One of the most common points of conflict is perceived to be the moment when a business is asked to decide whether affiliates—for example, providers of voucher and coupon services or cash back sites—should be allowed to bid on trademark brand words. If they are allowed to do so, consumers entering “M&S” in the search engine, for example, will not only find the link to www.marksandspencer.com displayed on the search page, but also links to a number of websites offering discounts and vouchers for the purchase of Marks and Spencer’s products. If you use affiliates, it is up to you to ensure that your site comes out on top in search rankings, and affiliates are unlikely to bid on your brand so intensely that they knock you out of the top ratings.

If affiliates really are more popular than your company’s own ecommerce site—and they feature higher in the page rankings than the company’s own website—customers searching specifically for your brand are very likely to end up purchasing the product via a website other than your own. The lead gained will then have to be paid for by your company, somewhat reducing its value, even though the consumer would have clicked on your site and not the affiliate’s had the rankings been more favourable.

A burning issue for businesses that have experienced this shift in attribution of sales leads: are the high-ranking affiliates cannibalising sales or is it simply a case of improving the traffic to the brand’s own ecommerce site? Improving your paid-for search results as well as your natural results should be the pressing issue for a business whose affiliates are attracting more traffic than the main site. If the consumer typed in a specific brand term, they almost certainly have been influenced to some extent by the brand’s own marketing and advertising; failing to optimize search lets these efforts down in the last lap. Understandably, however, businesses feel that affiliates should not charge for leads generated on the back of promotional activity that is not their own.

Because the acquisitions made through affiliates carry an associated cost, marketers tend to devalue them. First, they deduct the cost per acquisition (CPA) charge for affiliates, then the cost for the brand’s own marketing effort—which often drives the consumer on to the search engine—and finally the extra bidding cost of trying to keep the brand at the top of the search results page. Most of the leads, however, are entirely new, so they do represent added value in spite of the cost.

There is, however, another important aspect to consider before letting fears of cannibalisation and plummeting return on investment (ROI) damage the relationship with affiliates. Google has recently relaxed its regulations against bidding on competitor trademark names in most countries. For example, when M&S bid on the term Interflora, M&S appeared on the same search page as the brand. Since Google currently has no regulations against competitor trademark term bidding, affiliates can bid on key brand terms in to keep competitors out of that all-important first search page. While affiliate bidding may add a fractional cost to the process of customer acquisition, competitors really are driving business away with their aggressive bidding.

If relationships with affiliates are managed more openly, concerns over the cannibalisation of traffic can be quelled. Last-minute solutions such as lowering commission budgets and suspending programmes are simply unacceptable and feed into the climate of “every man for himself” on which mistrust is based. Some businesses have even gone as far as making up excuses to legitimise suspension of affiliate programmes over Christmas, a time of the year that affiliates have been gearing up to as much as your own business.

A practical solution that prevents the unease sometimes associated with affiliate relationships is to suggest different rates of commission depending on the different type of lead or customer acquired. This way, for example, if the consumer provided by the affiliate turns out to be a returning customer who has previously bought through the ecommerce site, the payment can be set at a lower rate than if the consumer is an entirely new lead or a person whose custom is only available to the business through the intermediation of affiliates.

Response One recently commissioned research into the effectiveness of different media at driving web visits and found that the top four channels for driving consumers to a website were customer e-mail, TV and newspaper advertising, direct mail and search engine links (see the full PDF report, http://www.responseone.co.uk/files/PR/Online_turn_on_.pdf). To follow up these findings and shed some further light on the matter of the interrelation of media to drive sales Response One asked UK consumers whether they were able to satisfy the majority of their pre-sales queries online and found an unsettlingly even split: 49% of consumers were satisfied by the information they found on the company website while 51% were not. It is likely that a significant portion of the unanswered questions would be satisfied if search were suitably integrated with the campaigns running at the time.

The internet has had a colossal impact on the way consumers interact with brands empowering them to claim the information they want at the instant, review, criticise and share experiences with other users across the globe. How and when people access the internet is, however, an area that still requires exploration particularly as research from Harris Interactive in March 2008 revealed that 70% of Britons go online while watching TV and 27% search the products advertised in the commercial. These findings tell us that consumers can be driven onto a search engine by other media so why has search not yet gained its proper status as advertising medium at the planning stage?

While consumers live their media experiences holistically, in-house advertisers and marketers as well as agencies still cling on to a misplaced and outdated “silo” approach to advertising. Each part of the campaign runs independently and only rarely are some elements integrated such as email and direct mail or follow up direct mail on display advertising. Search is practically never considered at the planning stage, mainly because a role for it in combination with other media is yet to become established. The result of this separation of media is that each part of the campaign is independent of the other making it difficult if not impossible to track response and efficiently measure return on investment (ROI).

When a cookie is set on a landing page informing the system that the potential customer has landed on the company website via a specific search engine, search is regarded as accountable for that acquisition. It is of course evident that the effect a television advert such as the pre-Christmas John Lewis ad, had on footfall is much less measurable as other factors can impact such as, for example, the VAT drop at the beginning of December. As a result traditional media are concerned that a massive portion of the sales conversions derived from the single campaign, composed by a series of items of direct mail, emails and television and out-door advertising will be attributed to the last trackable medium: usually search.

To put these fears to rest and promote a suitably integrated view of campaign planning, search needs to be integrated right from the start of the campaign. An increase in searches after television advertising is launched can thus be realistically measured as can the subsequent rise in campaign specific word searches after an item of direct mail or email is issued. This way search actually provides greater insight into consumer attitudes and may reveal that a channel has even more influence than imagined.

By tracking response across media it is be possible to view precisely the uplift created by, not only each channel, but the specific batch for each channel. This means that for example it will be possible to view the uplift generated by emails received and opened by customers on a Wednesday evening rather than a Tuesday evening and optimize send out times and follow ups for future activity.

While search is commonly optimized for the company website and traffic is driven to it both organically and through sponsored search, this effort is rarely made for individual campaigns. So while finding a website based on its core brand message and trademark product or service is usually taken care of scrupulously, the same is not provided for each campaign. Often companies do not even bid on the terms used in their expensive and far-reaching TV adverts.

The result are disgruntled surfers that cannot find what they are looking for and muddled response analysis that fails to reveal the impact made by each channel. Search is an important tool in the mix not to be overlooked as it can greatly improve understanding of media performance and campaign planning.