MoreNiche, the innovative health affiliate network, has announced that it will no longer allow voucher codes to form part of their advertiser and affiliate marketing strategy.
Voucher codes have been a contentious topic both within the MoreNiche offices and the broader performance industry. MoreNiche took a step further than just discussing it and have implemented an outright ban on all voucher code usage via their network.
“As a content affiliate network we pride ourselves on adding tremendous value to our advertisers by delivering targeted traffic, we feel that with some affiliates using voucher codes to grab the sale at the last moment simply devalues the service we offer.” said Andrew Slack, managing director for MoreNiche.
“Some affiliates simply focus on voucher, coupon and discount keywords, undermining the hard work of more generic content affiliates. We felt it was time for a level playing field. We still encourage affiliates to market advertisers onsite deals but without the use of voucher codes” he added.
Slack has never shied away from voicing his opinions about voucher codes. In 2014 PerformanceIn published an article ‘Are voucher codes killing affiliate marketing’ which attracted much debate at the time. This is certainly a bold next step, but Slack believes he has the data to back up his decision.
“We have been monitoring the use of voucher code affiliates in combination with the customers click paths for some time now, and we found that in over 82% of the sales which resulted from a voucher code affiliate, it had at least one other more deserving affiliate visit beforehand; in most cases many more. We found many examples where consumers visited many affiliate websites performing research only to go on and purchase via a coupon.
“Our affiliates work damn hard to build value in our advertisers; we do not think it’s fair when these sales are taken away at the last moment. We want to attribute reward where value is created. Voucher marketing completely undermines this.” commented Slack.
Affiliates have taken the news extremely well and the cleanup of voucher based marketing has already begun.
Tony Jay, one of MoreNiche’s top performing affiliates commented “Although we have had to spend quite some time removing voucher content and reworking copy, we do believe that this will level the playing field and we will earn more commission in the long run. We work really hard on our content and this is completely undone when voucher code websites outrank us with little to no content.”
Advertisers have already started to see a gain with average order values increasing due to less voucher codes being used at checkout, and sales numbers appear to be holding.
“MoreNiche have always supported their affiliates in ways which we have not seen with other networks. When they explained this would lead to rewarding people who were investing in our offer it seemed like a no brainer. Since the change we have already seen an increase in average order value without any drop in sales. I hope this motivates affiliates to put more effort into promoting Bauer over other competitors” commented Riccardo Rigamonti, Marketing Manager for Bauer Nutrition.
It is too early to understand the long term impact of this change, but as MoreNiche have a large amount of content affiliates they are in a strong position to benefit from this change. Some of the larger networks generate a huge percentage of their income from voucher code affiliates and therefore could not afford to follow suite.
