internet marketing tools and tips

Internet marketing tips and tools

• Making the affiliate Long Tail wag : part two

  In part one we looked at how and why the engagement of an affiliate programme’s ‘Long Tail’ is pertinent to advertisers today. This second part will look at specific techniques and ‘quick wins’ which have proven successful for other advertisers.Long Tail optimisation  Much about Long Tail optimisation is based on assumptions. One of the most widely-held is that it is just not possible because of the small sales volumes. But this would be to hold the Long Tail to the same volume standards as the top performers, which is clearly unrealistic. Long Tail engagement is a lot like SEO. One of the characteristics of the Long Tail is its lack of short-term influence. These affiliates are slower burners and therefore require longer-term commitment. While the performance of top affiliates will be characterised by peaks and troughs (marking the point where their newsletters are sent, for instance) the Long Tail will not show as pronounced a trend. How then can advertisers devise a strategy to engage the Long Tail? They might start by questioning what kind of Long Tail they want. An advertiser may consider some existing affiliates unsuitable and therefore want to effectively recruit a Long Tail of better quality partners. Most brands will find that recruitment is not an issue but relevance is. To find the best, some advertisers use their PR teams, who monitor what is said about their brand online while others ask potential resellers to start as affiliates. Similarly, advertisers whose market is seasonal may recruit for peak periods rather than expecting Long Tail affiliates to be active all year round. More generally with affiliate recruitment, it is worth remembering that the Long Tail of an affiliate programme will be the Long Tail of Google. The amount of traffic a site generates is susceptible to its rankings on Google, so advertisers can start their recruitment efforts by looking at what sites rank for their product terms. Secondly, many advertisers I have spoken to agree that re-categorising or segmenting the Long Tail is critical to the success of any engagement strategy. Different advertisers do this in different ways. One breaks the Long Tail into mid and lower tier affiliates, another separates them according to whether they are on or off brand in how they are represented. A third is more granular, considering whether an affiliate performs above or below the programme average for key metrics like new customers, churn and AOVs.  Each of these are indicators of quality beyond simple volume of sales. If sales volume provides a poor comparison to the top performers, how could an advertiser measure the success of the Long Tail? Their aspirations need to be realistic: One advertiser wanted Long Tail affiliates to reach an average of half the programme’s conversion rates. Another focused not on sales but CTRs and the relevance of the placement they received onsite against their competitors. A third looked at month-on-month sales growth from the Long Tail, rather than the proportion of overall sales it accounted for. Time is a more neutral benchmark than the proportion of sales. Top performers are more campaign-responsive and so produce more pronounced peaks, obscuring Long Tail performance if looked at from the perspective of the total sales they contribute. So a key success factor with Long Tail engagement is to treat the Long Tail differently to the top performers. But what quick wins do they respond best to? When asked in the 2011 Econsultancy Census why they did not promote programmes they had joined, affiliates’ most common answer was poor quality linking methods. Copy and creative is a particular need of Long Tail sites, so flexibility on this – perhaps with co-branded banners or landing pages– is greatly appreciated. Sending content-based sites products to review (and not asking for them back!) encourages them to write about this, whilst at the same time giving them a stake in promoting the brand. Prizes need not cost much, and gift vouchers on an advertiser’s products further solidify a personal connection. One advertiser runs a ‘Publisher of the Month’ award offering a £50 voucher to the best submission of a URL showing how they are promoted. Cash incentives are sometimes ineffective, but one advertiser offers a £10 cash bonus on an affiliate’s first sale. All newly-joined or inactive affiliates receive an email offering £10 against their ‘next’ (rather than ‘first’) sale, signed by the Affiliate Manager to give a personal touch. Customer-facing incentives combat the problem of good quality traffic not converting. One advertiser targets affiliates with high CTRs but low conversions with an exclusive code directing to a co-branded landing page. Conversely, it is better to avoid offering commission increases to Long Tail affiliates. These tend only to work for those more experienced in producing sales; those not presently producing volume are unlikely to be motivated by one. The final quick win is to add a recruitment page to the site to explain how the relationship works for good-quality sites looking for ways to monetise their traffic, and direct to the network where they can apply to join. More ideas on the topic of Long Tail engagement can be found in my presentation at last year’s a4u Expo here. - 8 days ago

