HouseLinks

Larry Adams over at Performics wrote a nice overview of their new HouseLinks technology, which allows a merchant to run their affiliate program through performics but have the links going directly to the merchant's own domain.

The tracking is facilitated by appending Performics-generated tracking IDs to landing pages on B&N.com's site. This means that a publisher can take the details of their primary link ID (or any other link ID for that matter), append it to any URL at B&N.com and the traffic will be tracked.

It's the Amazon model -- append a tracking ID to the URL and handle the tracking on the merchant site. As he mentions in the post, BN.com has been running like this forever with their BeFree program. So this is something that BN.com already has implemented on their end and working very well. Larry talks about organic search engine rankings being a benefit of HouseLinks. Generally, I'm not in favor of a merchant using their affiliate program for pagerank and link pop, but that's a different topic. He also cites ad and cookie blocking benefits, and this one is a great benefit as all of the affiliate networks have landed on many anti-spyware block lists.

He also says that BN.com will be the only one offering this linking. Don't hold your breath for others.

As if that wasn't enough, this announcement brings us two other newsworthy items.

Performics has a Blog

Holy Crap! I'll say it again. Performics has a blog.

Finally. Of the big affiliate networks, my money would have been on Performics to do this first as they have been demonstrating a keen interest in implementing important changes.

But Typepad? This smells a lot like, "We can't get the internal resources to host a local blog, never mind customize a template. Screw it, let's point a subdomain at a typepad hosted blog." Is that what happened Larry? Wordpress.com has the same feature. Take a cue from Shawn Collins. Do it before it's too painful to move.

Had I not passed out on the sofa this evening from exhaustion over the BUMPzee relaunch marathon week, I would have scooped Sam Harrelson who would be giving me this nod instead me me to him. (thanks to Jonathan and Michael Coley for mentioning it to me.)

Check out Sam's take on this.

If I may be so bold, I'll offer Performics some advice. Post as often as you can, but post only interesting and insightful stuff. Your first post is excellent. Keep the "Merchant X is offering 15% commissions until May" stuff to your Orange Links and newsletters.

Barnesandnoble.com is Moving to Performics

Even more than CircuitCity, this shows that some major shifts are happening in the US Affiliate Marketing landscape. As I mentioned previously, Commission Junction is shuttering up the Be Free platform and not giving some of the old school merchants reasonable functionality replacement in the CJ platform. So off they go to the competition. This is another major loss for CJ and gain for Performics.

It is a the major step toward the death of the Be Free platform. (yikes, that got spammed out, sorry. cleaned up and voting closed.)