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Kellie Stephens at AffiliateFairPlay has published a study on the use of forced clicks on affiliate coupon websites.
Forced Clicks
The definition of “forced click” varies a bit, but for this study is any affiliate tracking click that was initiated without any use action whatsoever when visiting a coupon site. No gray areas there.
Discussions have been happening recently at the ShareASale client conference a few weeks ago along with continuing discussions at ABestWeb. I’m glad to see Kellie tackling this with a no frills study that sets a baseline on what’s really going on. Too often we have these discussions without having any insight into statistics on what’s happening, and whether it is a big problem or a small one.
You can read the full details at AFP, but the results are as follows:
We found the incident of forced clicks to range from 0.8% – 4.4% on coupon sites. We found the incident of what could be considered a deceptive link on the merchant specific page listing the coupons to be slightly higher at 6.6%.
The detail of these numbers show that of 245 tests on Google search results, there were 2 incidents of forced clicks. On 180 tests on Google PPC ads, 3 forced clicks. And on 91 tests of direct navigation through affiliate sites, there were 6 incidents.
Since Kellie didn’t publish this on a blog entry, I can’t ask questions. I’ll ask them out loud here knowing that she’ll be by at some point.
Of those 2, 3, and 6 sites with forced clicks, what’s the unique number of affiliate sites? Were they the same sites with a total of 6 unique sites?
And if not, did some of the sites behave differently depending on the source of the traffic?
Deceptive Clicks
Kellie also covers the more gray area of deceptive clicks, meaning links that beg for a click to see a coupon code or close a pop-up but end up clicking over to a merchant site through an affiliate link.
The study demonstrates an increase in this practice, which makes sense given that affiliate networks have presumably been cracking down on forced clicks.
So many questions
As the coupon affiliates will point out, this practice is not limited to coupon websites. It is a way, however, to capture sales that they will argue they deserve when consumers come by hunting for coupon codes and find them on their website.
Forced clicks or not, this also raises another question about conflict between affiliates who have primed the pump, so to speak, with a product review only to lose that buyer in the shopping cart as the buyer goes off hunting for a coupon code.
Who deserves credit for the sale in that case?
One merchant at the SAS conference shared with me that through their own tracking they have determined that as much as 10% of sales are snatched up in the last few minutes of the buying process by a coupon affiliate.
Regardless of whether another affiliate was involved on the front-side of that referral, does the coupon affiliate deserve all or even some of this sale?
Many blame the merchant for driving this consumer behavior by placing a coupon field in the checkout process, prompting the consumer to make a last ditch effort to go off and save a few bucks. Even if there are no actual coupons to be found, the merchant is handing this sale to one of many affiliates who may be found on the search term, “merchant-name coupons”.
I’d bet my house that a big empty coupon code field in a checkout process is a bigger leak than any 800 number and cross-promotional links to other merchant properties combined.
Update: I missed it earlier, but Kellie did make a blog post to accompany this study, in which she presents the AFP position on what designates a commissionable action.
