The SEO Dominance of RetailMeNot

HOWEVER, and perhaps call me a giant wuss, but when you're at the mercy of not only an algorithm but also a savvy business, it's a pretty dangerous bet to hedge it all on search traffic.

Coupon codes are one of those things I could easily see appearing at the top of SERPs in no time courtesy of Google.

"Credit card comparisons" and other searches like it are a massively profitable keyword to rank for. But take a peek now and you'll see Google threw their hat into the ring, flipped one switch and magically appear above all organic rankings. They're doing the same thing with travel, weather, you name it. I can't sit here and argue it's unfair, it's their yard, they make the rules.

And truthfully, as a user, I completely applaud Google for providing these services, I love the one stop shop and trustworthy nature of their results.

As a marketer, I'm very, very wary to place any huge bets on any sort of long term business model relying on rankings. Should it be a tactic in your strategy? Absolutely. But diversification here is sure going to save a lot of headaches down the road.

But at the end of the day, as far as RetailMeNot goes, get it while it's good I suppose.

But RetailMeNot also steals that last click cookie with coupons that simply do not work or are not really coupons (Check out the Amazon Free shipping "coupon" for example). That's nothing but cookie stuffing, and if it were any other smaller company doing something similar they'd probably get banned from the Amazon affiliate program.

Basically, imagine you as a website owner buying a product on Amazon and writing a review about it, reading the review out while piecing together a video montage that shows it off, taking some pictures of it, and compiling it all just to get a little bit of commission if someone reads and watches your review. Then the customer searches for an Amazon coupon before checking out, goes to RetailMeNot, and then gets the "Free Shipping on 35+ deal" that is not even a deal or coupon, or even a coupon that does not even work or exist. This million dollar company has stolen your effort and will get commission on that sale. It's just rotten from that viewpoint.

As a user, I wasn't getting paid either just wanted to help out since the coupon I found was superior than anything they posted for that store at the time.

Is their mission to help users find deals or pad their affiliate revenue? If it was the latter, their reason they gave me would make sense.

The answer could be simple. As far as I know, RetailMeNot was one of the original coupon aggregators. (The domain was created in 2006.) It also seems to concentrate on natural SEO and does not seem to be cheating. Combine that with good quality content and you have solid SERPs.

My business started as a hobby and has grown significantly (due to SEO ranking improvements) over the last couple years. We're now at a point where we (my wife and I) can no longer handle the volume that's coming in. Our options right now are a) hire an employee to help reduce the load or b) remain small and stagnant because Google could cut the cord any minute.

I'm trying like hell to find alternate traffic streams like Adwords, Facebook, Mobile, etc, but I can't quite figure out how to make a reasonable profit with them. So for now I guess I just have to take the risk. No guts, no glory.

If this was a publicly traded company that bought links and had a site with a shoddy user experience, I'd get the argument that there's significant risk.

In the history of Google there are very few, if any case studies of sites that A) did the right thing B) were the best result that ended up losing significant traffic. Most of it is "yeah, we were doing this wrong, but it's still not fair..". In Rap Genius' case, they clearly did something wrong.

The only exception to this rule is if Google moves in on the vertical and steals traffic, which is possible with coupons - but there's a significant difference between completely destroying a vertical and impeding on it somewhat. Google has moved in on the airline tickets vertical but the businesses there are still doing just fine (Expedia, Priceline), as shown by their considerable growth in the last year+. It seems likely that if Google moved in on this vertical, it would be a similar impact.

In this article, there's little to describe what RetailMeNot does wrong. Yes, they are somewhat of a parasite, but in many ways they do these businesses a service by lowering purchase friction by creating an elegant experience for users. If their UX was substandard, it's possible customers would get lost and never complete their purchase - this happens time and time again, which is why CRO professionals can get hundreds of thousands of dollars to optimize a conversion funnel. In many ways, RetailMeNot is a piece of that elegant conversion funnel, so they are rewarded as an extremely profitable affiliate for that reason.

Disclaimer: I haven't taken the time to evaluate their link profile so there's a possibility that they are doing something risky there, but from an on-page perspective, they are the best result.

"When a consumer executes a purchase on a retailer’s website as a result of a performance marketing program, most performance marketing conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked by the consumer prior to that purchase."

I thought that often it was the earliest click (subject to an expiry), and that multi-touch attribution was becoming more common: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2282207/embracing-the-re...

If you're a CJ affiliate, please share any insight.

As described the vast majority of sales being generated are from people that have already started the purchasing process on your website and are looking for a discount coupon. Without having any hard numbers from my experience in ecommerce I think the majority of these people are going to purchase anyway, regardless of whether they find a coupon. There is a good chance the people actively trying to find a coupon have already checked out the competition and are relatively satisfied with your offering.

Price discrimination can be good but I don't think throwing away 10% to companies like this is the way to do it. I also dislike how they end up ranking really highly on a lot of your brand terms where I'd prefer my business, pages we control and 3rd party reviews to rank. Ideally you could get a coupon page of your own to rank well for the "x coupon" search to get the same effect without having to give up the 10% or whatever the commission level is.

So for Google, this is a great way for them to monetize their SEO SERPs. Invest in a company like this, get them to maintain clean SEO practices, reward them with obscenely dominant rankings against their competitors and then get the return from the IPO.

After IPO, wean off their reliance on Google with a push into mobile, as Google doesn't need to protect their investment any more and could disappear at any moment...

Pretty obvious how/why they have such dominant SEO results across practically all their markets, including arguably the second biggest market, the UK, if you ask me.

Am I missing something here? This is cookie stuffing, essentially! There's nothing white-hat about this at all.

I was sitting outside Macy's using Coupons.com "local search" and got no Macy's coupons. Oh but they are a "featured coupon!" You have to use that category to find them. Bleah.

All the coupon sites are limited. But RetailMeNot isn't overtly lame. They don't pretend to do things they can't. Local search works. The mobile apps work. They stay away from stuff that would not work on mobile and that burdens the user. They suck less. That's often a winning strategy.

I've been able to 5x our organic coupon traffic over the last year but you reach a certain point where the top competitor is just too entrenched. I definitely worry about this being a parasitic practice and Google has been favoring brands more and more in the SERPs. I'm surprised they are getting such a high multiple on their revenue considering the risks.

Does anyone compile an estimate for how much revenue Google is directly responsible for generating for other sites via referrals off their search engine? I'd be curious to know how that compares to their take via AdWords and AdSense.

I would be more afraid of changes in attribution than getting slapped by Google.

Google wouldn't do that? Not so sure these days.

I also think that Google picks by hand the first few sites for top categories.