While affiliate marketers and industry peers continue to work to oppose 'affiliate tax' proposals around the country, a nexus law passed yesterday in Rhode Island. There are also proposals pending in other states, most notably North Carolina, where a nexus law is included in the budget proposal and could pass on July 1st and Hawaii, where the legislation will be enacted unless the Governor vetoes it by July 15th.

Google continues to work with trade associations around the country to ensure that policymakers understand the implications of these proposals on businesses and consumers. And we encourage publishers who may be affected by these proposals to take action in their home states.

Online sales tax is a complex and dynamic issue and each advertiser must evaluate the implications of any legislation on their business. Google cannot provide counsel on potential implications.

The Performance Marketing Alliance is a good resource to monitor progress on these issues.

Here are some interesting links to some recent press about the proposals:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124605688876763507.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-ri-amazon-ri-taxes,0,6524224.story

Posted by Kristin Hall and the Google Affiliate Network team

It’s been just over a year since our affiliate business became part of Google. To say a lot has happened seems obvious but I am proud of what our team has accomplished. To name just a few of the achievements: a new brand & UI, numerous platform enhancements, fantastic client and employee satisfaction in the midst of integration and many, many, new customers. Google Affiliate Network is fully integrated operationally within Google. We had an exciting year, but I am even more excited about where we are going.

Our focus remains the same, drive exceptional customer satisfaction through affiliate channel growth; however, being part of Google brings a mindset in how to best achieve our goals. A culture focused on the user and the tenet that ads must be high quality now permeates the Google Affiliate team.

Our goals are clear as we invest in our Platform, integrate our Network and continue to refine and evolve the Practice of Affiliate Marketing. To this end, we recently launched an “opportunities center” in the platform allowing advertisers to more easily identify underperforming relationships. This capability generates growth by improving optimization. We currently are beta testing data feed integration with Google Base which will drive growth with improved category taxonomy and data validation, as well as an improved user experience for advertisers who will only have to send one feed to Google. Publishers benefit from a higher quality data feed. The integration with Google Base is also an example where integration with other Google products and systems enables our Affiliate engineers to focus on affiliate innovation, while the engineers supporting Base will drive that product forward. Our team and our users benefit in many ways from Google’s scale and engineering excellence.

Google brings a focus on making decisions based on facts and data, rather than intuition. Our Practice embraced this focus, and has conducted more than 20 structured optimization projects this past quarter, resulting in measurable lift in program performance. These are just a few of our accomplishments to date, and the possibilities and ideas endless.

There is a lot of hard work ahead. I am sure we will make mistakes and things won’t go as fast as we want. But know that we are 100% committed to our customers’ satisfaction and to bringing unprecedented innovation to affiliate marketing. Our collective futures are very bright.

Thank you for your business and continued support.

Chris Henger

Head of Google Affiliate Network

We just updated a new feature for advertisers that should benefit both our advertisers and publishers.  Advertisers can now view lists that highlight high performing publishers that are either underperforming for the advertiser, or have not joined the advertiser's program.

Advertisers:

    My network displays a list of publishers that are doing better on a relative basis in your category than they are for you.

    Rest of network displays a list of publishers that are not in your program that have a history of performance in your category.

  

If you are looking for a way to improve the productivity of your affiliate program, this is a great place to start.  The feature can be found by navigating to Publishers > Opportunities.

  

Publishers:

    In order to be visible to advertisers looking for new publishers, you must opt in to not joined opportunities on your communication preferences page.  To be visible to your existing advertisers that may be looking to expand their relationship with you, opt in to receive promotional communication for each advertiser to which you want to appear.

On behalf of the affiliate team,

Larry Adams

In 2008 the State of New York enacted legislation which expanded the definition of sales tax vendors. There are currently several state legislatures, most notably California, considering similar proposals. Online sales tax issues are a dynamic and important issue for our industry. It is important that we not only stay abreast of these issues but work together in the best interests of our industry and consumers to educate policy makers on the dynamics of digital marketing.

Google and several other California based companies submitted a formal letter of opposition to the proposed California legislation. The Google Affiliate Network team and other teams at Google are working with trade associations across the country to ensure that policymakers understand the implications of these proposals on businesses and consumers.

Google cannot provide counsel on potential implications. We encourage businesses to follow the situation closely and evaluate any potential impact on your particular business.

Following are some relevant links regarding the situation in California:

California Chamber of Commerce:

http://ct2k2.capitoltrack.com/BillInfo.asp?inarchive=true&org=all&measure=AB%20178&ss=413calchamberbillinfo.xsl

California Taxpayers Association Fact Sheet:

http://www.caltax.org/SalesTaxNexusFactSheet3-2-09.pdf

Performance Marketing Alliance:

http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/2009/03/19/the-fight-against-california-assembly-bill-178/

The ads provided by our advertisers are often time sensitive and require replacement by publishers on a regular basis. We have been told by many publishers that they have a hard time keeping track of out of date ads present on their site(s). To help alleviate this challenge we will now display notifications on the publisher home page whenever we detect traffic on links (ads) that have past their end date.

A new message center, featured prominently in the top center of the publisher home page, provides a daily summary with the number of clicks recorded on out of date links. Users can view a detailed list of the ads generating these clicks including the creative, if applicable, and a link to a list of current ads for each advertiser associated to an out of date link. Notifications may be dismissed, but will continue to appear daily if traffic on out of date links is detected on subsequent days. The first notifications were generated as we pushed out the feature, so publishers may see a notification upon their next login. Please note that while a promotion may be past its end date we will continue to track clicks and conversions, and commissions will accrue for any conversions recorded for an active but out of date link.

Google Affiliate Network provides multiple features to help publishers keep up with these frequent changes; we offer daily updates of promotional ads (via email or FTP) and advertiser product catalogs (FTP only). We strongly encourage publishers to try out these features by visiting Links > Link Subscriptions and Links > Product Feeds.

Finally, we have added a feature to automatically send an email notification to publishers when a change to commissions specific to an advertiser/publisher relationship is made; advertiser users will also get a copy of the message. Publishers must opt in to receive these notifications on the Settings > Communications Preferences page. Please note that notifications are not yet available if advertisers change their default commission rate, or if the advertiser is using Category/Product Level Commissions. We are working to provide coverage for these types of changes too, and will be making improvements based on your feedback as we enhance this feature.

As a reminder, we have altered the naming convention for Link Subscriptions. Files will now come in the form Link_Subscriptions_YYYYMMDD.txt. Beginning March 13, all files will follow this convention.

Larry Adams
Product Manager

The Google Affiliate Network UI will undergo maintenance this Thursday, March 12 between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. CDT.

In addition, publishers please take note that the file naming convention for link subscriptions will be changing to:

Link_Subscriptions_MMDDYYYY.txt

If you are a publisher and are not currently signed up for link subscriptions, it is highly recommended. You will receive a nightly feed via email or FTP of new ads created by your advertisers in the Google Affiliate Network.

You can subscribe via the UI by navigating to Links > Links Subcriptions.

Regards,

Larry Adams
Product Manager

We will be performing system maintenance this weekend, during our normal Saturday maintenance window.  During the maintenance, the Google Affiliate interfaceswill be unavailable beginning approximately at 10:00 a.m. EST (3:00 p.m. GMT), Saturday, February 28th.  The interfaces will be restored no later than 6:00 p.m. EST (11:00 p.m. GMT).
 
Please note: tracking will NOT be affected during the maintenance period.