As an affiliate marketer in the States, the past few months is a busy travel time for me every year. It starts with Linkshare Symposium in June, Google Affiliate Network Client Summit in July, Affiliate Summit in August, CJU in September, Blogworld Expo (skipped this year, too much travel) and ShareaSale ThinkTank in October.

Given that our holiday season ends on Halloween around here, September and October is a really bad time for the guy who keeps the servers running to be jetting around the country.

This past Saturday night, I was out in Newport Beach, CA at the awesome ShareASale event. At 10pm, I was hanging out at the bar waiting for a poker game to materialize when I got a text message that Costumzee.com was unresponsive. I quickly tried to load the site on my iPhone and it didn’t, so I bolted back to my room. I logged into the server and was reminded that the big weekly backup happens on Sunday morning at 1 am ET. It’s usually not a problem, but the extra halloween load was too much for the servers to handle the backups AND the traffic. The problem was over pretty quickly.

Thanks to monitoring services, I’m usually able to respond quickly to any issues. Here’s how the interactions usually go with my business partner.

Damien serves very well as a monitoring service himself, usually very close to the monitoring services. But he does sleep once in a while.

Monitoring Serivces That Don’t Sleep

The service that I’ve used for years to get alerts when there are site issues is Montastic. It’s a free service that pings your servers every 30 minutes.

Actually, I noticed recently that it hasn’t been it’s usual “Johnny on the spot” and logged in to investigate. It turns out that they’ve updated the service to add some fee-based options, and at the same time updated their default check frequency to once every 6 hours! If you use montastic, you might want to go set that back down to a more frequent check.

At this point, I decided that it’s probably time that I pay for this service and get more frequent checks than every 30 minutes. I thought I’d check out a few.

Yesterday, after hunting around, I signed up for Pingdom.com, a Swedish based service that looks a bit more polished than Montastic. Of course you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I can’t lie, it certainly makes a difference. (You listening BL?)

The paid versions of both services will get you monitoring every 30-60 seconds. Pingdom offers more functionality such as uptime tracking, logs, various reports, even an iPhone app, so you can see what’s been going on and look for issues and trends as well as get alerted in real time. Here I discover that shoehunting.com had a brief problem last night at 1am (again, those pesky database backups!)

Pingdom will send email, SMS, and even a tweet if it detects a problem. A “problem” is defined by you as x consecutive failed checks. I didn’t get an alert for that one failure last night. Also, they’re pretty stingy with the SMS alerts (20 per month in the basic plan), but most providers have an email address that will forward to your phone’s SMS so I just set up a second contact for that.

If you make any money at all on your websites, it is probably worth paying for a service. At the very least you should sign up for a free one.

I received an email last night from one of our advertisers who is disappointed with the performance he’s seeing. Here’s an excerpt:

Subject: Nothing Changed

We provided you guys with an extra 4% commission, etc., with the promise of increased sales and more exposure. Currently we experienced more success on your platform last year at a lower commission. If the increases are not going to be there over last than we would like to return to our old commission structure as the new incentives we offered you guys do not appear to make a difference. Please advise.

With the higher commission, his products are actually receiving higher placement on our halloween costume site, Costumzee.com. The alternative is LESS traffic. So yeah, nothing changed. That’s a good thing.

I compared their numbers from last year to this year for September.

It is true, their EPC is pretty much the same, year over year, even with the increased commission. But that’s only part of the equation. We’re actually sending them MORE traffic than last year, about 35% more. Their conversion rate is about 23% lower. And there’s the tale of the tape. Who’s not performing?

I don’t do this to rake him over the coals. His expectations are off, and that’s partly my fault. I’m trying to fix that.

The bottom line is, this year is VERY different from last year.

Let’s look at a few National Retail Federation Headlines:

September 30, 2008: Halloween Celebrations Rise As Consumers Look To Escape Everyday Realities: “Total Halloween spending to reach $5.77 billion”

September 29, 2009: As Economy Impacts Halloween, Americans Get Creative: “Shoppers to Spend $56.31 on Holiday from $66.54 Last Year”

Halloween isn’t your bag? Well, it’s probably a pretty good indication of what we’re going to see with the Q4 holiday shopping season. So what are the lessons here?

Affiliates: Prepare for merchant disappointment and be ready to explain what’s happening with traffic on your end. You might want to reset expectations with your merchant partners up front, especially if you’re cutting deals to get higher commissions in return for top billing on your websites.

Merchants: According to sources like the NRF, we’re going to see lower spending this year at Halloween. Holiday surveys aren’t out yet, but it may be the same news. If you see only flat performance with even with better deals and efforts, don’t dismay. Flat is the new up.