ad:tech San Francisco: Advanced Affiliate Optimization
Session Description: Affiliate marketing best practices are not “one size fits all.” Optimization tactics that work for online retailers could prove disastrous for subscription marketers (and vice versa). This session examines popular affiliate strategies from both the retail and subscription marketing perspectives to identify how both types of marketers can grow sales/subs, manage quality, protect their brand and ultimately get the most from this channel. Learn from Peter Figueredo’s, Co-Founder and Brainstorm Chaser of Netx, 11 years of experience running successful affiliate and search campaigns for large retail and subscription advertisers.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Peter Figueredo, Founding Partner and Brainstorm Chaser, Netx (Moderator)
- Vinny Lingham, CEO, Yola.com
And you thought I was done posing about ad:tech? Pshaw! I really enjoyed this session because it gave me great actionable items to help improve and better understand the For Me To Coupon leads program I manage!
Bullet Point Review!
- Retail Programs
- Product focused
- Paradox of choice
- New customers
- Short term ROI
- Minimize returns
- Subscription/Service Programs
- Service focused
- Fear of commitment
- Wants qualified customers
- Long term ROI
- Minimize churn
- Advanced Techniques for Retail
- Product driven: Shopping comparison, coupon, loyalty (Peter suggested brands create orphan coupon page to rank higher than affiliates on brand + coupon).
- Paradox of choice: feed optimization, advanced creative.
- New customers: new customer bounty, recruit new & growing affiliates.
- Short term ROI: offers to increase AOV, only pay more to get more (don’t just give higher commissions, negotiate what kind of placement you’re getting).
- Minimize returns: commissions on shipped, reverse returns.
- Advanced Techniques for Subscription
- Service focused: review sites, vertical content sites, blogs.
- Fear of commitment: affiliate education (one sheets, webinars, networking, etc), consumer education.
- Qualified customers: manage consumer incentives, clear consumer messaging (you know the lifetime value, so you can offer a higher bounty).
- Long term ROI: sites with a loyal user base, track retention by affiliate.
- Minimize churn: retention based commissions, retention rate bonus.
- Key takeaways
- Retail: optimize your feed.
- Subscription: optimize on retention.
- Subscription: educate your affiliates.
- Yola Case Study
- Focus on purchasing actions, not sign ups.
- Run promos for multiple year subscriptions.
- Test different discounts on promos.
- Keep promos fresh by varying messaging & theme, keep discounts constant.
- Align creatives with affiliate pay our structure.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Drive engagement with top tier affiliates. Look at the research. Look at how they prefer to be engaged & engage them that way.- Do you provide materials an influencing person can take to a meeting to convince the decision maker? One sheet, stats, other educational materials.
ad:tech San Francisco: Affiliate Marketing – The Big Challenges
Session Description: As the affiliate marketing industry grows, it continues to encounter challenges on multiple fronts. One front burner issue for brands and advertisers remains affiliate legislation. From New York to California to Texas, the nuances of tax collection in each state are still being worked out and, in many cases, litigated. With this vital issue still in flux, what are brands and marketers doing to move forward? How can advertisers keep track of the state-by-state laws, and how can they develop strategies for today and for the future? Trademark legislation is also a key issue for affiliate marketing and we’ll explore how brands walk the fine line between protecting their brand and getting wider exposure. Finally, we’ll tackle how affiliate legislation in various states will impact all online retailers.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Carolyn Tang Kmet, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Groupon (Moderator)
- Angel Djambazov, OPM, KEEN Footwear
- Rebecca Madigan, Executive Director, Performance Marketing Association
- Brian Looney, Senior Director of Business Development, CitizenHawk, Inc.
- Seana Montgomery, Senior Paralegal, McAfee
Impression comment
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate marketing has become a legitimate marketing channel.
- Ad Tax, aka Amazon Tax
- Lots of spin going on from the pro side.
- No physical presence – not required to collect sales tax.
- Reality is that there’s no money involved
- What does it mean for merchants?
- If you have an affiliate program in states where this passes, you must now collect sales tax for all purchases made into the state, Or
- Terminate affiliates (obviously the feared option).
