GAN is Opening Up Referring Publisher URLs to Advertisers

Earlier this week, Google Affiliate Network announced that they’re making affiliate traffic referral data available to their advertisers.

This is not unprecedented. Other networks do this too, but (a) this is Google, and (b) they’re potentially showing more data than any other network to-date.

So, I have some questions and went straight to Larry Adams, Product Manager for Google Affiliate Network.

Here’s the Q&A I had with Larry over email.

Me: This report contains a click count for the prior 7 days. Is this every referrer, or just a sample?

Larry: Every referrer (being part of google has it’s advantages )

Me: As a publisher, can I examine my own referrer data to see what my advertisers are seeing?

Larry: At the moment, you can only see referrers for out of date links that are generating traffic on your site. we plan to offer publishers a view of all their referring traffic but it’s not available yet, no eta for the moment.

Me: Do you plan to share other information per referrer such as transactions, EPC, or conversion rates?

Larry: We think there are a lot of intriguing possibilities around providing more insight about how affiliate traffic performs based on origin and destination, nothing to share here yet though.

Me: I may be concerned that certain extraneous information may be getting passed through with these referrer URLs, such as my local tracking parameters. I realize that I can redirect and clean these up so visitors land on a clean URL before clicking on any ads. But this brings up another related transparency question. Do advertisers have access to my MID information?

Larry: Any information that is included on the URL of the page the user was on is transmitted. Note that we’re not reporting on parameters you add to the tracking link, but if there is a token that is included on the page on your site, it would be included in the referrer.

Me: Thanks Larry!

Larry: Thanks as always for your interest and support.

Is this a good thing?

I support the feature. I think transparency is critical to merchant advertisers, especially as they become more responsible for their publishers’ actions, such as with the new FTC endorsement guidelines. If they can see the problems, they can deal with them on a case-by-case basis. The alternative is that they may need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and eliminate entire publisher segments, or worse as the only way to avoid publishers promoting them in ways that they don’t want.

Watch your Referrer Data

The last question I asked Larry is an important one to publishers who are concerned with advertisers gaining proprietary information. For example, if you are doing direct PPC, the advertisers will see what keywords you’re sending traffic through. The referrer will be the search engine page that had the advertisement on it, which includes what the visitor searched for.

I don’t in any way advocate being evasive in order to hide the source of your traffic, or bid on restricted terms without detection. However, you may want to take steps to prevent too much data from getting passed through to curious marketers who may also be running their own SEO and PPC campaigns.