• Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Contents

HP Affiliate Program + Commission Rates

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Contents

We’re very excited to announce Geniuslink’s auto-affiliation support for the HP affiliate program (US and Canada). The Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) is a globally known and respected company with over 80 years of innovation. HP Inc. (the personal computer and printing spin-off from HP Enterprise), ranks 58 in the 2018 Fortune 500 and has a product catalog of over 40,000 products in the US storefront.

HP is notorious for a wide range of consumer, business, and personal computing systems (including laptops, desktops, all-in-ones), accessories (such as bags, cases, mice, monitors) and, printing systems (inkjet, laserjet, Designjet, sprocket printers, and even 3D printers).

With the completion of our HP US and HP CA affiliate program integrations, it’s now easier than ever to seamlessly generate a full HP affiliate link directly from their storefront using Geniuslink.

Overview

Stanford graduates, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, initially produced a line of electronic test and measurement equipment and got their first big break in 1938 with a contract from Walt Disney to help with the hugely successful animated film Fantasia. In proper tech startup fashion, the company officially started in 1939, in a garage, which is now an official California Historical Landmark, and is marked as the “Birthplace of ‘Silicon Valley.’”

The company has had a storied history over the last 80 plus years with many acquisitions and divestitures as it innovated in a wide variety of technology-related fields.

Looking online, HP.com is currently positioned as the 531st most popular website in the world, and 444th most popular in the US. According to SimilarWeb, HP.com ranks 6th in the Computers Electronics And Technology > Consumer Electronics category, behind Samsung, Apple, and Best Buy but ahead of Newegg, Sony, and BH Photo Video.

Like many global brands, HP has built out, and optimized storefronts, around the world to cater to regional audiences. Similar to the Amazon affiliate program, HP also has storefront-specific affiliate programs where it’s necessary to use the affiliate program that matches the storefront from which you made the referral.

Unlike Amazon, these affiliate programs use independent affiliate networks to facilitate the tracking, reporting, and payouts, as well as the management of their programs. Further, the regional affiliate programs for HP are split across multiple affiliate networks. For the US and Canada HP affiliate programs, the focus of this blog, the affiliate network is AWIN. For the European HP affiliate programs, which include affiliate programs for the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden, HP uses Tradedoubler to manage their affiliate programs.

Our focus today is on the US and Canada affiliate programs that are managed by AWIN.

From our research quantifying the affiliate landscape, we estimated the size of the HP affiliate program at approximately 97th of the top 500 affiliate programs with a market share of approximately 0.04%.

HP US and Canada Affiliate Program Rates and Cookie Windows
Just how much do the HP US and HP Canada affiliate programs pay? They are currently offering a baseline commission rate of 1% and a staggering 30-day cookie window. However, if you classify as a “Content” or “Influencer” typer of partner (which is essentially everyone that uses Geniuslink!), then you are at a 5% baseline! Further, an insider secret is that even higher commissions rates can be negotiated directly with HP which make the HP affiliate program incredibly lucrative!

In comparison, the Amazon.com affiliate program has both the “PC” and “PC Component” categories that are currently at 2.5% commission rates and a much shorter 24-hour cookie window.

According to Skimlinks, HP Store affiliate program paid an average of $0.12 per click (our analysis shows Amazon at about $0.05 EPC on average), however, Sovrn Commerce has a significantly lower reported EPC of $0.006. The average conversion rate is reported at 0.65% with the average basket size being just over $600 according to Skimlinks.

It’s important to note that the affiliate program is set up to track sales on store.hp.com, www8.hp.com and www.omen.com, however, all ink, toner, printheads & paper is not eligible for commissions.

There is a good handful of things that make the US and Canada HP affiliate programs unique, especially in comparison to Amazon.

These include:

  • Access! The HP affiliate programs have a dedicated affiliate manager at HP and an account management team at AWIN that are there specifically to help you. To prove it, we’ve been given permission to share the direct line to the account management team at AWIN that handles the HP US affiliate program — us-hp@awin.com (let them know we said hi!).
  • The AWIN-based HP affiliate programs are also unique in that there are flexible payment options, including Cost Per Action (CPA), Cost Per Click (CPC), and flat fee.
  • On a similar note, you may also be eligible for an “influence” payment where a sale may not be directly attributed to you but your content and links did ultimately play a roll in helping the sale go through.
  • AWIN and HP support cross-device tracking.
  • HP also does a loaner program (like B&H Photo Video do with their affiliate program) where review units are made available to affiliate partners for a period of time to help you produce related content.

HP Affiliate Program Signup or Login

You can sign up for the HP affiliate programs, via AWIN, with the following links:

US – https://ui.awin.com/publisher-signup/us/awin/step1?advertiser=7168
CA – https://ui.awin.com/publisher-signup/us/awin/step1?advertiser=7169

However, to access your existing AWIN account for the HP affiliate programs you’ll want to login via the AWIN dashboard which is available here: https://ui.awin.com/idp/us/awin/login.

HP + Geo-Fragmentation

Geo-fragmentation is the term we use to define the challenges affiliate publishes and creators have with monetizing referrals to region-specific storefronts of a brand or when shoppers have to navigate to the correct brand/retailer’s storefront in order to be able to buy in their local language, currency and receive fast and affordable shipping.

The HP affiliate program, just like Amazon’s Associates program, is the definition of having geo-fragmentation.

From the user-experience side (ensuring foreign shoppers are seamlessly directed to the correct product in their local storefront to easily buy) and the monetization angle (earning commissions from referrals regardless of the storefront they use), the affiliate program has significant challenges (which are exactly the things that Geniuslink fixes!).