- What happens when it passes?
- 25-35% loss of income to affiliates.
- Lay offs, downsizing, some companies may close entirely.
- People move out-of-state.
- Income tax decreases.
- Legislation has been beaten back 25 times.
- Passed in 5 states.
- 8 states in play in 2011.
- Brand Protection is Important.
- Typosquatting relies on typos in URLs.
- Bad spelling is as prevalent as the common cold.
- Typing too fast, fat fingers, old keyboards that stick, small keyboards on mobile devices.
- More than 20% of all Internet traffic is typed in.
- 15-30% of the time the URLs are misspelled.
- Companies often classify this as a legal issue instead of a marketing or traffic issue.
- Defending yourself against a typosquatter is expensive when you get lawyers involved.
- URDP – uniform domain name dispute resolution policy.
- Trademark infringement considered anything confusingly similar. Typos don’t count but content does. $1500 to file a complaint in court.
- You’re not filing against the domain name, you’re filing against the domain owners.
- Turn trademark enforcement into a profit center.
- Laws are international, but more enforceable on .com & .net.
- Marketing channels are business tools. Each should be employed for a specific purpose.
- You’re obligated to police your brand – your trademark can get canceled if you don’t prove you’re actively policing infringements.
- Learning from KEEN Footwear.
- Be sure your affiliates understand what affiliate marketing is.
- Affiliate publisher joined, tried selling his own brand of shoes thinking affiliate meant an endorsement similarly to the definition of “affiliate” in the TV world. Eventually showed up at the corporate offices demanding Keen CEO do more to leverage their partnership in trying to sell is shoe related product.
- Not all publishers understand what the channel is. Educate them.
- Be sure to clearly define all legal aspects.
- 20% of your affiliates are driving the majority of the revenue.
- What can you do to measure impact of amazon tax:
- Monitor legislation in states crucial to your success.
- Join the PMA to help.
- Stay informed through geekcast.fm, ReveNews.com, PMA blog.
- Create a contingency plans with a different payment or advertising model to not loose these valuable partners.
- Garbage can bills popping up including more junk trying to get out-of-state retailers to collect sales tax. Just says “don’t do business in our state”.
ad:tech San Francisco: Affiliate Marketing Innovations for Brands and Advertisers
Session Description: Affiliate marketers are the most adept at harnessing new technologies in their marketing efforts. As a result, the industry has evolved faster than most marketing channels. During the past decade, affiliate marketing has grown from basic text links and banner ads to geo-targeted mobile campaigns and social media swarms. In this session, we’ll delve into how brands can leverage their affiliate channel to multiply reach and the number of consumer touch points. What market factors have driven the rapid growth so far in affiliate marketing? Has the increase been consumer-driven or technology-driven? And what sort of changes will come next? Join us as we find out.
This session took place Wednesday, April 13, 2011. The speakers:
- Carolyn Tang Kmet, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Groupon (Moderator)
- J.J. McCarthy, Sr. Manager Internet Marketing, eBay
- Alicia Navarro, Co-Founder & CEO, Skimlinks
This was a great session. It gave some insight on the beginnings of Affiliate Marketing that even I didn’t know. It was also chock full of interesting tidbits and insight gained from eBay & Skimlinks’ experiences.
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate marketing really started in 1886 with Avon ladies.
- People didn’t realize sites were interactive at the dawn of the internet.
- Consumers are responsive to free and discounted offer.
- Approving of animation.
- Consumers lost interest in flashy stuff, needed to find relevance.
- Groupon basing the ads not on the content, but the consumers location.
- Consumers felt their privacy invaded by contextual ads.
- Key to delivering content is relevance to individual consumer.
- Recognize where services are needed.
- RFID helped Walmart improved out of stock by 16% and improved restock efficiency by 60%.
- Staples reduced out of stock by 21%.
- Harrahs used RFID in chips – knew where to send cocktail waitresses or pit bosses according to the concentration of where the chips were located on the casino floor.
- Market fragmentation: broadcast to the individual instead of to the masses.
