April 2007

Late last week Google Checkout (GC) launched in the UK, offering merchants and consumers noticeable benefits. The affiliate networks themselves are currently being fast tracked through the 3rd party tracking approval process, and many have now been approved.  

Google have been criticised by some for not ensuring pre-approval of networks before launch, however a representative from Google on a4u has confirmed that affiliate tracking is a core feature of the product and that tracking providers should contact them at checkout-api-support@google.com to get setup and approved.

The thought process should now turn to whether GC will be a good thing for Affiliate Marketing. I am presuming below that all networks have now been approved as third party tracking suppliers with GC.

As a merchant it seems like a pretty decent deal, you get £10 worth of sales for free (no payment processing fee) for every £1 you spend on Google Adwords. Now does this mean merchants will bring a portion of Adwords activity in-house? It’s feasible, however it would probably affect agencies more than affiliates, and there are certainly ways around any immediate problems for the benefit of all parties.

The merchant could increase sales via the current promotional offer of £10 off a £30 transaction, this will potentially increase their conversions and tease shoppers who don’t buy online to do so - Sales that otherwise could have leaked through to a sales hotline or to the high street; Both these have, in the current state of play positive results for affiliates.

So how can GC be negative for the space? Well a couple of things spring to mind. First of all the potential inflexibility to add sophisticated affiliate tracking technology to GC. If GC currently only supports 1×1 pixel trackbacks, this could be an issue for discussion.

Direct to merchant PPC’ers could attract unwanted clicks from intrigued surfers in the early weeks. With the GC logo appearing on ads which have the merchants main ‘business url’ - whether from an in-house or affiliate campaign.

Maybe networks have the most to worry about; does GC offer an decent in-road along with adwords and analytics to launch their CPA model? quite possibly yes, however networks are always diversifying and with support not historically Google’s core competence networks should prevail, something I guess we will all watch closely. After all Google has collected years of stats which could be at their disposal through adwords, adsense and more recently analytics. Checkout could be the final piece of the jigsaw to help them create a formidable player within the affiliate marketing space! - It is important to stick to the facts however, speculation can often be dangerous!