[loxly]

It's spring and it's time to check your sites for expired coupons etc.

1. Check your coupon codes. Viator only allows affiliate coupons from the CJ interface to be used and there are NO general affiliate coupons out there. There are a few exclusive site coupons, and any affiliate caught posting a coupon that wasn't created for them will be booted. So check your pages, make sure if you don't have a coupon you link to our Red Hot Discounts page instead :) It is the third top converting link when you log in to get links. (tried to put the code here for copy and paste but forgot those domains are blocked per CJ.)

2. Check your PPC campaigns. Viator updated the keyword link to clarify the following:

Publishers may not bid on trademarked terms either alone or in combination with other terms. Phrase and broadmatched bidding that includes the trademarked terms is prohibited. i.e. Viator promo codes or Viatour coupons. Affiliates doing so are subject to immediate termination.

Add Viator as a negative keyword if you are coming up in broadmatched phrases.

3. Make sure you have current product links, or if you use our datafeed, that you are using the latest one. The datafeed and product links are updated once a month, to ensure you have the latest links.

4. Remember we have datafeeds and product links in multiple currencies, so if you are planning a site with UK traffic, they will see the Viator tours in their own currency. The site also automatically detects the browsers geo location and shows the appropriate currency for them. They can override the default by selecting a different currency from the currency box.

5. Make sure your site has a sitewide privacy policy statement. This is a Commission Junction requirement and the search engines are looking for them as well.

Viator also cleaned house by removing software based affiliates and is diligent in policing trademark bidding affiliates. There is a new TOS coming that will require all affiliates to accept, so be watching for that announcement as well.

Let's make this a great spring travel season :)

[Snowman]

http://deallocker.com/coupon/viator.com

More on this affiliate at http://forum.abestweb.com/showthread.php?t=103800

[loxly]

Thanks Snowman, we are going through and looking for affiliates like this and getting them to cleanup or removing them from the program. The reason the newsletter that went out yesterday specifically mentioned the coupon issues is because there are a large number of affiliates that have expired coupons on their sites and this was their first contact to make them aware that is an issue. The new TOS that is in the pipeline specifically prohibits this type of activity, which gives us the "teeth" to remove those affiliates that don't comply.

[loxly]

Someone pointed out to me that my first post didn't clarify that we are actively removing "bad" affiliates and have been since I started managing the program in late December. I have been quiet about promoting Viator until now because we have been "cleaning up" and rewriting the TOS to be more comprehensive about what is allowed and what isn't allowed. Viator has always been diligent about trademark bidding, but wasn't aware of some of the other issues and once they became aware they were very willing to make the appropriate changes.

So full steam ahead, they are a great program, an ethical company, that has great products available. Let me know if you find other issues I need to be aware of, and if we are still listed on sites like e Bate, SaHS or others, we have removed them from the program and their links are dead.