Review: T3Leads third generation affiliate network

Back in August 2008 I was asked by the chaps at T3Leads to review their affiliate platform.  Well, 2 years later they contacted me again urging me to investigate how things have changed.

One of the things I really liked about this network when I first reviewed it was how simple it made life for the newbie affiliate.  The fact that they offered pre-built landing pages and suggested keywords made life very easy for the green PPC marketer.  It meant without any real knowledge or placement in a given industry you could set up a very basic landing page, target a very broad PPC campaign at it and - in theory - make money.

In reality it takes more than this top-level thinking to make money on lucrative CPA models, but it certainly gave you a great basis.  They've now released their third-generation website which is aimed to make life easier.  

Core model
As was the case when I reviewed them 2 years ago, their core model is lead generation for its advertisers; i.e. you're hooking up a supplier with a customer lead.  For this reason the majority of the campaigns on offer are financial (loans, insurance, etc) which means it's unlikely that you'll be able to shoe-horn them into your own website (unless of course, that is your niche).  So T3Leads is going to be more useful to you on a more traditional landing-page + traffic model.

Websites
As I stated above, the fact that T3Leads provide you with pre-made landing pages (or microsites in some cases) was always a nice feature - although it relied on you being able to host it somewhere and drive traffic.  Now there is the notion of "public" websites, which are hosted by T3leads themselves and merely require you to link to them with your affiliate ID in the URL.  Affiliate marketing cannot get easier than this; although whether you can profit from this model remains to be seen.  

The profits I've seen in such markets have been through innovation or clever landing pages, sending people through to a very obvious landing page such as the ones hosted publically seems a bit like a mixed bag.  However, I'm sure they've put more thought and testing into their landing pages than I do, so I'm sure their conversions are more favourable also.

"Personal" sites are as they always have been, landing pages/microsites zipped up for you to download, customise and host yourself.

Affiliate/Referals
AS with all sensible networks they offer you another avenue with which to get paid; banners.  They've got a huge number of banners (of various dimensions) for you to embed on your sites for both their advertisers and for themselves.  If you're less into landing pages and PPC, you could simply load these onto your website and hope for the best.  A nice feature if you're into passive, speculative monetisation.

JavaScript Forms
I was quite surprised to see this as it's actually a surprisingly good idea.  If you're into making your own landing pages or embedding forms into your own websites, T3Leads now provide fully working JavaScript powered forms for you to dump into your website.  Simply copy the code into your website and you're good to go.  This would really accelerate any bespoke development you'd wish to do because the functionality is already taken care of.  A really handy feature.

Downsides
One of the biggest problems I had with T3Leads in 2008 was that there was never an explicit affiliate payment model.  Most other networks you deal with are very up-front about how much you're likely to earn; expressed either as a flat dollar amount per transaction or as a percentage of the overall transaction.  T3Leads still doesn't openly offer these values which for me is a huge issue.

If I'm undertaking PPC I need to know EXACTLY what the CPA is.  There's a huge difference between a $3 action vs. a $40 action and they'll need to be marketed accordingly.  If the affiliate lead is worth $40 I can spend a lot more on marketing and still turn a profit.  $3 on the other hand means I need to be very frugal.  The fact that T3leads don't seem to offer this information up-front would mean I couldn't do any marketing that required expenditure; it'd have to be organic.  Which, as we all know, is not a fast process.

Doing this work organically would be pointless; the financial sector is lucrative enough without more websites needing to appear on page 1 of Google for "payday loan".  Hell, you wouldn't get within the first 100 pages.

UPDATE: I have since spoken to the chaps at T3Leads and they've informed me that they do actually provide payout information, however it isn't where I would expect to find it. Instead of having it inside the admin-area/dashboard where I choose what products to market, the only place you can find this information is on the front-end brochure part of the site. However, it still doesn't help your costing at all. The payouts are invariably listed as $1.50 to $65+ which is still delightfully useless. Granted T3Leads are unlikely to know a precise figure for every transaction but an average would be more welcoming. As I stated earlier, there's a huge difference on a $3 payout to a $40 - even more so now we're talking a range of $1.50 - $65 or more.

Given my cynical understanding of how such systems work, because it implies that payouts are from $1.50 I have to assume that every payout is going to be $1.50. So I'd suggest for T3Leads to offer some more statistical data on average payouts so that the user has something to base their calculations on. Giving me such a broad range of possible payouts for a single product is essentially useless still from a practical perspective.

Conclusion
A great network (although I'm going to gloss over a few styling issues) but they still need to listen to their users and offer earning indicators.  I can't see the platform taking off unless the user knows that every successful lead on [campaign x] will deliver [$y] to their account.  If they don't say it makes me think it won't be very much at all, which means I won't bother.

For now it's absolutely worth a look, but until they can say with some authority what the CPA is going to be (hell, even an average would be better than none) I really wouldn't invest any money in advertising the landing pages.  Visit T3Leads.

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