Your Promo Code Field May Be Sending Revenue To Affiliates via @sejournal, @lorenbaker
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SEJ STAFF Loren Baker 6 hours ago ⋅ 8 min read SEJ STAFF Loren Baker Founder at Foundation Digital Bio Follow Could a small field in your checkout be sending revenue to coupon affiliates? When shoppers see an empty promo code box, many leave the site to search for a discount. That detour can hand the final touchpoint – and sometimes the commission – to an affiliate, even when your marketing already did the work of bringing the customer to checkout. In an SEJ Pro session, I explained how ecommerce brands can identify this overlooked revenue leak and reclaim branded promo code searches. I’ve connected the issue to more than rankings. It can affect attribution, affiliate costs, margins, checkout completion, and the brand’s control over what customers see immediately before buying. Here is a recap of the session. The full presentation and Q&A are available to SEJ Pro members. By the time a shopper reaches checkout, they have already discovered the brand, considered the product, accepted the price, and moved toward payment. Then they encounter a blank field asking for a promo or discount code. That field introduces a question the shopper may not have had before: Am I paying more than I need to? The customer opens another tab and searches for the brand name with terms such as “promo code,” “coupon,” or “discount.” An affiliate aggregator may appear ahead of the official brand and become the last stop before the order. “You don’t want anyone leaving your site when they’re about to check out.” The search exists because of an experience the retailer created and the retailer should also own the answer. “You generate the demand, so you should own the answer.” You can see the complete checkout-to-search journey in the SEJ Pro recording. Coupon affiliates can play a legitimate role in introducing customers and generating incremental sales. The concern is not affiliate marketing itself. It is whether an affiliate created the demand or simply entered a branded journey seconds before conversion. “Affiliates should be driving sales. That’s not the question. The question here is, how come we’re letting the affiliates piggyback on top of our brand?” During the session, I used an example of a $900 order to show how quickly the economics can become meaningful. At a commission rate of 10% to 20%, an affiliate could receive $90 to $180 from a transaction the brand had already brought to checkout. If the shopper also applies a discount, the retailer takes two reductions on the same order. In my opinion, this is why the issue is a multi-channel revenue leak rather than a narrow ecommerce SEO problem. A branded coupon keyword may not impress anyone in a traffic forecast. But raw volume can hide the value of the audience behind it. In an example from the session, a midsize brand had roughly 760 monthly searches across its coupon-related terms. That is modest compared with broad informational keywords, but these searchers were much closer to purchase. “I’d rather have 760 customers that want to buy right now with their credit cards out of their pocket than tens of thousands of users that don’t do anything … The volume may be small, but the intent is maximal.” An initial audit should look at which domains control the branded coupon results, whether the official brand appears, whether the displayed offers work, and whether competing merchants are being introduced. The business case becomes stronger when search demand is considered alongside average order value, checkout completion, affiliate commission rates, discount costs, and affiliate payouts connected with branded codes. In the full session, I show you how to turn those signals into a commercial argument that can resonate beyond the SEO team. The strategic response is a stable, brand-owned destination for promo codes and legitimate ways to save. That does not necessarily mean advertising a permanent sitewide discount. Depending on the business, the official answer could feature a current promotion, seasonal offer, email incentive, loyalty benefit, subscription program, or an honest statement that no public code is available. What matters is that the information is accurate, current, and connected to the purchase journey. I summarize the challenge of presenting the official result this way: “We name the source, we answer the fear, and we state the offer.” The shopper should immediately recognize the brand as the authoritative source, trust that the information will not lead to an expired code, and understand how to continue buying. The experience should also prioritize the reason the shopper arrived. “If the priority is checkout, get the code, get them going in the checkout immediately.” The SEJ Pro presentation goes further into the page blueprint, including the offer experience, other ways to save, direct-purchase messaging, FAQs, paths back to checkout, and the internal signals that help establish the page as the official answer.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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