• Companies boosting digital marketing budgets - new report

  Companies are investing more money in digital marketing and related technology as they seek to benefit from the ever growing digital economy, according to research published today. Econsultancy's Marketing Budgets 2012 Report, published by Econsultancy in association with Experian Marketing Services, shows increasing levels of investment across a range of digital channels and disciplines. According to the research, based on a survey of more than 500 companies and agencies, more than two-thirds (68%) are increasing their digital budgets for 2012, compared to 45% of companies increasing overall marketing budgets but only 16% saying the same for 'traditional' marketing budgets. Three-quarters (74%) of companies are investing more in digital marketing technology this year, up from 67% who expressed similar intent a year ago.  The research also shows an encouraging commitment to address the skills gap within many companies, which we have previously described as 'a ticking digital time bomb'. More than half (56%) of companies say they will recruit more people into their digital teams this year, up from 52% a year ago.  Despite this progress, 'lack of staff' is still cited as one of the most significant barriers preventing further investment in digital marketing.  The chart below shows the proportion of companies planning increased investment for specific areas of digital, with more than half of organisations planning to boost budgets in almost every area. (Groupon investors should look away now.) What best describes your budget plans for the following digital marketing channels or disciplines in 2012? Commenting on the findings, Mark Zablan, Managing Director, Experian Marketing Services, UK & Ireland, said:   While spend is increasing, it is little surprise that much of the dynamic growth has been in companies trying to understand, interpret and measure customer behaviour within this increasingly complex marketing ecosystem. The key to success is turning huge quantities of data into insights which show behaviour not only across channels, devices and platforms, but which also span both the online and offline worlds and drive customer engagement. Marketers are therefore investing in the tools, technology and people to allow them to deliver greater returns on their campaigns and present insight and results back to the business in a meaningful and incisive way.   The report also looks at levels of investment in offline channels such as printed media and direct mail. Television is the only 'traditional' marketing channel where investment is holding steady rather than declining. The research shows significant investment in mobile, as businesses seek to engage with the vast numbers of people now consuming information on devices such as smartphones and tablets.   Zablan added:  While social networks may dominate media headlines, and are gaining ever-increasing shares of marketing budgets, strong performances by channels such as mobile and TV highlight the vital importance of a multichannel strategy.   - 9 days ago

