Merchants, do you have any loyalty toolbar affiliates or toolbar affiliates of any kind in your program? Do you know how they work and how they can negatively impact your bottom line??? Affiliates, do you understand the impact toolbar affiliates can have on your revenue? At the link below, Scott Jangro is going to show you in real-time exactly how toolbar affiliates earn commission for sales they should not be getting credit for.

In simple terms, loyalty toolbars INJECT themselves into the middle of a transaction that was already destined to take place, then they get credit for a commission they did not earn – either from the rightful affiliate that drove the sale or from the merchant’s own marketing efforts.

Scenario: An affiliate does PPC and drives a buyer to merchant.com. When the visitor buys, they deserve the commission right? Well if that visitor has a loyalty toolbar installed – AFTER the original affiliate successfully gets the visitor to the merchant, an alert on the tool bar essentially says click here to contribute X%. If the customer clicks, because they want to donate to their charity or school, guess what? The loyalty site plants a cookie and gets the sale that rightfully belonged to the original affiliate – a visitor that affiliate PAID PPC dollars to get! Even if the affiliate didn’t do PPC, they paid blood sweat and tears to build their site and did SEO, wrote an article or did some other type of marketing to attract that visitor AND got them to click through.

Merchants, the same thing happens with direct sales. YOU pay PPC $ to get the customer or the customer does a direct type-in. YOU got the customer directly. Then the loyalty site’s toolbar injects themselves into a transaction you would have had anyway and already paid to get through PPC or other marketing. You’ll pay them a commission for a sale that was already yours to begin with.

There’s a lot more to it and it helps to see the toolbar activity play out in real time. Due in part, I’m sure to the One Cause Toolbar issue (see below) Scott Jangro is doing a series where he will show you in real time exactly what happens. He will explain in much better detail than I can, the technical aspects of how it all works. Here’s his intro to the series he’s about to start.

Loyalty Affiliate Toolbars Keep on Keeping On, Do We Care?

Below is Scott’s recent post about the One Cause toolbar which has been shown to actively overwrite affiliate cookies AND is owned by Rakuten the company that owns the Linkshare affiliate network. Important to note this does not just affect Linkshare affiliates, but the toolbar is overwriting CJ and other affiliate network cookies as well. It’s a big issue and one you need to head over to Scott’s blog to check out. Affiliate Marketing Takes a Big Step Back to 2002