The way I see it, you only search for coupons once you see a product at a retailer and you want to buy it (or even once you already have a shopping cart built up, and are on the checkout form where the coupon field is). So the retailer already acquired you as a customer, and you're ready to checkout. Most likely you'll end up checking out anyway even if you don't find any valid coupons (which is what's currently happening, since most coupons don't work anyway).
So why are retailers still paying out affiliate revenue in this case? They have the customer already. This shady affiliate doesn't bring them anything they didn't already have.
They can easily fix this by only paying out affiliate revenue for actual, legitimate affiliates, those that brought you a brand new customer. If the user already spent time browsing your website and built up a shopping cart, don't pay out affiliate revenue even if they do end up clicking on an affiliate link after.
The people who are working at these big legacy retailers in 2018 tend to not be very sophisticated about online marketing. I'm being polite with that understatement.
So nobody calls out the marketing departments on this because there is so much political BS going on anyway as everybody is scratching and clawing for their piece of an ever shrinking pie.
I worked in a similar situation and I wanted to stop working with these coupon sites for the obvious reasons you pointed out. I got overruled by higher ups and I later came to learn that my complaints about this practice were a career limiting move.
They just want to be able to take credit for driving a ton of sales even though everybody with half a brain realizes they are not generating new sales. They are simply cannibalizing the business because the vast majority of the time these people would buy at full price anyway if their Google search never turned up a coupon.
For example, talk to anyone running Google AdWords campaigns, they’ll tell about “branded” vs “unbranded” search terms, and how you should treat them all as one big bucket. They’ll say the unbranded terms generate demand, while the branded terms are the “closers.” This is PURE BS. “Branded terms” are literally someone searching for “Jira”, clicking the ad that takes you to Jira instead of the top non-ad link right below it, buying Jira, then saying “they bought it because of the ad.” Unbranded is people searching for “issue tracking software”, seeing a Jira ad, clicking it, then buying. That’s legit, but likely the CAC for unbranded is like 2-5x the LTV of the customer, and totally not worth it. But if you lump it together with the “branded” ads (people literally searching for your exact product, and randomly deciding to click the ad over the legit search result right below it), the CAC looks great. Marketing is FULL of BS like this.
My wife installed a plug-in on our family computer that looks up coupon codes for you at checkout time. But often they don't work, so I don't even bother with them. To me, that suggests that even if its 'easy' to find the coupon codes, the coupons still work as a form of price discrimination.
What's their opinion of Apple, for example? Would they operate the same way there?
Since they can't cookie stuff on us to make money they are just trying to get additional eyeballs for ads by organically ranking for anyone searching for a coupon for my brand.
I think that's quite an assumption. I have no data either way, but personally I'll rarely make a spur of the moment purchase without something pushing me over the edge. Those £60 sneakers? Pass. Those £60 sneakers with 20% off? Yeah, ok then.
How often do you find that those £60 sneakers were "on sale" for 20% off on one site, while being "full price" at £48 on other sites?
It's pretty common for me. There's much less variation in the price something is selling for than in the amount of "discount" you're supposedly getting.
I usually open a private window to mitigate them doing something less the super sophisticated.
In my case, I can often get the same item (or similar quality item) for same or near price, I value the extra points a retailer that participates through the affiliate program provides, and I choose that retailer.
Not so easy. New customers like to shop with coupons too. There's certainly no guarantee (or, in my opinion, even a likelihood) that only awarding affiliate commission for new customers would rule out coupon purchases. I personally always scout around for discounts and coupon codes before shopping anywhere - it has nothing to do with whether it's my first purchase or not.
> If the user already spent time browsing your website and built up a shopping cart, don't pay out affiliate revenue even if they do end up clicking on an affiliate link after.
I think this makes more sense without the "even" word. Also, if the link was clicked on before the cart was built up, a commission would be in order.
Besides, even if like you said a user is ready to buy something, there could be better coupons from rival retailers which bring the user to the site and look for the same product. Isn't this what a lot of retailers want? Using better coupons to bring users from competitors site?
There are many other scenarios, without considering those and just make the decision is really bad.
That said, affiliate networks expend a huge amount of resources into convincing retailers that coupons bring incremental sales. Reason being, it gives them an opportunity to plant cookies with every sale the retailer makes, not just those driven by a legitimate affiliate.
You could say sales do the same thing, but online sales are so overused that I personally disregard them because I figure the store will have another fake sale soon anyway.
Coupons allow you to selectively target price-sensitive customers with lower prices, resulting in better matching of your price to buyer's willingness to pay.
Regardless, most likely there are links involved, and there actually be canonical tags involved, as well. If there are links involved they're most likely hiding them from link crawlers like ahrefs and Majestic.com.
I'd put my bet on links (that are hidden), link ghosting, or cross-domain canonical tags.
It's not "just because it's on the Amazon domain". If domain authority existed, we'd see sites on Google sites, Business.site rank--and they don't.
Not that I condone it but the sheer ingenuity can be appreciated.
Finally, someone has openly spoken about it, instead of exploiting it a bit more!
the s3 page has all links go to promocode.org https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/in...
When you click on that you get redirected to promocode.org where you get re-prompted to click on the promo code and that's where the cookie promo gets tacked on the walgreens website.
I understand that amazonaws.com is a highly-ranked domain. What part of this process makes this particular s3 webpage rank up in search algorithms though? At the end of the day don't you need lots of _direct_ inbound clicks and links to this specific s3 page for it to rank higher?
