Announcing the Notifications tab for publishers

Communication is a key component to Affiliate marketing, so it's no surprise that advertisers and publishers exchange a lot of email. With the peak shopping season coming up, it’s critical for publishers to stay informed of important advertiser program changes to make the most of their affiliate marketing efforts. To make it easier for publishers to keep track of important account notifications from within the Google Affiliate Network interface, we’ve launched a new Notifications system.

Types of notifications

If you're a publisher, starting today you’ll receive a notification whenever an advertiser makes a change to their account that impacts your relationship or commissions. For example, if an advertiser invites you to join their program, this invitation will appear in your notifications. You’ll also receive a notification when an advertiser makes a decision on your application to their program. Other examples of the notifications you’ll receive include Commission rate changes or updates to Advertiser Specific Terms.

From the Publisher Home, you’ll see a notification alert in the upper right corner of the interface that displays the number of pending messages. When you click on the alert, you can see more information along with a link to see all notifications.

When you click the Notifications tab, you'll see a basic summary and detailed view for each communication. You can search across notifications and advertisers so you can more easily review and act on affiliate-specific notifications while you’re working in your account.

This launch is the first of a series of enhancements to communications within the Google Affiliate Network interface. For a long time, we've listened to your feedback that adding a central communication hub could help increase efficiency and reduce the need to simply rely on your email inbox for important communications. Today's launch is the first step we're making towards this hub. Our vision is to move more communications into a central location in interface so you can better track and maintain your affiliate relationships and activities.

Send your feedback

We welcome your feedback. If you have any suggestions, let us know what you think by posting a comment here or in the Google Affiliate Network forum. Sign in to your account today to access the Notifications tab.

Posted by:
Joel Ingram, Software Engineer

Introducing structured promotional data for links

It’s no secret that special promotions and coupons are integral to the affiliate channel. If you're a publisher with a shopping-focused website, you know how important it is to present accurate, comprehensive promotions and coupons to your visitors.

Today, we're happy to announce a more structured way to get links with offers, promotion codes, and discounts so you can more easily automate and display the latest advertiser promotions. You now have the ability to search and filter by special offers, promotion codes, and discounts – including Link templates and Publisher-specific links. Read on to learn more about how you can now access structured promotion data.

Accessing links with structured promotional data

When you search the interface, you can perform queries that weren't previously possible. For example, try searching search for an Apparel link with Free shipping that has a Promotion code where the discount is greater than 25 percent off. This could be helpful if you have a website where you only want to promote coupons with a significant discount.

We’ve also updated the recommendation engine to help you find more relevant promotional links. If you're a shopping-focused publisher, you'll see that links with special offers, promotion codes, or discounts are more visible.

Links API

Structured link data is also available through the Google Affiliate Network API, so you can programmatically access and display offers, promotion codes, and discounts to your website in real time.

Link subscriptions

You can also get links with special offers, promotion codes, and discounts via Link subscriptions. To access structured link data through Link subscriptions, sign in to your publisher account and upgrade to Link subscriptions Version 2.

Send us your feedback

As always, your feedback is very important. You can click on “Details inaccurate?” in the interface to provide feedback at the link level to help us quickly resolve any potential issues.

If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know what you think by posting a comment here or in the Google Affiliate Network forum.

We’ve worked hard to make these changes to help you achieve greater success this holiday season. Sign in to your account today to access these new link features!

Posted by:
Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Quickly create links with our new Chrome extension for publishers

If you're an affiliate publisher, you might be looking for the most efficient ways to promote great products. With this in mind, we’re happy to announce the Google Affiliate Network Link Builder, a new Chrome extension that makes creating product links fast and easy.

Publishers have long been able to create links by signing into Google Affiliate Network and creating a Publisher-specific link (PSL). Now, the Google Affiliate Network Link Builder enables publishers to create affiliate ads that link directly to unique product pages -- right from an advertiser’s website.

If a great product catches your eye while browsing, why shouldn't a PSL be anything more than a click away? With our new Chrome extension, it isn’t. The extension displays a button in the corner of your browser window. If the advertiser's program supports deep linking, you can easily create a PSL for any product you’re viewing by clicking the button.

