to hear from you in our forum.



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Robin Anil, Software Engineer

New enhancements to Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger

Back in April, we introduced Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger, a gadget that enables Blogger users to easily monetize their blogs through Google Affiliate Network and helps advertisers scale relationships with content blogs. We’ve received positive feedback about this gadget from participating advertisers and Blogger users, and wanted to let you know about a couple of recent enhancements we’ve made:

• Additional advertisers: This program is now available to more advertisers. In order to participate, advertisers must provide a Merchant Center feed and consent through an email agreement.
  
  


• Additional categories of blogs: All Blogger users located in the US with an AdSense account can now sign up for Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger. Participating advertisers can see performance at the category and blog level via the ‘Reports’ tab in the Google Affiliate Network interface.

Here are two examples of a Blogger user finding a relevant affiliate ad:

If you’re an advertiser interested in participating in Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger, please reach out to your Google Affiliate Network account team or submit an inquiry if you’re not already working with us. If you’re a publisher, learn more about posting affiliate ads to your blog.


Posted by:
Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Announcing new UK advertisers

We’re excited to let you know that 30+ UK advertisers have recently launched affiliate programmes with Google Affiliate Network. For publishers with UK audiences, these programmes represent a new opportunity to earn incremental revenue for your website.



Just a few of our newly-launched advertisers include:

• Travel: Olotels


• Entertainment: Netflix


• Gifts: Moonpig


• Apparel & Accessories: Radley


• Finance: Baines & Ernst

Follow these steps to apply to UK programmes:

1. Log in to your account (or apply to join our network)


2. Go to the Advertisers tab


3. On the left-hand navigation, click 'Relationship status' and choose 'Available'


4. Click ‘Countries’ and choose United Kingdom


5. Apply to programmes

If you’re an advertiser interested in starting an affiliate programme with Google Affiliate Network, please contact us.



Posted by: Tony Nelan, Head of Google Affiliate Network for Europe

Connecting shoppers and great stores online

(Cross posted to the Official Google Blog)



Online shopping is great for many reasons, but most of all it’s a convenient and fast way to turn your intent to buy that new pair of running shoes, for example, into an actual purchase. But shoppers tell us they’re often nervous about buying from online stores they don’t know. We created the free Google Trusted Stores program to help solve this problem. When shoppers see the Google Trusted Store badge, they know in a snap they’re shopping with a reputable retailer and they can feel confident making an informed purchase.


We’ve been testing the program since last fall with about 50 online merchants and more than 10 million orders. It’s working even better than we hoped, generating positive feedback from shoppers and increasing sales for merchants. Starting today, Google Trusted Stores is open to all U.S. merchants who want to apply. 

Helping shoppers choose stores they can trust

When shopping online, you may come across the Google Trusted Store badge. Hover over it and you’ll see a “report card” which shows “grades” for that merchant’s shipping and service, including more precise metrics about what the grades mean. 

The Google Trusted Store badge and report card

This badge is only awarded to online stores that deliver a great overall experience, so even if you haven’t shopped with this merchant before, you can easily tell if they are trustworthy, ship quickly and reliably, and offer exceptional customer service. If there’s a problem with your purchase, we’re here to help. When you buy from a Google Trusted Store, you can opt in to get up to $1,000 lifetime purchase protection per shopper. And our dedicated customer service team is there to work with you and the merchant to assist in resolving the issue.

Helping merchants demonstrate their excellence and earn new business
Google Trusted Stores helps online stores attract new customers, increase sales and differentiate themselves by showing off their excellent service via the badge on their websites. Soon the badge will also appear on Google.com ads and in Google Shopping results.

Google Trusted Store badge on AdWords

Over the last nine months of the pilot, our tests show that participating in this program can help merchants big and small. For example, Wayfair, the largest online-only retailer of home goods and one of the top 50 largest online retailers as ranked by Internet Retailer, increased sales* on its site by 2.3 percent with Google Trusted Stores. And Beau-coup, a specialty online favors and gifts retailer, saw an 8.6 percent increase*. Take a look at our merchant success stories to learn more about how Google Trusted Stores has had a positive impact on website conversion rates and average order sizes for online retailers. 

