Analytics Glossary: Psychographics
Psychographics:
- Data used to build customer segments based on attitudes, values, beliefs and opinions as opposed to factual characteristics such as age and gender.
Many lead generation tools and services lump psychographics in with all of their demographics. Keep a keen eye out to watch for this both in separate categories and lumped in. It’s a valuable asset to have when deciding who to market very targeted products to. Avoid the egg on your face that could occur if you try to sell heavy metal music to conservative church-goers!
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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.
Analytics Glossary: Parameters
Parameters:
- These are located in the URL immediately after a question mark and followed by an equal sign and a return value, known as name=value. Parameters indicate to a database what page a user is viewing. For example, www.mysite.com/product/widget.aspx?=1234. Here, widget is the product and 1234 is the product identifier.
This comes up a lot when using search functions embedded in websites. Be sure if you’re going to share the link with a customer or through a bulk email campaign to copy everything after the question mark. Sometimes if you just paste a link into an email or document and rely on the auto hyper link feature to add the link, it won’t add anything after the question mark. Be sure to use the menus of the program to insert the correct URL into the hyper link.
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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.
Analytics Glossary: Conversion Funnel
Conversion Funnel:
- The series of steps that move a visitor towards a specified conversion event, such as an order or registration sign up. Funnels vary for every site, but best practice is to limit the depth a user must engage to convert.
A more common term for this is the ordering process. Here at PsPrint that’s what we usually say to describe the steps a consumer has to go through to place an order. It’s always a good idea to review your conversion funnel every year or so to make sure that the UI (user interface) is easy to understand and isn’t garbled with useless information or unnecessary steps. Remember that the easier it is to convert, the more likely the conversion is.
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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.
Day 3 of asw08 – Part 2, Fin!
Of course the best way to keep readers is to create a sense of anticipation in one’s blog, yet I assure you that was not my intention in waiting until today to finish my recap of Day 3. The Nevada dryness and, I come to find, altitude was not conducive to my attempts to fight off a bug that’s been going around here. So I returned home from ASW08 yesterday, slept ALL day, and already feel better just being back here on the California coast with my 20 ft above sea level home and cool air.
So where was I? Somewhere around Asymmetric Warfare. This was a great panel about affiliate fraud, something I’m not entirely familiar with how to combat. I picked up some great tips and can’t wait to receive a copy of the presentation from moderator Graham MacRobie. There was a TON of information, such as tips on how to prevent fraud, a list of countries to be careful of applications from (these countries are REALLY easy to create offshore corporations at so it could be fraudulent), and information on typo-squatting, tasting, and kiting (not sure if I spelled that right).
Some highlights I noted:
- Know your partners & reach out to them. Staying in touch will help weed out fraud.
- Check the WHOIS contact info for the affiliate domain name – will help ID fraud but also give you a chance to see if they have any other websites that your program would be a good fit for.
- Do what you can to own your own typo’d websites and redirect to your official website to avoid typosquatting (costly, but probably the best way to protect your brand).
- Don’t assume fraud will go unnoticed.
- Be wary of affiliates using redirects – not always a sign of fraud but worth a second look.
- www.torproject.org – proxy site to see the affiliates website as the rest of the world sees it, just in case they have an IP rule on you so it looks legit to the manager.
- Well thought out rules indicate vigilance against fraud & help to protect against it.
- Networks can help protect you because they trade info about globally bad affiliates and provide a first line of defense against fraud before the affiliate even gets to you.
- An audience member asked if it’s better to let everyone in or to be really selective, and the panelists advised to go for an approach right in the middle. Give the new affiliates a chance to succeed as lots have potential they just need to gain experience. Reach out to the little guy & try to help rather than cutting them from your program when they don’t perform.
- A good way to stay in touch with affiliates without being annoying to them is to just get an agreement with them about how often they want to be contacted. One call per month can be much more effective than a weekly blanket email.
- Understand how your company deals with transactional fraud before setting a policy that will affect paying your affiliates.