Get started

To start using the Link Builder, just follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Chrome with your Google Affiliate Network publisher login and password. Here’s a step-by-step process for signing in to Chrome.
2. Visit the Chrome Web Store and download the Google Affiliate Network Link Builder. This will add the icon to your browser.
3. Next, visit an advertiser website where you have an existing affiliate relationship and search for a product.
4. Found a cool product? Use the extension by clicking on the icon and a pop-up window will prompt you to create a PSL with one click.
5. And that’s it! Copy the PSL, and you can begin promoting it right away.

How it works

The extension works entirely by making calls to Google Affiliate Network’s public API, and the only requirement is that you be signed in to Chrome with your publisher account. Once loaded, the extension downloads all your advertiser relationships into memory and then recognizes when you have an affiliate relationship with a website you’re visiting. The extension's open source code is available for all to see, as an example of how to use Google Affiliate Network's public APIs.

We encourage our users to study and use the code to support their creative endeavors. If you have questions or feedback, please let us know in our public support forum.

Posted by:
Ben Collins-Sussman, Engineering Manager

Launched: Switch between your preferred currency and timezone

With our international launch earlier this year, we enabled you to set your preferred currency and timezone. We’re pleased to announce that if you changed your settings, you can now switch between your preferred settings and the default currency (USD) and timezone (Central Time) when viewing reports. This enhancement allows you to view your reports in the format that's most relevant to you, and is available for all reports except for payment reports.

 Switch between your preferred and default currency:

Switch between your preferred and default timezone:

If you're a Google Affiliate Network publisher, please note that you can only view the reporting currency you’ve chosen in your AdSense account. It’s not possible to change this once you’ve set it.

Posted by: Kurt Spoerer, Google Affiliate Network Product Manager

Faster, better order management

Since migrating to the Google stack last September, we’ve been working to improve the Google Affiliate Network interface by both adding new features and enhancing some existing ones.

As a part of that effort, we’ve just pushed out a brand new release of the Orders tab for both advertisers and publishers.

First, we've made the Orders tab fast. Very fast. Whether you’re looking up 10 orders or 10,000 orders, you'll see query results load in about the same amount of time.

Advertiser-facing changes:

We want to make it easier for you to handle bulk operations. So, we enabled inline order editing right from the Orders tab. No need to click through to another page -- you can simply edit the order inline. Once an order is updated, publisher and network fees are updated, too.

Also, it’s now easier to cancel orders in bulk. When you search for multiple orders, just select the orders you want to cancel and cancel them all at once.

Publisher-facing changes:

The key publisher feature we’ve added is the ability to directly edit the Member ID field for an order inline. If you're a publisher whose workflow involves verifying or editing the Member ID field, this process will now be much easier.

Finally, based on your feedback, we now display locked orders (e.g. those that have been paid out) in the tab, rather than just open orders. Keep in mind though that those locked orders can't be edited.

As always, we look forward to your feedback. Please use our forum for feedback and comments. Thanks!

Posted by:
Ali Pasha, Product Manager

Opportunity Center for Publishers (Beta)

We’ve just released a new feature that automates the process of finding new advertiser programs. The Publisher Opportunities Center generates a list of recommended advertisers that have the best potential to generate conversions from your website traffic. Recommendations are based on internal data including publisher-advertiser category matches and the advertiser’s performance with your peers.

All Google Affiliate Network publishers can visit the new Opportunities beta tab after signing in to Google Affiliate Network. If we have adequate information on your website, the list of recommendations will be available immediately. From this screen you can view information about the recommended advertisers such as program-wide 3 month and 7 day Earnings Per 100 Clicks (EPC), a standard logo banner, primary category, links to the commission information and program terms, as well as a simple click to join button. You can also export this list as a CSV or TXT file. Note: You’ll also see a link to ‘Dismiss’ a recommendation if you’re not interested in a particular advertiser. Once you ‘Dismiss’ the advertiser listing, it is permanently removed from the Opportunities tab.

If you don’t see any recommendations it means we need more information about your website. You will be prompted to fill out a short form. Recommendations will be quickly generated based on your response.

Results will be updated daily, so publishers are encouraged to check their recommendations on a regular basis.

We will continue to iterate on the beta and we invite you to provide your feedback in our Help Forum.

On behalf of the Google Affiliate Network team.

posted by Sheila Parker, Product Manager