As seen by clicking on the “Country/Region” link at the bottom of the HP website, there are over 90 different storefronts, each optimized and localized for a specific audience to help make their shopping experience as smooth as possible.

 

From the monetization perspective, HP also faces the same challenges where you need to be signed up for, and use, the affiliate programs that are specific to a storefront. Further, these affiliate programs span multiple affiliate networks (US and Canada on AWIN, the European programs on Tradedoubler). This makes monetizing international traffic a bit of a challenge.

But fear not, it’s these exact challenges that Geniuslink exists.

It’s also an opportunity for you, with a little work, to increase your conversion rates and revenue. More details on how to overcome these challenges using Advanced geni.us links below.

Terms & Conditions

The way that AWIN lays out the terms and conditions of the affiliate programs on its network is great. They move it from endless scrolling of legalese (looking at you Amazon!) to checklists of common behaviors and clearly articulate what is and isn’t okay to do with their program. You can see it for yourself here (HP US affiliate program termsHP Canada affiliate program terms). We’ve pulled out some of our highlights below:

Playing arbitrage using Search Engine Marketing or doing direct Pay Per Click ads to promote products inside a retailer’s store via their affiliate program is often an area where special arrangements need to be made beforehand and HP’s program is no different.
An interesting call out that we don’t regularly see is that a partial return of an order will void the commissions for the whole order.
The HP affiliate program is open to all types of publishers except those focused around Behavioural Retargeting and Media Brokers.
Finally, it’s important to note that bulk orders above $10,000 are not eligible for commission (so focusing on targeting school districts might not be a good fit!). Additionally, orders from call centers are also excluded from earning commissions.

HP + Geniuslink

While the US and Canada HP affiliate programs offer a range of link creation tools via the AWIN dashboard, it can still be a bit of a process to take a product link from the HP store and convert it into a fully functioning affiliate link.

We are excited to announce, however, that any HP US (https://store.hp.com/us/en/…) or HP Canada (https://www8.hp.com/ca/en/…) product link can now be used in a geni.us link and you can be sure that your clicks will be sent to the correct destination with a properly formatted affiliate tracking link.

We call this process “Auto affiliation” and it’s very simple to set up. You simply need to grab your Publisher ID from your AWIN Affiliate dashboard and then drop it into the Geniuslink Affiliate tool. Once we have your Publisher ID all of your geni.us links for HP will start using the tracking info appropriate for your affiliate account.

Please note our support of Sovrn Commerce (f/k/a VigLink) and Skimlinks also enables you to monetize HP links through either of these monetization services. There are multiple benefits of using Sovrn Commerce or Skimlinks but signing up directly for the HP affiliate programs and adding your Publisher ID directly into Geniuslink allows you to keep 100% of your commissions earned from the program (vs. the ~ 75% that is paid out when using an affiliate aggregator). In addition, working with the HP affiliate program directly via AWIN gives you access to potentially higher baseline rates, product review units for select partners, and the opportunity to get those influence payments we discussed above.
Excited to try out using Geniuslink with the HP affiliate programs? We have a few suggestions if you are up for a challenge and want to experiment with augmenting your Amazon affiliate links.

Choice Pages

We believe that curation and choice are good for the consumer and have built out Choice Pages to enable you to promote a single product but offer multiple destinations for the consumer to choose from (and you’ll monetize the sale either way). You can see an example here — geni.us/HPTangoPrinter — and we bet you’ll see a boost in overall conversions and total commissions. More info on how to set up a Choice Page can be found in our Knowledge Base.

To help aid in the quick and efficient setup of a Choice Page, the HP (US) affiliate program is now supported with our Suggestions feature. With this time-saver feature, any Amazon link that you drop into the Geniuslink dashboard will be searched for across 80+ retailers, including HP, to see if the exact same product exists in their product catalog. You can then automatically add those destinations to your Choice Page with a click of a button (and with the auto-affiliation mentioned earlier, it will be an affiliate link).

Further, you can also type the product name or a key phrase, hit enter, and we’ll search for the product across the HP product catalog as well.

With a Choice Page, you can place Amazon and HP affiliate links next to each other in a clean, easy to buy way to further optimize your affiliate revenue and better support the buying preferences of your diverse audience. This keeps you from having to make an “either/or” decision about using HP instead of Amazon and from our research this actually helps increase your affiliate earnings!

A/B Split Links

The Amazon.com Associates program is often a mainstay way to earn commissions from US-based clicks, though we’d encourage you to run an experiment if it’s the best option for your audience and recommended products. The A/B Split Test links provide a platform to closely track between two or more affiliate programs.

Using an A/B Split Test link allows you to compare the performance of Amazon’s affiliate program to the HP affiliate program in case you wanted to evaluate replacing your Amazon affiliate links with another affiliate program.

Conclusion

We roll out direct affiliate support for new affiliate programs every month, we hope you enjoy the recently added support for the HP US and HP Canada affiliate programs managed via AWIN.

We look forward to hearing your feedback about using the iHerb Affiliate Program and Geniuslink.

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Author

  • Jesse Lakes

    Jesse is a Native Montanan and the co-founder and CEO of Geniuslink - or, as he likes to say, head cheerleader. Before Jesse co-founded Geniuslink, he was a whitewater rafting guide, worked at a sushi restaurant, a skate/snowboard shop, was a professional student, and then became the first Global Manager at Apple for the iTunes Affiliate Program.

Related posts