• Q&A: Ben Edelman of Harvard on adware & affiliate commission fraud

  It has been a while since the topic of adware and conjugated affiliate commission fraud has been brought up on digital marketing blogs. It may appear that the problem is gone. However, this is by no means so. Today I am thrilled to bring you a Q&A with Ben Edelman, a Harvard Business School-based expert on affiliate commission fraud.Ben, what, in your opinion, are the top areas in which merchants fall victim of affiliate commission fraud? I’ve been tracking a variety of problems. Spyware and adware can invoke a merchant’s affiliate links when a user is already at the merchant’s site, claiming commission on traffic the merchant would otherwise get for free. Cookie-stuffers can drop cookies when a user is merely browsing the web, again, claiming commission the merchant shouldn’t have to pay. Typosquatters wait for a user to mistype a merchant’s domain, then send the user where the user wanted to go, but charge the merchant for the referral (even though the typosquatting domain registration was illegal to begin with). The techniques vary, but the key tactic is the same i.e. finding a way to get between the user and the merchant, in order to claim commission that wasn’t actually earned. I know you believe adware to be one of the worst types of affiliate marketing abuses. Why? And can you quickly explain how things work here? Spyware and adware are particularly pernicious because they offer such effective targeting. If you want to find a thousand customers about to buy new Dell laptops, where are you going to find them? To a rogue affiliate, spyware and adware offer an answer: just wait for the user to browse to the Dell web site, or even through to the checkout page, and then pop open the affiliate link then. To a merchant that’s not thinking about this problem, the traffic can look just great. Conversion rates can be high. Average order size also good. Click-through rate can be superb. But it’s all a ruse since it's traffic the merchant would have gotten for free. You've been researching and writing on affiliate adware and spyware for nearly a decade. How have things changed in the course of the past few years? One major change over the last few years is the rise of complacency. Folks think "the adware mess is over," and in some respects that’s right, certainly there are no more mega-adware vendors collecting millions and planning IPOs. Yet plenty of users are still infected. And keeping a program clean requires ongoing diligence. Indeed, as fraudsters have gotten trickier, (recognizing known IPs, using history sniffing to detect folks who might be trying to flesh them out, and so on) the risks have actually grown. Prohibiting adware, BHOs and other parasites in the affiliate program's Terms & Conditions agreement is only the first step. What can merchants do to effectively police affiliate compliance with such a clause? One crucial first step is to combine tough T&C’s with genuine enforcement. T&C’s alone won’t do the job as rogue affiliates are inclined to try their luck and see what happens. So then the question is where enforcement comes from. Some affiliate program managers can do this, and some networks offer the service too. Savvy affiliate managers can even do it themselves, especially if they examine traffic stats and referer headers to try to get a sense of who may be up to no good. But complacency isn’t a sensible choice. It’s also important to discuss this problem with affiliate networks. The standard contracts between merchants and networks disavow a network’s responsibility for these shenanigans. I understand a network’s hesitance to promise good behavior by its affiliates, but suppose a network is on actual notice that a given affiliate is a cheating. Perhaps the network has received impeccable proof of that cheating. Can the network continue to send that affiliate’s traffic to other merchants? Continue to tell the other merchants that that affiliate is active and in good standing? Savvy merchants should demand better, and should insist that networks use best efforts to block bad affiliates, and that networks act on information in their possession. Give us a good reason why etailers and affiliate managers should attend your keynote at Affiliate Management Days. There’s real money at stake here. For example, the 2010 indictment of Shawn Hogan alleges that he was the single largest affiliate in eBay's affiliate program in 2006-2007, collecting more than $15m over 18 months. (eBay and the US Attorney’s Office now allege he was cookie-stuffing all along.) Of course, most affiliate programs are far smaller than eBay's, yielding a correspondingly lower opportunity for fraud. But for mid-sized merchants, there are typically large savings in catching and ejecting rule-breakers. That means more commission available for legitimate affiliates who do their best and follow the rules. Merchants and good affiliates should both be pushing to put an end to this kind of fraud. - 10 days ago

• Groupon acquires social commerce company Mertado

  Deals giant Groupon has acquired Mertado, a social shopping company that helps customers discover new products.  This is the second talent-based acquisition the company has made in the past month, as it announced the purchase of ‘stealth’ start-up Campfire Labs just a few weeks ago - which was yet to launch.According to reports, Groupon was primarily interested in Mertado’s expertise in the social commerce space, including the launch of Mertado TV, which combined video content with products. The concept is similar to French Connection’s YouTique ‘store’, which uses YouTube’s annotation feature alongside clips of a stylist showing viewers how to wear the brand’s latest collection. Mertado wrote on its site that the company was no longer accepting new registrations and will officially shut down on Feb 28, while customers are currently being redirected to Groupon Goods. This is the company’s answer to Amazon, acting as an online retail site for physical products.  Today, we're pleased to announce that we are continuing this journey by becoming a part of the Groupon family. Groupon has been a pioneer in social commerce in many ways, and when we started talking with them, it became extremely clear that they shared the same set of values as us." Groupon’s shaky financial footing continues to fluctuate. Its shares fell below the company’s initial public offering price at the beginning of this month, and public confidence in the deals industry is dropping as people turn to trusted brands for ‘daily deals’ direct from the horse’s mouth. O2's Priority Moments is a great example of this. This talent land grab feels like the slow and steady rise of panic; an attempt to bring smart people in that might be able to change the path of a sinking ship before its too late. We’ve said before that 2012 will be the year the deals industry either matures or dies, and for now, the jury is still out on which side Groupon will fall. - 2 weeks ago

