Network Name: TradeDoubler
URL: http://www.TradeDoubler.com
Contact Details:
4th Floor, 52 Grosvenor Gardens
London, SW1W 0AU
United Kingdom

Telephone: 0207 881 1489

Type of Merchants Available: Tradedoubler has a huge amount of large brands as merchants. As every affiliate knows, big brands can mean big money if promoted in the right way. Tradedoubler’s portfolio includes affiliate programmes from American Express, Dell, Ann Summers, Natwest, and Opodo to name but a few.

Min Payout:£30.

Payments: Payments tend to be made two months in arrears. However, Tradedoubler has some merchants available to promote who “prepay” commissions. This means that whatever commissions you earn will appear in your bank account the following month. There are a few of these around, so good scope to speed up your affiliate payments!

2nd Tier Commissions: Nope.

Support Quality : Tradedoubler have had some fairly chronic issues with giving affiliates appropriate support in the past. The need to contact a particular account manager direct about affiliate queries has sometimes led to delays or total lack of response. However, they are now attempting to rectify this situation by creating a dedicated team of “publisher managers”. This has started to work well, and they have recently promised to answer all affiliate queries the same day if submitted before 4pm (Mon-Fri). A marvellous step, but we shall see if they fall on their own sword over this one!

Merchant Performance Metrics Available: Yes. Tradedoubler displays these in a slightly different format from that which you might find on other networks. There are two “epc” columns. One displays the 90th EPC. The other is AVG (Average) paid EPC. Still awake? OK, listen carefully as I will only say this once and you will forget it immediately.

The EPC bit is earnings per hundred clicks earned by publishers during the previous 3 months. The average is calculated from the activity all of the publishers who got paid for that programme during that period. The 90th percentile is calculated from all publishers in the programme.

The average is the sum of the earnings divided by the number of unique visitors delivered by publishers, whereas the percentile is a rank, i.e. the actual value for the publisher that ranks 90th out of the top 100 affiliates for a programme.

These metrics are probably excellent, but unless you spend a fair bit of time understanding how they work, they may not mean terribly much to you!

Keyword tracking: Yes. This is known as the EPI on the Tradedoubler network.

Search Term Tracking: Yes. There is an “EPI2” column in their reporting. You can access this by clicking on the “event breakdown” report in their reporting interface. This gives information on the search term entered if you are sending traffic direct to merchant via PPC.

Referring URL Tracking: No.

Custom Content Units: Yes. Unfortunately, the Tradedoubler “Adtool” was developed with the best intentions, but hasn’t really been terribly usable for affiliates as yet. The system that was released was not as user friendly as hoped and has proved difficult for affiliates to manipulate in order to be able to get the right kind of product into a content unit. This one is pretty high to the top of my list of things likely to make me use the “F” word at high decibelage.

Data Feeds: Yes. There is a functionality to grab details of up to 100 products as part of their standard affiliate control panel. To access the entire feed for a merchant you must request it from Tradedoubler and you must then have the ability to host the file yourself to download / gain access. If you are a newbie, prepare for a small amount of confusion on this one, it’s not incredibly intuitive.

Type Of Programmes:

Per Sale: Yes
Per lead: Yes
Per Click: Yes
Per Call: Yes

In line with their client base, Tradedoubler tend to be my biggest network in terms of earnings but its not my favourite. I find the merchant directory hard to browse around (although it does offer excellent performance metrics when you are browsing through the merchant categories).

Tradedoubler

• Deal Group Media Network Overview
• Tradedoubler’s Promise – Same Day Response To Queries
• Affiliate Network Overview – Affiliate Window UK