Review of Tatto Affiliate Network

The following is a paid review of Tatto Affiliate Network. Although I am getting paid to write this review, it is completely of my opinion and my review is not influenced by being paid. If you would like your site or product reviewed, please contact me.

When Tatto Media contacted me to do this review, at first I thought they were yet another new affiliate network that just popped up. I heard of them on a couple of other blogs, but honestly I didn’t bother signing up as I have accounts with so many networks already and after you sign up for a few, you realize they all mostly carry the same offers and mostly run on the same software (usually DirectTrack).

After doing my research though I found out that they’ve actually been around since 2005 – a long time in Internet years – but they’ve been a private network until recently.

Started by a handful of very successful affiliates, Tatto Media has grown into the third largest ad network worldwide according to ComScore (Jun 3,2009 Press Release). Not that being a large company is the most important thing when choosing to work with a network, but I like to work with networks who didn’t just pop up yesterday and might disappear tomorrow. Tatto Media has definitely been around long enough to establish its credibility in the marketplace, and they’ve now opened up their Tatto Affiliate Network publicly to all affiliates.

What Makes Tatto Affiliate Network Different

Alright, lets identify what makes the Tatto Affiliate Network different. In other words, what would make you click on the sign up now link to get an account opened up with them even though you may already have accounts with plenty of other networks.

Proprietary Software

The first big differentiating factor with the Tatto Affiliate Network is that they’re using their own custom-built tracking software, unlike most networks which use DirectTrack.

The cool thing about this is that as an affiliate you get access to use a software package that was designed by affiliates for affiliates. These guys built the software knowing full well the drawbacks and annoyances you’ll find with DirectTrack. They’ve been running their own software since December 2008, and here are just a few of the updates and improvements they’ve made in the past few months alone.

Redesigned Reporting and Statistics – They’ve recently improved the speed and efficiency of their reports and stats pages. Data view pages can be searched and sorted easily even with multiple pages of data. Speed is important for reports, especially when you start pumping a lot of traffic to an offer.

Conversion Tracking Report - Reporting is super important for making sure you’re maximizing your profits on campaigns. Their conversion tracking report provides specific lead/sale information, including sub id, tracking info, transaction id, ip address, and payout, allowing you to quickly run sub id reports.

One Click Tiny URLs – This is a cool little feature. You can shorten your tracking links to your own TinyURL with the click of one button.

From this:

To this:

All with one click. Very cool.

Easy to Understand Tracking Links – Their tracking links are now easy to understand. For example, the offer id is simply “offer_id”, and your affiliate id is “aff_id” and your Sub ID is “aff_sub” etc.

They’ve also added a “Source Name” into their tracking so you can specify the source of the traffic for your reports. For example, you could set “source=google” or “source=yahoo” in your tracking link and then run reports by source. Of course, if you’re paranoid about protecting your traffic sources, you can always use aliases for your sources such as “source=a” or “source=b” for your different traffic sources.

Browser Targeting – The Tatto Affiliate Network now can target offers to users based on their browser. This will redirect users to receive offers designed for mobile devices including iPhones and thus increase your conversion rates.

Creative Manager – Quickly browse the available creatives (banners) and add the tracking code for a specific creative (banner type and size). For example, you can select a 468×60 banner and it automatically generates your tracking code along with the banner image in seconds.

Also, if you prefer, you have instant access to all the URLs for all the banners at your fingertips. You can link to them directly, or download them and host them yourself.

Self-Serve Tracking Pixels

This is awesome. You can add in your own tracking pixel for an offer without having to talk to your Affiliate Manager. This is especially cool if you’re online during late night hours like I am, and there is no AM to place your pixels for you. There are some networks who have taken over a week to place a pixel for me, while most usually take about 24 hours.

This little feature of their software allows you to place and change your own pixels any time you want. This is a huge benefit in my opinion. Now you can create a conversion pixel in Google, and just cut/paste it right in here, click Save and you’re done.

Refer a Friend – As with most networks, Tatto will pay you to refer your affiliate marketer friends to their network. They pay 1% of the gross earnings your friends earn through their network for life.

Stats API – If you’re a programmer, their software has its own stats API you can plug into and get access to your statistics through an API.

Exclusive Offers

While almost all networks say that they have “exclusive” offers, Tatto Media is also an advertiser network which means that they work with advertisers directly to get offers which you won’t find on other networks. Of course they do also offer some of these offers to other networks, but if you go through Tatto directly, you’re cutting out the middle man which means possible higher payouts.

Payment Terms

At first, when I created my account with Tatto, I saw that the payment terms for my account were set to “Net 30″. My understanding from working with other networks was that most of them work on “Net 15″ payment terms, which means that you get paid 15 days after the end of the month in which you earn commissions.