The only way I see this working is if _indirect_ clicks of the entire domain count towards the ranking of this specific page -- that doesn't seem right though.
edit: looks like the paragraph above describes the concept of "domain authority" so that's probably the answer
Each page of a site doesn't need a ton of links to that specific page to rank, just links to the site in general (site being root link plus subdomains).
That's typically why blogspot-type services give you a subdomain, and not a page on their main domain.
It's been known about in SEO circles for a while[0], will be interesting to see if things change in the next major Google update.
[0] https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/how-to-get-backlinks-from-...
No idea. The article basically ends with "I'm not sure exactly how this happened so I'm going to talk to some experts". A bit of a letdown, tbh. I was waiting for the big reveal!
Not quite. Notice that when you click "Show Code" (the first click), a new window is opened and the existing window is redirected to Walgreens.com. All the action happens on the first click.
It really depends on how you define site authority.
As the article you cited states:
“I am just labeling that unknown multiplier effect as a trust factor, that’s all.
That’s a realistic definition of Site Authority, as a catch-all for all the quality signals that Google uses in it’s core algorithm.”
At least in the early 2000s having a page on a high authority(however you define it) domain automatically guaranteed higher rankings.
So even today, it is pretty much impossible to outrank wikipedia on some mundane(non SEO worthy) topic even when wikipedia article is more basic, has less inbound links and even cites the more substantial article which is based on some random "low quality" domain. Obviously citation needed here...
I'm sure they wish we'd forget PageRank ever existed too.
> Imagine Usain Bolt looking back as he runs the 100 meter dash and seeing you covered in sweat, screaming up behind him. Imagine the look on his face. That’s my face when I saw this page went from total obscurity to top ranking for “g2a discount code” in one month and generating an estimate 30,000+ visitors to that one page.
Really effective use of imagery. I love how he directs your attention to think about Bolt’s face, which is easy to imagine.
The main idea of the post doesn’t seem to be related to social engineering, though. Sorry for the confusion, I should have clarified.
When you click the "show coupon" boutton, two things happen
1. A javascript "click" event is triggered (in coupon.js) and executes : window.open(https://www.promocodefor.org/promo/walgreens/walgreens-photo...) This opens a new tab at this url, this page shows the fake coupon code.
2.Since the button is a <a> tag with href="https://www.promocodefor.org/go/pcfc833699cf9ddea03", the current tag navigates to this url
Then you follow 7 redirect redirects (code 302) to pages owned by https://skimlinks.com who redirects to pages owned by https://www.conversantmedia.com who finally redirect to https://photo.walgreens.com/store/prints?tab=photo_Promo1
It's basically an affliate link to walgreens.
The question is how did https://s3.amazonaws.com/walgreens-photo-coupon/walgreens/in... rank so high in google ? Just because it's hosted on amazon doesn't make sense. There is a trick that we don't know.
I think it's hosted on Amazon S3 juste because it's very cheap hosting, since the site is a single .html file
i mean i know it's all about consumer surplus, but all walmart knows is that someone on the internet wanted to get a discount, did not get it, and now walmart pays random SEO cash. They lose margin, the buyer is frustrated cos they paid full price, and walmart knows nothing about surplus because the client paid full price - no differentiation no price signal.
how is walmart winning here?
This is like saying "Most people who watched the TV ad didn't buy anything, how is Walmart winning?"
The age old saying is that you know half of your marketing budget is wasted, you just don't know which half. It still applies now even if you can track users.
if i turn up at the till with coupon clipped from the tv guide, then putting coupons in the tv guide is a viable channel to reach me
if i turn up with a cookie from whichever SEO happened this week to be on top for "gardening gloves", but there is no legal coupon just a cookie, then what has walmart learned? that google is a channel ? it's too big to be useful
But affiliate marketing as a whole is one of the shadiest internet industry. The coupon thing is one of the many tricks in the book to get your cookie everywhere and earn $$ without providing any value.
There's an awful lot of fraud like that but somehow the benefits seems to outweigh it because the industry is still alive and kicking.
Having seen numbers for some affiliate channels, my guess is that it's probably grossly overvalued but people still buy into that because the numbers look good, from afar, especially if you compare them to Search or Social. But the pricing model (CPA > Cost per Acquisition / Conversion) is different so I guess both sides are fine with that.
It's a mouse and cat game that is the usual playbook between the "good guys" and "bad guys", as you'd see in security, pirating, etc ...
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Also, this is hardly a secret but it's actually really hard to properly estimate the ROAS / ROI of advertising in general and most of it is like a black box.
You pour some money in, get more money out if you play your cards well. Maybe you nailed your strategy and execution, maybe you'd still have made the same money without advertising.
They can identify and cancel those SEO accounts and deny payout. Meanwhile, the real advertisers have lost their cookie and don't get their deserved payout.
I really wonder why deleting all the cookies for a given website as soon as you close it isn't the default behavior and not even a built-in option in web browsers. I use Vanilla Cookie Manager in Chrome to make it work this way.
Probably because users would find it annoying to have to log in to all their websites again.
The sad reality is there's not much point in having privacy features if nobody uses your browser so there is a balance to be struck.
> Seth Kravitz is the CEO of PHLEARN, the world’s #1 Photoshop & Lightroom training company online
wow. i guess CEOs of any online company have to have deep deep understanding of SEO these days. and what better SEO than blogging about things unrelated to your company! as we just saw a few days ago from 3byte.
This is so phishy. Doing a landing page on Amazon S3 and having all the link redirecting to your real website.
I'm starting to wonder if shady SEO marketing companies aren't already doing this to promote their "clients".
I hope the Google SPAM team we'll do something about it.
now everyone's going to try that and it stops working
but then people are going to start naming their s3 buckets amazon-
