What is Affiliate De-Duplication?
In Affiliate Marketing, the word De-Duplication pops up from time to time, especially if you have several advertising partners who are paid by performance, rather than impressions or clicks or other ad products. The following simple, yet most important process to execute when paying for advertising campaigns and sales activities when using affiliate partners, will help you radically if you’re new to affiliate marketing, and probably insanely surprise you if you’ve been mastering affiliate marketing for decades. Welcome to the De-Duplication process.
What does “De-Duplication” mean?
Before asking your IT department about de-duplication, remember that the term is most often related to data deduplication, and your IT guy, department or agency will often be quickly to say that, you are covered by data deduplication. But related to advertising and marketing activities, more specific affilliate marketing, we’re not talking about the normal data term, meaning “the elimination of duplicate or redundant information, especially in computer data”, but you are facing a more serious problem than will basically empty your bank account unless you have deep pockets to cover significant loses, the simple fact is, lack of de-duplication will kill your profits in a rapid pace.
Though the meaning at the end of the day is similar, this specific term is more direct pulling the legs away under you without notice, it’s the difference of you thinking that you’re only paying a percentage of your profit on a sale, to remove the entire profit on thousands of sales every month having you destroying any price strategy and you paying affiliate commissions higher than your profits, product costs, shipping all together, financed by you.
What’s The Risk With De-Duplication?
Though Affiliate Marketing sounds like a safe and a “no risk” kind of marketing activity, you’ll have many pitfalls and risks using affiliate networks, and besides the general and critical safety measures you have in your business, lack of de-duplication is basically the same as you sharing your password, pin code and card numbers publicly for any one to use.
Lack of de-duplications is a ad industry’s legal way literally access and empty your bank account in front of your eyes, while you happily approving and paying the party month after month.
Common Misterpretations of de-duplication
Our eCommerce Platform Can Only Register The Sale Once
Similar to your iT guys, your eCommerce provider will initially make you feel safe, with either “No Worries, We’ll Not Charge Your Client Twice” or “Just Relax, We’ll Not Register Your Order More Than Once“, and that’s all true – they won’t, they master these disciplines as superheroes, they really do.
But mastering these disciplines site wise won’t secure double commission to affiliates or external platforms and technologies. This problem has nothing to do with your ecommerce platform, website, payment processor or clients being in risk of double charges, but your external media partners, such as affiliate networks and their systems and platforms, all claiming effect and sales in their systems and ad reports sending the bill directly to you.