Session Description: How can marketers get the most from their budgets in a difficult economic climate?  We’ll explore how to attain more from a smaller budget via performance marketing with practical, tactical solutions.  We’ll look at the pros and cons of allocating dollars to performance marketing and we’ll discuss what technological innovations are coming to the performance marketing space that will maximize budgets and minimize challenges.

This session took place Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The speakers:

• Neil Strother, Analyst, Forrester Research (Moderator)
• Peter Bordes, CEO, MediaTrust
• Steve Schaffer, Founder and CEO, Vertive
• Jarvis Mak, Senior VP, Global Research and Insights Director, Havas Digital
• Kelly Powers, Senior Manager, Customer Acquisition, Zazzle

This session was definitely geared towards those marketing and advertising professionals that are not already in the performance marketing game.  It was very insightful to watch from that point of view in mind.

Bullet Point Review!

• Neil asks “What is performance marketing?”
  • Paying only for results, whether those results are leads, referrals, a percentage of the sale.  Advertisers get to determine how much they pay.
• You can leverage your affiliates to assist with your paid search efforts.
• You need to have good landing pages.
• What’s the real value of the actions being driven?
• What you’re paying for is marketing.
• Affiliates have more incentive to drive more qualified traffic and customers.
• Affiliates drive higher conversions, average orders.
• There’s three types of advertising, CPM, CPC, and CPA.
• Merchants only want to pay one touch point for the sale.
• There’s a mentality that affiliates are frowned upon; CEOs will be wary of the methods but CFOs will be excited about the value and efficiency of the channel.
• AM is very data driven – more money is shifted towards traceable marketing.
• Executives need to understand affiliate marketing; the whole industry is misunderstood.
• Industry is starting to get the data out and break through the black box and lack of transparency.
• Peter briefly explained what’s going on with the #advertisingtax to the crowd.
• A couple of states have been able to stop the #advertisingtax but it’s moving fast.
• Fraud has grown exponentially, especially in lead gen.
• Paying for leads welcomes fraud in som,e industries, ask yourself if you can pay for a different action.
• A major player will soon announce a ranking system (Peter couldn’t divulge who).

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Is there a metric to show brand safety?  No.  It’d be nice to take the focus off the brand.
• Yes you need brand awareness, but that’s not going to drive a sale.  The best offer is.
• It’s not infinitely scalable; you can always throw more money at search, etc. but throwing more money at affiliate marketing doesn’t work because the core is the relationships.
• Amazing how much more some merchants pay on other marketing methods and channels over affiliate marketing.
• Advertisers need to do a better job at attribution to track the sales to the correct channels.
• Feel free to launch new products with affiliate marketing; it has worked in the past when done right.
• What are some practical takeaways?
  • Continue to optimized
  • Work on attribution
  • Look at marketing channels as a holistic portfolio.
  • Focus on better, fewer networks and don’t spread your program too think.

The Q&A portion wasn’t so much a traditional Q&A as it was a case study like discussion.  The panel really wanted to help with real examples, and only one gentleman in consumer finance was willing to ask for assistance.

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