TradeDoubler – Pan European performance-based marketing

Update: This is a very old text from Nikke’s Index. But the facts are all straight. I like that.

TradeDoubler presents itself as the leading provider of performance-based marketing and sales solutions in Europe. They offer Internet marketing services to anyone who wants to improve the effectiveness of their online business.

I have been a Swedish TradeDoubler affiliate for almost 4 years. It’s rather interesting to see that TradeDoubler has managed to keep on the same path, both the dotcom era and during the dotcom disaster years. I think that is due to their ability to attract both small web sites like this and larger ones that want to fill up vacancies in their own advertising sales.

And it works both ways. When the two alchohol oriented sites Vinguiden.com and Cocktailguiden.com, that I produce, partnered with TradeDoubler we saw an tremendous increase both in visitors and new subscribers to our news letters.

Pan European and local advertisers

The interesting thing about TradeDoubler is that they partner both with local, one-language-only companies, and internationally active companies, like Apple Store and Dell, with representation or at least local language sites in many contries.

Since most of the online commerce seems to be local, at least in the smaller language areas, like here in Sweden, local partners might bring you a better return as an affiliate than working with the large international companies. At least when the larger companies ship from another country and the customer will have to add a customs fee to the invoiced price. And I think that’s why I have a much better result with the campaigns for the Swedish DVD renting company Boxman (now taken over by Lovefilm) than I have with it’s US or UK based competitors.

In fact, the local companies don’t even want me to advertise their products to most of you reading this page. Since it is in English, most of you won’t be living in Sweden, won’t even consider buying their merchandise, and thus are utterly uninteresting as a target group. That is also the reason why a Swedish site only can apply to the Swedish version of TradeDoubler, a French site only will se French affiliate programs and so on… (And, as a site note, that is why I am converting N!kkes Index into two seperate sites. One containing English material only, and one with Swedish texts only).

How it works

It’s pretty straighforward to partner up with TradeDoubler. All you have to do is to sign up at their site, apply for a couple of programs, and either start showing these immediately or wait for approval first. You’ll find advertising material in most sizes, as well as text. And in most cases you can easily do deep linking while still retaining commission. TradeDoubler work with cookies that are set first when clicking on a link, and then when your visitor performs an action that in most cases is returning a lead or a sale. Some programs pay per click, but I know of no advertisers paying per view. TradeDoubler pays out commissions very regurlarly, when you meet the minimum (here in Sweden SEK 500).

I think the text linking ability is the best here really. I do get some clicks on the graphical material, but the vast majority of clicks is through text links. And this I know, since TradeDoubler has a really good reporting feature that tells me stuff like this.

Go check if TradeDoubler has representation in your country or in the language you use on your site. Click here! »»»