One weapon that affiliates love to keep secret is their hidden horde of keywords which are converting the best for the merchants they promote.

The problem is that with a little technology the merchants can see what the visitors have entered into the search engines and they can reach the same conclusions as the affiliates.

Next thing you know, the merchant is deploying the same keywords and squeezing out the affiliate.

That's business.

There are some tools which replace the searched keywords with a subid, which is then passed on to the merchant system.

This way the affiliate still gets credit for the sale and still knows which keywords convert - but the merchant won't have a clue since all they see are numbers in the reports.

I didn't realize that some affiliate sales tracking systems vendors actually provide a tool like this for affiliate.

Speaking with John Vehlewald, Sales Director for KowaBunga! Technologies (vendor for MyAP), I was pleasantly surprised.

"Hey Peter,

We've already built this pretty much. Ours is a piece of javascript that its on an affiliate's site and looks for incoming search engine traffic.

If someone comes from a search engine, it grabs the term they searched for, stores it in a database, assigns a numeric subid to it, and appends that subid to every affiliate link on the page.

The affiliate gets a report that shows them how each referring search engine term is converting, and the merchant will never know that the subid is actually a keyword (if the
affiliate instead used the keyword as the subid without this system, the merchant could look at their reports and see what key terms the affiliate was buying).

The system you mentioned is probably a bit more robust then this though.  In general our focus is more on the Merchant, so they can truly control their marketing efforts, and get an idea of the real value of the traffic they are getting."

I think merchants getting MyAP should promote this tool to their affiliates, so that they can focus on getting the best converting keywords in their niche without worrying someone will grab their hard working keywords.

--- (Edited on 4/30/2007 7:28 pm [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---