- Groupon has added incentives for users to share deals via Facebook and Twitter.
- Affiliate marketing has become device agnostic.
- We’re constantly wired.
- Convergence used go just be a phone, but now it’s a PDA, camera, Internet, television, & more.
- eBay been actively marketing in affiliate space since 2000.
- eBay partner network launched 2008.
- >100k websites actively driving traffic.
- Unlike all other marketing channels, success in affiliate marketing is predicated on competing for affiliates mind share & loyalty.
- Success is a function of reputation, ease of use, & earnings f(ree).
- Invest significantly in reputation.
- Being successful isn’t always about tech innovation, it’s also about cultural innovation.
- QCP: quality click pricing. Volume isn’t a proxy for value. Would rather have quality. De-averages the CPC.
- Build world class tools.
- Do-it-Yourself Affiliate Marketing is more costly than the revenue.
- Integrate with the affiliate networks.
- Apply to individual merchant programs.
- Create deep link syntax.
- Hard code into site.
- Maintain links.
- Access multiple reporting interfaces.
- Optimize.
- Publishers don’t think of themselves as marketers, so appeal to them with that angle.
- Perhaps affiliate marketing should be affiliate linkage.
- The closer funnel (converto.com)
What #ASE11 Sessions I’m Voting For
Let the games begin! Voting has opened up for Affiliate Summit East 2011. While some people have not been happy with this voting system, I think it evens the playing field nicely. As well, it clears any conspiracy theories about how sessions are chosen.
Before I begin, I will say I have a horse in this game. I’ve submitted a panel, The Future of Coupons in Affiliate Marketing, for consideration. If picked, I’ll be moderating this panel with industry coupon veterans Mike Allen (Shopping-Bargains.com), Connie Berg (FlamingoWorld.com), Carolyn Tang Kmet (Groupon.com), and Kim Rowley (ShoppingBookmarks.com). Please take a moment to register, confirm, then vote for our panel!
Okay, that being said, these are the panels I’m voting for. All of them have very intelligent speakers, well thought out ideas, and will offer merchants and affiliates great insight into the topics.
- It’s Not Your Mother’s Affiliate Program
- Creatives Deliver Success
- Evolution of Local Search
- Do-Not-Track? Not-So-Fast
- Killing the Affiliate Nexus Tax Dead!
- Got an Idea? Make it a Reality.
- 10 Questions for a Prospective Affiliate Manager
- A World Without Cookie Tracking
- How to Convince Online Shoppers You’re Real
- Learn to Create a Likeworthy Facebook Page
- Social Media in Niche Markets
- Merchant ABCs – Launching a New Merchant Program
- How to Avoid FTC Scrutiny in Advertising
- Affiliate Improv!
- Are Your Affiliates Adding Value?
Performance Marketing Leadership Summit 2011 Recap
Once again, on the eve of ad:tech SF, OfferVault put on another afternoon Performance Marketing Leadership Summit. Last year’s topic was compliance, whereas this year’s summit focused on growth, transparency, and improving CPA networks everywhere. The 2011 summit was graciously sponsored by CPA Detective, LashBack, LinkTrust, EFFECTUS, & HasOffers.
While I didn’t explicitly learn much myself from this summit as it was definitely geared towards CPA networks, there was a lot of good information for those folks I’d like to share with you. Here are some highlights of information I took from the afternoon’s speakers:
Darin Namken
Founder & President of Bulldog Media Group, Inc.
- Why Diversify?
- Create value & enhance margins.
- Stability & structural positioning.
- Do you have the resources?
- Management.
- Technology (in house, other).
- Cash Flow.
- Infrastructure.
- You have to do something special in the market.
- You may need to diversify just to survive.
- Where to diversify?
- Verticals/products.
- Do you own your own products?
- Do you have your own technology?
- Internal development.
- Partnership.
- Strategic alliances.
- Joint ventures.
- Verticals/products.
- You’ve got to have a good database, not just emails but information about these people. That’s where the real value is.
- You’ve got to be able to work well with others.
- Reciprocating traffic works well.
