Last week, we made some updates to give users quick access to comprehensive and interactive help within the Google Affiliate Network interface.

In the lower left of each page in your account, you’ll see a new and improved help widget that displays relevant help information based on the page you’re on.



Benefits include:

• Advertisers can quickly access the Getting Started Guide and learn about creating links, supplying merchandising information and advertiser-specific terms, and more

• Publishers can get quick access to the Publisher Beginner's Guide, learn about setting up product feed subscriptions, and watch a step-by-step video on setting up link subscriptions

Need an answer fast? Use the search box to get information from Help Center articles, forum posts, and even this blog -- right within the widget. You can click the search results to find more detailed information in a new browser window without interrupting the work you were doing in the interface.

Take a minute to check out the new sidebar help widget. You may discover features you’re not yet taking advantage of, and learn some affiliate marketing best practices, too.

If you have feedback, we’d love to hear from you in our forum.

Posted by:
Josh Pyle, Affiliate Network Strategist
Jessie Chavez, Software Engineer
Sabrina Gana, Publisher Support Specialist

Last week, we made a few updates to help publishers stay on top of commission rates and commission rate changes.

New commission report for publishers
The new commission report allows publishers to view all of their commission rates (except for tiers & category-level commission rates) in one location. This report allows publishers to sort, filter, and export the commission rates as a comma or tab delimited file. Learn more about commission reports.



Improved commission notifications for publishers
Commission notifications now display the old and the new values for commissions that have changed. This helps publishers easily track changes that have occurred to a commission rate.

------------------------------------------------------------
Test Advertiser 1 (K3)
------------------------------------------------------------
New Commission schedule:
Start Date: 2012-01-01
Event Type: Transaction
Rate: 58.00% of sales
------------------------------------------------------------
Previous Commission schedule:
Start Date: 2011-09-27
End Date: 2012-01-01
Event Type: Transaction
Rate: 10.00% of sales

If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you at our forum.

Posted by Ali Pasha, Product Manager

We hope to see many of you at Affiliate Management Days on March 8-9 in San Francisco. Affiliate Management Days is a professional forum for affiliate managers and marketing executives responsible for their company’s affiliate marketing strategy, program management and related operations.

Two members of the Google Affiliate Network team will be speaking at the event:

• Kristin Hall, Head of Publisher Development
  Publisher Segmentation & Key Optimization Levers
  
  
• Ali Pasha, Product Manager
  Trends & Innovations in the Affiliate Marketplace

You can review the conference agenda and register on the Affiliate Management Days website. Register by Friday, January 20th to take advantage of the early bird rate, which will save you $500 from the onsite price.

Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager

Today, we’re publicly launching the first version of the Google Affiliate Network API, which allows advanced publishers and advertisers to automate various tasks related to Google Affiliate Network.

The features in this release include:

• Advertiser lookup: Publishers can now use the Google Affiliate Network API to more easily access data that advertisers have chosen to share with them (such as payout rank and advertiser category). Previously, publishers had to manually access this shared data through the Google Affiliate Network interface. Advertisers can also access their own information through the API.
  
  
• Event and order details: Developers can easily integrate data from events that occur in Google Affiliate Network into their own website's workflow and internal systems. This API, in particular, allows access to all significant event-level data for transactions and actions.
  
  
• Publisher lookup: Advertisers can use the API to look up data that publishers have chosen to share with them (such as payout rank and publisher classification). Previously, advertisers had to manually access this shared data through the Google Affiliate Network interface. Publishers can also access their own information through the API.

For more information, please refer to Google Affiliate Network’s API documentation page.

Posted by Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Do you have a blog, website and an AdSense account? If you aren’t already a Google Affiliate Network publisher, now is a great time to join and monetize your website by giving your audience access to exclusive opportunities. Over 25 great deals will be available exclusively to Google Affiliate Network publishers for one weekend only, Friday, 12/9 through Monday, 12/12.



As a reminder, this limited time opportunity enables you to add a variety of great consumer opportunities to your site and earn a performance fee from orders that originate from your links.

How do I promote these opportunities on my site?
To promote any of these exclusive opportunities, you need to be an approved publisher in Google Affiliate Network.

1. Apply for Google Affiliate Network with your AdSense Publisher ID (or sign in if you're already a Google Affiliate Network publisher).
2. Once approved, review the opportunities available and click the "Apply Now" link for each one that you wish to promote.
3. Tracking links will be available in your Google Affiliate Network account by viewing the Home tab on December 5th.  You can also search for “December Exclusive Opportunities” links in the Links section on December 9th.

Need help applying or want more information? Review the Publisher Beginner’s guide today.

When can I post these opportunities on my site?
All opportunities will be available on December 9, and all will expire at midnight on December 12. Please remember that you may not post any of these exclusives until December 9th.

