You can achieve more with your online business in Vietnam by understanding the common features of the country's affiliate channel and the preferences of the local audience.

Last week, we looked at how a younger and more educated population in Vietnam is causing its internet penetration to soar in recent years, giving rise to booming affiliate networks in the country.

As you might expect, the ads and creative on Vietnamese affiliate sites do not differ much from Western affiliate sites, in that local Vietnamese affiliates use primarily text and banner links, with little in the way of innovation (not much dynamic rich media [DRM] or video linking, for example).

There are, however, some subtle but important differences. For example, one of the common features of banner advertising in Vietnam is the tendency to use frames to hold the banners on either side of the content, in the middle of the page. As the reader continues reading an article further down the page, the same banners remain in view. That is to say, as you scroll down the article, the banners that you saw at the top of the page remain the same as those at the bottom of the page. In general, you don't find this kind of technique employed by most Western affiliate sites, but it is very common in Vietnam.

Another characteristic is the amount of information on Vietnamese affiliate sites, which is often substantial and well organised. This is in contrast to, say, a Thai affiliate site which, while content rich, tends to throw ads and content all together in a huge mishmash that looks as if it has no organisational logic whatsoever! Thais, in contrast to the Vietnamese, tend to have a high tolerance for an abundance of information that screams at you visually from every corner -- that doesn't fly in Vietnam.

Google AdSense is also common on many affiliate sites. But the presence of Google AdSense is not necessarily for well thought-out strategic reasons. As one ad campaign manager who works full time in the Vietnamese market puts it, "That's just damn laziness, the affiliate channel is so new in Vietnam that people get confused by the need to take the simplest steps, such as accessing a link and ensuring the tracking code is intact. Most of my Vietnamese affiliates are tempted to take the course of least resistance." He goes on to pose the question: "If you are new to this industry, and you have the choice between putting up the ads yourself and having the ads populate your site automatically in Vietnamese, based solely on your content -- what would you choose?"

In fact, the situation is not nearly so pessimistic for the affiliate channel as this observer would have us believe. A Syntryx analysis shows a number of affiliate sites are working very actively in Vietnam and generating substantial commissions. It is nonetheless a battle that we will see played out in Vietnam -- AdSense versus affiliate marketing, and certainly merchants will need to make it easy for affiliates to advertise for them if they want to be successful within the affiliate channel.

As you would suspect, the overwhelming majority of the country's affiliate sites are in Vietnamese. But the Vietnamese referring pages need to go to landing pages that are language competent. In the case of Vietnamese sites referring traffic to English landing pages, the Syntryx data show that conversion rates drop radically for these merchants. Vietnamese-language landing pages are absolutely vital for this market, and the cultural nuances of colour, look and feel, and general cultural appropriateness -- in addition to the use of appropriate language -- needs to be carefully researched before any attempt is made to penetrate this market.

Cost-per-lead (CPL) is where the money is in Vietnam. In general, the practice of buying online is still very new for the Vietnamese. However, with the young, increasingly affluent and tech savvy population that is characteristic of the "New Vietnam", this is likely to change.

Nevertheless, the money is mostly in CPL at the moment. Take the Lucky Pacific network, the most active affiliate network in the country. Every of its programmes running in Vietnam is based on clicks for ads that reward affiliates for forms filled in, or some other kind of information-gathering action.

If you study the characteristics of the Asian affiliate networks more carefully, you will see that the presence of CPL or lead generation over other forms of performance-based marketing (mainly cost-per-sale) is a powerful theme that runs through most of the regions, with the possible exceptions of Japan and Korea. Certainly, Vietnam will become a microcosm of the Asia region in this important respect.

Chris Sanderson is director of AMWSO. Read full bio.

William Hamson-Wong is director of Asian marketing for AMWSO. Read full bio.