- Pay day loans have higher traffic, as do prepaid cards and rewards programs.
- You must have a stable strategy to survive.
- What direction to diversify?
- Analyze, evaluate, and plan strategy.
- Future areas of diversification:
- Major players of influence (Google, Facebook, Apple, Groupon, others).
- What’s the next generation?
- What are the trends? (Chase them or plan for them).
- The economy has created more reasons to look farther into true performance. Who’s checking out your backside?
- Who’s aiming for what current teens will be looking for?
- Spending marketing dollars doesn’t mean a lot of you don’t know what the ROI on that money is.
Panel 1: Diversification Strategies
Darin Namken (Bulldog Media Group, Inc.), Chad French (PeerFly), James Murphy (BurstDirect), Bob Regular (Kitara Media), & Curtis Fullmer (AdKnowledge)
- Is it enough to just be a network?
- There’s not much barrier of entry.
- The relationships are what set the networks apart from each other.
- It’s more about conversion & yield than the type of offers. it starts with the offer but it can’t overcome traffic sources.
- It’ll be tough if you don’t have the right mix of affiliates and offers (e.g. Gaming affiliates but pet product offers).
- Understand where the publishers are getting their traffic from.
- Most networks don’t have a good handle of where the traffic is coming from. Which leads to the bigger question – as long as you’re not dealing with risque sites, does it even matter?
- Go with what you know. There’s no one path. Go from there and then expand.
- What are you solving? Are you solving anything? If you want to grow, you need to ask “What are you solving?” or are you just opportunistic? If you’re not solving something the relationship can’t last very long. It’s all a supporting mechanism to fixing the problem.
- Remember that you don’t have to be all things to all people. Build your identity and have a solid foundation to build it upon.
- Where is a bad idea to diversify into? Chasing trends too heavily is dangerous, like with re-bills. Focusing on a trend too much means you’ll go down when the trends go down. Don’t act like an affiliate. Haves multiple eggs in multiple baskets. Facebook fan page marketing is tricky these days, hard incentives tricky,
- What traffic is ok? All traffic is fine. You want everything in between. All traffic has a value, but it needs to be transparent. Understand the transparency of where your offers are running. If you know that, then you can calibrate your offer to suit the traffic being driven. Take those factors into consideration & you’ll get better yield. Bad traffic isn’t necessarily fraud, just mismatched traffic to the offer. There’s a place for incentives, but it takes focus, time and understanding. What you ultimately have is a user with no intent & no interest in your end offer. If you don’t understand how to create the intent, stay far far away.
- What do you need for resources & focus to pull a true diversification off? Make sure your core competency is solid to support the side stuff.
- How do you measure if something is worth getting into? In our industry you don’t have to be 1st, there’s still a lot of room. How does it fit into your core strategy? Evaluate what’s the dollar value you could potentially build that business or division to? I there a growing market there? If the answer to any of those things is no, consider moving on. Don’t chase, identify if it’ll help what you do. If you can’t do it very well & be superior at it, run away. Know when to cut your losses. (i.e. affilicert, affiliate certification that OfferVault was attempting to do). Be mature as a company & don’t look at it as a monetary thing.
- How do you diversify the traffic flow to different kinds of offers in one network? Make sure to understand the performance metrics, it becomes an education thing, be transparent, educate the affiliates on the performance of other offers. Just ask if they have traffic for those kinds of offers. How many times can you tell your publishers to “trust me!”? If they had an answer, they’d probably not share it lol. Get them to believe in the offer & why it’ll work for them. Look at the whole marketing funnel. Don’t kill your credibility by pushing something you’re not sure will work. Educate them that it’s in their best interest as well for them to diversify because advertisers can back out on offers in the blink of an eye for various reasons.
- Should you be a network without an in-house media team? It helps. The easiest way to get knowledge on traffic and performance is it do it yourself.
- Do you consider who your ultimate client is? Advertiser or publisher? Does that come into play on how you diversify? Consider the end user, if they don’t want to participate in these offers, the advertisers wont have the money to write the checks. There needs to be a balance. If you work direct with the merchants, you can look at things as more of a partnership with affiliates.