Further questions? Check out our Help Center for answers to frequently asked questions or feel free to contact us with any questions.

Posted by Jamie Ross, Affiliate Network Strategist

Welcome to the second post in our "Interpreting Your Data" series for affiliate advertisers, brought to you by Google Affiliate Network analysts. View all posts in the series here. 

Calculated metrics provide great insight into how specific variables are performing. A few of these commonly used metrics are conversion rate, click through rate, and average order value.
In this post, we will use examples to discuss how you can use calculated metrics to interpret your affiliate program data. 

Reviewing performance data using calculated metrics:
You’re in the Google Affiliate Network interface, reviewing performance reports and notice your conversion rate has increased. You may think -- “That’s great news!” Or, is it?

Before celebrating, you’ll need to ask a few more questions and take a deeper look to determine whether an increase in conversion rate is really a positive indicator for your overall program.

This is because conversion rate is a calculated metric that is generated by combining two other metrics -- in this case, conversions divided by clicks. Whenever you use a calculated metric, you should understand what’s happening to both of the underlying metrics to to determine an overall trend.

Example 1:

• In period 1, you have 33 conversions and 100 clicks, so your conversion rate is 33%.
• In period 2, you have 25 conversions and 50 clicks, so your conversion rate is 50%.

As you can see, the conversion rate goes up in period 2. Is that good? There are fewer conversions in period 2 and fewer clicks. You should investigate why clicks went down before you can determine if this is a positive or negative indicator.

Understanding metric composition:
With an affiliate program, you should also consider the composition of each metric. That is, the composition of all of the publishers that are driving clicks and conversions. Each individual publisher composes one part of each metric.If you see conversion rates go down, you may think that this is negative indicator. To determine the significance, you should check if the conversion rate is down for every publisher and if you added any new publishers. 

Example 2:

• Publisher X had 33 conversions from 100 clicks totaling a 33% conversion rate. 
• Then you add publisher Y, who generates 200 clicks, 20 conversions totaling 10% conversion rate.
• These two publisher combined generate 53 conversions on 300 clicks, for a conversion rate of 26.5%. 
• The combined conversion rate is down, but that’s only because you added a publisher that drives more clicks at a lower than average conversion rate. 
• You still have 33% conversion from publisher Y that drove 100 clicks.

In this example, it’s important to look more closely at the new publisher. It’s possible they have a lower conversion rate due to their business model. Adding this publisher to the program changes your overall number.

In summary, when you’re looking at the movement of a calculated metric (such as conversion rate and average order value) you shouldn’t stop there. To understand the shift, you should do a bit more investigating to find out why that metric moved.

For additional resources on analyzing your program, please see this analysis checklist help center article. 

Posted by Dan Filowitz, Manager of Affiliate Operations

Welcome to the first post in our new "Interpreting Your Data" series for affiliate advertisers, brought to you by Google Affiliate Network analysts. View all posts in the series here.
Affiliate program success can be evaluated in different ways, so you’ll need to clearly define performance requirements and metrics early. Questions you should seek to answer include:

- What is happening?
- Why it is happening?
- What actions can I take?

In this post, we’ll cover time periods and getting started with performance analysis.

Time Periods
The first thing you'll want to decide is what time periods are important to you. Do you want a broad,  monthly view or do you need to get more granular with a weekly view? Next, decide how you want to compare your time periods.  Year over year will help take seasonality into account.  If you are a new affiliate advertiser, week over week and/or month over month will help show how your program is growing.

Performance analysis
After the time period comparisons are determined, start by looking at your main metrics and see if they’re up or down.  It's important to look at more than just transactions.  An increase in transactions is valuable but you'll also want to see if your clicks increased to really understand the reason behind your increase.  Did your opportunities just convert better or did you have a larger base of clicks?

Now, it's time to dig deeper into your program and examine changes in publisher performance. Take a look at your publishers using the same time comparisons. This will help you identify and sort by publisher activity to find the biggest increases or decreases. If only a few of your publishers saw large gains, review any actions you took with them. Did you purchase an ad placement? Did you increase their commission rate or run an exclusive affiliate offer with them? If you saw increases across many or most of your publishers, this could be a result of a sale, or might be tied to publishers implementing creatives or offers that better appealed to your customers.  Once you're able to make conclusions about the cause and impacts of program changes, you can take the appropriate steps to optimize publisher performance and drive more conversions.

It's important to understand when gains or losses are due to seasonality and when they’re due to actions taken by you and/or your publishers.  For instance, if December is your top month, January sales are going to be down when comparing month over month.  This is why it's helpful to use year over year comparisons and understand the seasonality of your business.

For additional resources on analyzing your program, please see this help center article.
Posted by Elliott Chapman, Account Strategist