Is Social Media Measurement Wasted Effort? Jul 19
If you’re not filtering out affiliate spam sites from measurement results, it could be.
Affiliate spam websites and Twitter handles are built to drive traffic to sites like Amazon with an end goal of earning a percentage of the sales dollars. These sites regularly “borrow” content from directories in order to bolster their search rankings. While Google and other search engines have made progress in the battle to filter out or push down these sites in search results, many social media aggregation tools are still returning a number of affiliate sites in results.
What does this mean for marketers?
When conducting online measurement and research for consumer packaged goods, we’ve often found that affiliate sites make up 40-60% of social media results. For some clients, this means that results may appear to be thousands of posts higher than they actually are. At Loudpixel, we tend to reference the percentage of affiliate to “true” opinion posts and reactions, but it’s important to exclude these sites from any in depth analysis—this overly promotional content will skew the numbers.
And to make matters more complicated, tools such as Radian6—which work on tiered pricing structures based on volume—could be more you costing more than necessary to pull in extraneous content.
How to identify affiliate spam websites
- Check out the URL. If you see that the main URL is a string of mumbo-jumbo letters or numbers (e.g. ab3bg.com/widgetreview) or directly related to selling a particular product (e.g. buywidgets.com/widgetreview), there’s a good chance you’re looking at an affiliate website
- Look for multiple posts with the same content. Retweets are one thing, but if you see a string of the same overly positive or promotional posts from different sites with no direct attribution, you’re likely looking at affiliate spam
- Look for specific keywords: Proceed with caution when you see words like “buy cheap,” “buy now,” “low price,” “hot deals,” “online shop,” “Amazon” or other content that is overly promotional toward the brand or company—in fact, in many cases, you can filter these words out from the get-go, depending on the specific client and goals
- Look for a string of positive reviews followed by links to Amazon. Affiliate sites will often repost positive product reviews promoting the product, followed by a link to buy the product online
- Use your best judgment. Sometimes, affiliate spam is obvious (as in the example below), but the more you pay attention to the general design and features of the sites, the better you’ll be at identifying them
In order to return accurate measurements and results, take the time to identify and familiarize yourself with the characteristics of these sites. Otherwise, you’re probably wasting effort.