- Do you have issues where an advertiser is asking for full transparency (double verify) and how do you work with that? You give it to them. if they demand a certain quality and you want to work with them, you have to give it to them & meet that quality or the alarm bells start ringing. The money flows downhill. The increase in transparency is coming to more verticals and more industries. It goes back to relationships, if you build these good relationships then transparency is second nature. Why hide? It’s a two way street.
- Do many publishers say they won’t run 3rd party ad tags & want to hard code everything? If they’re that resistant, you have to ask yourself if they’re worth the time to work with or career to.
- International a great way to diversify? Is it? It’s key to future growth, but you’ve got to be prepared for the challenges of fraud, compliance, policy issues. Canada & UK fairly easy to get into, but do it in a very stepped, focused way. Consider your offers if they appropriate for international traffic as is, are there any TOAs that prohibit the international traffic, etc. Do you have the resources for that kind of expansion.
- What industry trend or issue keeps you up at night? There’s a constant battle with shady publishers & compliance. Regulation from the government. How are government departments interpreting the regulations. The government of Google & Facebook & their control over the Internet & their policy changes. The inability to integrate technologies & lack of standards.
Ryan Pamplin
CEO, Ryactive
- Patented technology, open sources, propriety
- Apparently affiliate marketing is patented (Patent# US 6804660) filed in 2001, granted in 2004. Probably without merit, companies getting sued. Mid level networks (ShareASale, Blue Phoenix).
- Going to trial 4/17/2012.
- ShareASale has filed a counter suit against essociates trying to invalidate the patent.
- In house, proprietary tracking solution instead of licensing direct track or LinkTrust or another vendor. All the networks mostly with propriety tech have much higher network revenue (i.e. Neverblue) They all started with their own solutions.
- Benefits of in house platform:
- Less reliance upon third party tech products.
- Increased value for investors and shareholders.
- Ability to quickly adapt to changes in the industry.
- Data portability and security.
- More control over your user experience.
- Differentiates your network from the thousands of other networks all using identical software.
- Benefits of an outsourced platform:
- Quick time to market with lower up front costs.
- Software that continues to be developed and improved on their dime.
- Predictable start-up and operating costs.
- Is Open Source the future?
- Tracking202/Prosper202 is open source, and became the industry standard tracking software for affiliates.
- WordPress is open sources and 13% of websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
- Stop reinventing the wheel!
- Every network is reinventing or licensing the wheel.
- Instead, a group of networks could sponsor the creation of open source software.
- A network is more than software, it’s about people, offers, and relationships.
- Imagine if the resources going into development of the dozens of proprietary networks and the monthly fees for licensing were allocated to building a single universal platform.
- Noteworthy tech solutions:
- If you can reduce the size of your landing pages, offers and/or redirects you will make more money.
- Cloud is virtually infinite scalability.
- No need to overbuild gory intransigent with cloud.
- Software required to automatically scale.
- Pay just for what you use.
- Increases your risk of downturn, not necessarily so with applications that don’t need scalability.
- Dedicated, fine grain control over hardware.
- Dedicated server is likely to be more reliable.
- Model is proven and relied upon but 90% of Fortune 500 companies have it.
- Wouldn’t put whole business on cloud.
- ServerBeach (offshoot of rack space).
- Backup your servers everyday.
- Create scripts to automatically upload from your servers backups to your local FTP email you files, and/or another website.
- Your data is the core of your business, and if you’re not already you need to take measures to ensure you keep it safe.
- Auto backup with Tivoli.
- WordPress is free and open sources, with tens of thousands of templates available. It’s secured and trusted by millions with extreme flexibility. Websites can be developed in hours not weeks.
- Joomla powers 1 in 37 websites on the internet, not many of which are blogs. It’s slightly more complicated to learn, but great for split testing with thousands of themes available.
- Drupal powers millions of sites, including MTV, Lifetime Television, Yahoo, and more higher volume sites. It’s considered the best framework but is most complicated to learn of the open source CMS out there.
