Toys R Us affiliate program sucks
Why? Because they only offer 3% commission in a sector where 10% is average? No, well yes but that’s not the main reason.
The main reason is the following taken from their terms and conditions:
There are also ‘currently’ strict guidelines for the pay per click channel - There is NO PPC activity allowed on this campaign (including brand or generics or using landing pages). Any affiliate found to be driving traffic from the PPC channel will be immediately suspended from the campaign and commissions will be declined. Promotion for Toys R Us will be through the affiliate creative options and datafeed.
So just to clarify, if I have a website that features toys, like erm eToys for example and I am say spending £500,000 a month on ppc - generic keywords like “toys”, “buy toys online”, “cheap toys” etc. to that site (I’m not btw) and generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of sales for my toy merchants then I am *not* allowed to promote Toys R Us on that page?! What? Excuse me? So they don’t want to benefit from all my traffic which I am paying for and for which my merchants are all enjoying on a cost per acquisition basis? ARE THEY STUPID????
Just to clarify - I am *not* bidding on any trade mark terms here, I am not bidding on “toys r us” or any variations of. So whats the problem?
I don’t care if Toys R Us are *new* to affiliate marketing, they need to be told that this is daft, stupid, idiotic and that they need to treat their partners with respect. Ignorance of how the affiliate/ppc channel works is just not an excuse.
UPDATE: Frostie has blogged about this too.
What I’m listening to right now: Sunshine Anderson – “Heard it All Before”
Affiliate Marketing - Toys R Us
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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[...] only do they have ridiculous “we haven’t got a clue” ppc rules but they also only offer 3% commission on sales. Most other toy retailers offer between 5% and [...]
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
I thought this might be a case of a PPC agency acting in their own interests, so I had a quick peek at the top 10 products on the Toys r us site and stuck a couple into google
smoby baby slide
Swingball Skip Station
Nothing for either of them, and they don’t have top slot in naturals either. I’d love to know who is advising them on the account, they must be costing them a kings ransom.
Does this then mean that you have to contact Affiliate Window and get them to remove Toys r us from the ShopWindow system? I think 3% is too low to run PPC on and get any real profit back anyway.
totally agree - it’s absolutely barking mad!
No it means if you want to continue advertising ToyRUs on your website, and you PPC your own website in anyway, then you should keep quiet.
This actually stems from a conversation I had with AWIN about it, and couldn’t quite believe what I was being told. Checked with Kieron and he too was gobsmacked.
The fact that I was denied in October last year annoyed me, but now knowing the restrictions in place, I am not the slightest bit interested in pushing ToysRUs until they change their policy, or until AWin educate them on how Affiliates work.
Basically they only want their banners, products etc appearing on website that has 100% organic traffic! AWin should have stepped in and, if they have knowledge of the affiliate industry, informed ToyRUs that there are no such affiliates.
Certainly infuriated me!
It is just a case of a big company that doesn’t understand online marketing and isn’t willing to learn it.
I think any company that won’t even allow you to do ppc is a dinosaur and is run by dinosaurs who have no clue how google is making billions per quarter but they sure do have it in their own personal stock holdings.
AW were probably so grateful to have such a global brand on their books that they accepted this without much discussion. IMO.
That is atrocious. Next they’ll say you can’t advertise your website in certain magazines…
I’m sure it’s probably a case of some Manager somewhere hearing bad things about PPC (perhaps trademark bidding), and thinking “ah all PPC is bad. We must not allow anyone to use PPC”.
Like you I’m a little surprised AW didn’t educate them on what a stupid policy it is though.
Kieron, have you seen how high this page is ranking for the term Toysrus?!
Hi Kieron,
Whilst attending the emails this evening we came across a merchant called 247 blinds, who amongst their keywords they were restricting affiliates on were “blind” & “blinds”, now we might bid on these two keywords & send to a page listing various merchants & products which may include them amongst these. Now we could assume that they mean in relation to any direct to merchant ppc activity, however on the merchant infromation page these are not mentioned.
Would you consider this comparible to unecessary restrictions?
Moose
Moose, I’ve just looked on the 247 Blinds program terms (on affiliate window) and can only see the following restrictions:
Affiliates are requested not to bid on brand name terms:
247 Blinds
247Blinds
There is no mention of generic terms such as “blinds”. However if there were then in answer to your question, yes that would be very silly.
Worse..
Not only ToysRus.com offers a poor 3%, but now their Return Days is at 0.958 (23 hours). It’s not even one day!