• Making the affiliate Long Tail wag : part one

  This is the first of two articles about how to engage and optimise the Long Tail of your affiliate programme. Whilst the term has its origins in statistical sciences as early as 1946, it was popularised 60 years later with the publication of Chris Anderson’s book of the same name. So how does this apply to affiliate marketing?The Long Tail In his words a ‘Long Tail’ utilises “the efficient economics of online retail to aggregate a large inventory of relatively low sellers.”. For offline bricks-and-mortar stores it is not feasible to stock low-selling items due to shelf space; they instead stock the big-sellers, and unsurprisingly that is what people buy because that is what is available. However, things are different online. Without the problem of shelf space, Amazon for instance, can sell everything. Anderson notes that this creates the effect of inexhaustible demand even at the end of the Long Tail: even the 500,000th best selling product still sells in the thousands, and the Long Tail never reaches zero. Thus there is a market for almost everything. So how does this apply to affiliate marketing? The ‘Long Tail’ of an affiliate programme is collective name for the sites that share the same distribution curve Anderson noted with Amazon, but of affiliates rather than products. It is the affiliates themselves that form the Long Tail, the multitude of sites outside the top performers that sell in small volumes individually but large volumes collectively. Every affiliate programme has a Long Tail if defined solely as those outside the top 10 or 20, but as the concept implies that endless choice available online creates unlimited demand, affiliates can help advertisers to cater for this demand. It is through this natural affinity that affiliate networks are able to target relevant partners for advertisers’ programmes. In the affiliate world, the Long Tail should be able to cater to all audiences. Just as a retailer captures more of the market by selling more products, so an affiliate programme can capture more potential customers with more affiliates. Search, for example, is the predominant way to find products online, but advertisers are unlikely to cover Long Tail keywords that are as niche as their Long Tail of affiliates: they are simply unable to bid on as many products as they sell. However, their affiliates may rank naturally for these terms. Advertisers can thus use their affiliate Long Tails to effectively expand their search budgets. Volumes from the Long Tail are potentially huge. One telecoms advertiser saw its Long Tail grow over the last four years to generate collectively as many sales as a top 10 affiliate. However, Long Tail optimisation is a long-term strategy requiring investments of time, money and resource. Moving from theory to practice, we find advertisers constantly asking questions about their affiliate programmes which indicate that, practically, engaging this Long Tail is tricky. Indeed, their questions are symptomatic of problems with Long Tail engagement: ‘Why are there not more affiliates referring sales?’; ‘Why are we so reliant on a few top players?’; ‘Why can I not just cull non-performers and bring my top affiliates in-house?’ What is the extent of this problem? Studying the growth in commissions paid to affiliates by Affiliate Window over the last four years shows that the top 200 (on a network of 75,000+) account for the vast majority of all commissions paid. At the same time, commissions to those outside the top 200 are decreasing rather than following the same growth trajectory of total network pay-outs, with the gap between commissions to the top 200 affiliates and those from the Long Tail having grown in 2011 compared to 2010. So is there an affiliate divide? Amongst Affiliate Window’s top 20 advertisers, the average programme has 2,716 affiliates, with 16% driving at least one sale, and 47% at least one click. In the period September 2010-2011, the top 10 revenue-drivers contribute an average of 76% of total sales. The gap between sale and click-drivers therefore suggests that the problem is one of conversion rather than engagement. Many affiliates are engaging enough to get a click, justifying their value to advertisers, but cannot convert. Perhaps the issue is one of context over content: whether or not users are in the right frame of mind to buy when they are browsing such sites. Of course, each advertiser may define their Long Tail differently, but it's useful to make a three-way distinction not just between the top 10 and the Long Tail, but between the Long Tail and the potentially larger number of inactive affiliates. The Long Tail in this sense would still drive sales or click-throughs, just in smaller numbers. What is important is the extent to which there is a divide between the top 10 and everyone else. Distinguishing between the Long Tail and inactive affiliates helps address this by aiming to raise the game not just of the Long Tail but also raising inactive affiliates into the Long Tail. Having got a measure of the extent of the issue, in the next part we will look practically at how Long Tail engagement and optimisation can be achieved. - 3 weeks ago