- Braintree is a great eCommerce solution that powers sites like LivingSocial, Bright Cove, 37 Signals, Open Table, and more. It’s easy to integrate.
- Visual website optimizer is $49 per month but worth it; it’s like Google Website Optimizer on steroids.
- Be sure to include trust symbols on your website – 100% satisfaction guaranteed logo, privacy seal, SSL certificate, Verisign, McAfee, etc. Avoid less trustworthy things, like GoDaddy right now.
Panel 2: Technology Insights
Ryan Pamplin (Ryactive), Matt Frary (SmarterChaos.com). Lucas Brown (HasOffers), Beto Paredes (Offered Launch Media, LLC), & Jay Moore (BigDeal.com)
- HasOffers goal is more people in the industry. They’re doing a lot to increase data redundancy.
- If you can build something better than anyone else, go for it, but if not, don’t bother. It’s not about if you do it in house or outsource it, it’s do I have go do it in house?
- How can you innovate on a closed platform if you can’t integrate a new technology? Open API is the suggested way.
- HasOffers rather on the spot.
- Innovation is driven by need.
- Cookies vs. Server side calls? You’ve got to make sure you don’t violate Apples rules. Cookies are becoming outdated. It’s inevitable that cookies will be going away. There’s also an element of educating people on the new tracking methods.
- Larger networks are also looking at the tracking solutions with the working group.
- The banks are guilty of screwing the whole merchant services thing up. A lot are just white label stuff.
- By removing inefficiencies, within the existing infrastructures, you’re going go make more money.
- You may find more of the advertisers having moe control on their programs mandated by the networks.
- Make sure your advertisers know how to do things, like tracking a sub ID. What’s lacking is a true integration. The education for the advertisers on the technology that’s available is also lacking.
- It’s not about the technology sometimes, it’s about the willingness to apply it.
- Its not unreasonable to want to know who you’re doing business with. The way things are with affiliates being in the dark is not going go persist. People are going to be changing the way things are done in favor of transparency.
- All industry panels lead to transparency. We all talk about it, but who does it? Advertisers do it, and unfortunately they’re going around the networks and collapsing the value chain. They’re the ones on the hook with the government.
- If the networks used their tech for good, instead of just protecting their own interests, then there’s more money for everyone.
- It’s the business ethics behind the technology that’s going go drive the industry.
- Any tech you’re excited about or think it’s a game changer? Blue Cava (allows you to ID a user all over the net without cookies or server side tracking, browser fingerprinting with ip). Any tech tracking people across devices or without cookies, across platforms, etc. Excited about online to offline to online tracking like pay per call. Anything that’s going go move towards a more sustainable affiliate marketing industry.
- Privacy is dead, if you’re putting all your info out there on Facebook & whatnot, FTC requires everyone offer a way to opt out. Overall it’s going to improve the consumer experience. Theres a lot of opportunities to give people a chance to opt in. The more important privacy issues surrounding ID theft are being addressed.
- Full transparency isn’t necessarily the way, but we want to know who the affiliate is generally speaking & have a way to contact them.
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 53: Interviewing Yanni Kayani
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A couple of hyper-caffeinated affiliate marketers (Mike Buechele) and (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
Shady’s back. Tell your friends! Mike’s back after a podcasting sabbatical to focus on his consulting business. Today we’re keeping that chatter to a minimum and speaking with Naeem “Yanni” Kayani, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Adknowledge. In in this episode we discuss:
- The relevant targeting with email marketing that AdKnowledge can help with.
- The fascinating stuff that Facebook and the other email service providers are doing these days to give users more control.
- Yanni will be speaking at The Power of eMarketing Conference in San Francisco April 19th & 20th. The format will be less presentation, more conversation.
- His fellow panelists are Daniel Kuperman of Aprix Solutions and John Janetos of iPost.
Find us on Twitter: @AMF_Podcast, @MikeBuechele & @TrishaLyn. Like us on Facebook! Be old fashioned and just leave us a comment!
Special thanks to GeekCast.fm for hosting Affiliate Marketing Fanatics!
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