So for example, if you earn $500 in commissions in October, most networks will send you a payment on November 15th. That’s what they normally refer to as “Net 15″. With Tatto showing their terms as “Net 30″ I thought it would mean I would get paid 30 days after the end of the month, so in the above example that would be November 30th.

I thought that was rather odd, since most networks pay “Net 15″ so I asked my AM and actually what I found out is pretty cool. What they mean by “Net 30″ is that they pay you on the first day of the following month. So, if I earned $500 in October, they would pay me that on November 1st. That’s much better than what you get with most networks who offer “Net 15″.

Personally I would put a note on their payment terms page to explain what they mean by “Net 30″ because I bet other affiliates are going to think the same thing I did at first.

They do also offer weekly wires once you hit a threshold of $2000/week in earnings. This is fairly standard across networks, where they require $1,000 – $2,000/week minimum and then they put you on weekly payments.

The Verdict

After checking out the Tatto Affiliate Network, here’s my thoughts.

Overall this network definitely looks like they’re going to be around for a while. They’re not some brand new company that just popped up last week that you have to worry about how long they’re going to be around. The company was created by a group of affiliates that created their own private affiliate network which they’re now making available to all affiliates.

As an affiliate marketer this is a great opportunity to get access to the same offers that previously were only available to their private affiliate members.

Improvements

A few things that I think they could improve on are:

(1) Refer a Friend Program – Their refer a friend program consists of a link on the front page which allows you to refer friends to Tatto’s sign-up page.

I think they should make it easier to get access to their banners for their own network. One way to do this, and what I’ve seen most networks do is to create an Offer for the network’s “Refer a Friend Program”. This way you can attach banner creatives to the offer and track stats on everything just like any other offer.

I had to ask my AM to get access to their banner pack, so that I could place a 125×125 banner on my site. This wasn’t a big deal, since it only took a few seconds to ask and get an email with the banners, but since they’ve made so much of their software “self-serve” I think making the “Refer a Friend” function fully self-serve just makes sense.

Also, while I’ve seen some networks offer referral percentages as high as 5%, Tatto offers 1%. This can be deceiving however, because often times networks will take the 5% off the top of the payout for the affiliates you refer so they’re unable to offer as high of a payout due to the 5%, which sometimes results in the affiliate going to another network.

For example, you refer a friend of yours to an affiliate network which pays 5%. Your friend looks at an offer he’d like to run, and the payout is $25/lead for that offer. Your friend looks on other networks (which don’t pay 5%), and he sees the same offer for $26/lead for example, so he ends up going with the other network and you make nothing.

In the end, what I’ve learned is that it’s better to get paid 1% from a network that carries great offers with great payouts, so that you actually make something from that 1%, rather than get paid 5% of nothing because the offers suck.

(2) Advanced Offer Search – Right now you can select the type of offer category you want (ie. Mobile, Health, Insurance etc.) and the software will show you all the offers that they have within that category.

What would be cool though is if you could search and filter offers with more flexibility. For example, if I wanted to search for all offers that accept Canadian traffic with a Payout of $20.00 and above, for example. There’s no way to do that right now. You can sort by “Countries” or “Payout” but not both.

Of course, you could always ask your AM for “Canadian offers above $20″ and I’m sure they could give you a list as well as offer suggestions on which offers are doing well, but this is a feature I’ve actually looked for on many networks and most of them don’t have this ability.

Another thing that I’d love to be able to do is filter certain types of offers. For example if I wanted to see all offers that are not “free trial” type offers.

(3) Top Performing Offer Stats – Right now when I look at all the stats for all the offers on the network, everything is set to zero. Meaning they only show stats on all the offers that I’ve ran personally. What would be cool is to see some of the stats such as average EPC on offers etc, so that you can get a better idea of which offers are doing well. A lot of networks show you these stats, although a lot of times they’re not very reliable.

However, the flip-side of this is that when you find an offer and do well with it, them not showing stats to other affiliates does help to protect you from everyone flocking to your offer. So maybe it’s better that they only show your own stats, and not network-wide stats, and then rely on the discretion of the AM’s to share stat information with you as they see fit.

Final Words

I really like how the affiliate networks are listening to affiliates and making changes to how things work.  For example, placing pixels is honestly a pain in the butt if you have to ask your AM every time to do it for you.  Especially when you’re launching a bunch of campaigns for testing and you get held up due to something as simple as placing a pixel.

The self-serve pixel placing feature of Tatto Media alone is enough to sway me to run an offer with them in certain situations where the alternative is waiting for days to get a pixel placed manually with another network.  Their payment terms are also much better than what you see on most networks out there.

Of course, this isn’t really surprising since it’s a network built on software developed by affiliates like us so they know what’s important to an affiliate.

If you haven’t yet signed up with Tatto Affiliate Network, you can do so by filling out their sign up form here.

If you have any questions about Tatto Media and their affiliate network, don’t hesitate to leave a comment with your questions and I’ll try to find out the answers for you.