- If you’re really concerned, there are a lot of local task forces on police departments revolving around cyber-crime that can give you more information.
After that last session I packed up our materials for shipment back to Oakland and called it a day. I was still feeling ill, so I didn’t make it down to the un-keynote or the road rally. Hopefully when we go back to Boston for Affiliate Summit East 2008, I’ll be able to report more in-depth!
Read MoreAnalytics Glossary: Demographics
Demographics:
- The physical characteristics of human populations and segments of populations often used to identify consumer markets. Demographics can include information such as age, gender, marital status, education or geographic location
Whenever you do a targeted marketing campaign, demographics are key! It’s a much better use of your time, efforts, paper, and budget to send your message to consumers who will be the most likely and interested in buying what you’re selling. You don’t want waste precious resources sending custom hot tub installation flyers to people in apartment buildings.
Many mailing list providers (e.g. PsPrint, USAData, etc) offer many demographic distinctions to choose from when renting a mailing list to market to. It’s also important to differentiate if you’re aiming for consumers at large or other businesses as it makes a huge difference in what kind of list you spend your money on.
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Glossary Definition From Website Magazine, February 2008.
Day 3 Affiliate Summit – Part 1
Still sick, I managed to get as much sleep as I could and skipped breakfast in favor of that goal. Once I slept as much as I could without skipping more than just some food, I headed down for the Super Affiliate Strategies that Work panel. I was interested to see how this differed from the What Super Affiliates Want panel I attended at the last Affiliate Summit in Miami.
It was a great panel, and I hear it was standing room only. Rock on – my sick self managed to score a seat otherwise I never would have lasted in there. It was a great panel by Kris Jones of Pepperjam, Amit Mehta, Zac Johnson, and John Chow. It was mostly Q&A from the audience with a little bit of moderation from Kris, so lots of good stuff. Someone actually blatantly asked about black hat tactics…to which he received a pretty unbiased response from John that he was just better off in the long run to stick with whitehat tactics if he wants to be a success overall. Which makes sense to me. Since this session was Q&A style it was pretty different from last year’s panel I already mentioned, which is good for me. I’d hate to get a lot of duplicate content. Some great points I picked up from the session are:
- Amit looks for a niche where there’s a lot of search traffic and builds a site with content & landing pages. Optimizes through SEO.
- Keep working on content & adding new things.
- Relevant content around affiliate links help the buyer make a decision.
- The long tail search terms are more stable for long term success.
- There’s an incredible risk for affiliates using black hat tactics. There’s an incredible amount of opportunity in white hat channels so you’re better off keeping your nose clean.
- John noticed that people were scraping his RSS feed and he started by sending cease & desist orders and trying to go after the culprits, but when the culprits became too many he just started throwing ads into the RSS and continued to make money off them.
- Develop your business system & that’s something that no one can just copy off of you.
- Amit uses an umbrella domain then makes sub domains for the more specialized, high traffic stuff or registers an alias and redirects the traffic.
- Social networks (resources, Facebook applications) are what’s hot right now.
- Yahoo & MSN seem to convert better for whatever reason than Google. Google users are more savvy.
- Spaces between 3 & 5 are the sweet spot in search results. Constantly bidding for the Sponsored Results box may not necessarily be worth your time.
- Day parting (bidding lower during the night) can increase ROI
- Continually split test everything.
- Have a great relationship with your affiliate manager and that will help you to leverage to increase commission rates or added bonuses.
- Amit advocates his strategy of bidding on hundreds of keywords and spread the sales between them, while Kris advocated creating a narrower ad campaign that’s very clearly related to your content.
- Some good programs & tips:
- Winner Alert: everyday it sends you a report with what’s winning
- Efficient PPC
- AdWords Editor
Overall it was a great session, and in case I missed anything J. Botter live blogged from there as well.
After lunch and some hours staffing our booth, I headed to the Asymmetric Warfare: Battling Fraudulent Affiliates session. More on that later.
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