Google Trusted Stores is entirely free, both for shoppers and for online stores. We’re still testing the most helpful ways to display Trusted Stores information to shoppers, so you may see different versions, or none at all, while we conduct experiments. If you’re a merchant and would like to participate in the Google Trusted Stores program, please apply. 

Posted by Tom Fallows, Group Product Manager, Google Shopping



*Increased sales percentages are based on a combination of uplift in conversion and average order size.

The importance of community policing

Google Affiliate Network works hard to ensure a high quality network for advertisers, publishers, and users. In addition to our integration with AdSense and the safety net you get with Google’s cross-product security and fraud prevention efforts, advertisers and publishers must adhere to our terms of service and program policies.

We also get a lot of great input from the affiliate community via our help forum and other feedback channels. We believe that community policing is an important part of a healthy, high-quality network and review every entry that comes in through our ‘Report a Violation’ form. We encourage you to use this form to report abusive or suspicious publishers who may be in violation of our program policies or terms of service around site content, traffic sources, or our software guidelines.

Posted by Matt Dougherty, Network Quality

Faster, better order management

Since migrating to the Google stack last September, we’ve been working to improve the Google Affiliate Network interface by both adding new features and enhancing some existing ones.



As a part of that effort, we’ve just pushed out a brand new release of the Orders tab for both advertisers and publishers.



First, we've made the Orders tab fast. Very fast. Whether you’re looking up 10 orders or 10,000 orders, you'll see query results load in about the same amount of time.



Advertiser-facing changes:

We want to make it easier for you to handle bulk operations. So, we enabled inline order editing right from the Orders tab. No need to click through to another page -- you can simply edit the order inline. Once an order is updated, publisher and network fees are updated, too.

Also, it’s now easier to cancel orders in bulk. When you search for multiple orders, just select the orders you want to cancel and cancel them all at once.

Publisher-facing changes:

The key publisher feature we’ve added is the ability to directly edit the Member ID field for an order inline. If you're a publisher whose workflow involves verifying or editing the Member ID field, this process will now be much easier.

Finally, based on your feedback, we now display locked orders (e.g. those that have been paid out) in the tab, rather than just open orders. Keep in mind though that those locked orders can't be edited.




As always, we look forward to your feedback. Please use our forum for feedback and comments. Thanks!



Posted by:

Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Abt.com transitions to Google Affiliate Network and grows revenue 119%

Over the past few years, Google Affiliate Network has helped advertisers and publishers grow their businesses with the right mix of technology, service, and data insights. We’ll be sharing these stories on the blog over the coming weeks. 



Today, we turn the spotlight to Abt.com, an online electronics retailer based just north of Chicago in Glenview, IL. Since launching in 1998, Abt.com has climbed to #151 on Internet Retailer’s list of America's top retail websites. The Abt.com team came to Google Affiliate Network in 2008 with three objectives: to grow online sales, reach new customers, and expand their existing reach across top affiliate publishers.



Steve Tazic, Abt.com’s Director of eCommerce Marketing, transitioned the company’s affiliate program to Google Affiliate Network based on the platform’s ease of use, automation, robust quality controls and advanced reporting. With less time spent managing processes, Steve collaborated with his Google Affiliate Network account team to optimize key relationships and implement best practices. Just a few highlights include:

• Data-driven optimization: The Abt.com team used advanced reports to “reach out to publishers in different situations when numbers are good or bad to try and capitalize on opportunities. For example, we can easily pinpoint publishers who have dropped off in sales and know exactly who to contact to get them back on track.”
  


• Take advantage of platform efficiency: “The Google Affiliate Network platform automates processes for creating ads, pinpointing potential new affiliates and recognizing current affiliates that need attention, whether it be good or bad. One big time saver is that we were able to automate the reconciliation process which we used to do manually.”

“Since coming from our previous network, we have seen average monthly revenue increase 119%. We have better relationships with each publisher and feel it is easier to get our offers out to our publishers. The affiliate channel now represents 15% of our online business.” - Steve Tazic, Abt.com’s Director of eCommerce Marketing 

Learn more by reading the full case study.



Posted by Will Heidrich, Account Manager