Posts Tagged "cost per action"

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics 56: Interviewing Greg Hoffman & Ian Fernando

Posted on Aug 17, 2011 in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing Fanatics, Conferences & Networking |

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!

You’ve come to love it – our interviews!  This is one last interview with speakers at upcoming Affiliate Summit East 2011 at the New York Hilton in New York City.  Today we’re chatting with Greg Hoffman & Ian Fernando about their origins in affiliate marketing & their panel “Industry Clash: Balancing CPS & CPA Marketing”. They’ll give us a bit of insight into this peace-making panel. In in this episode we discuss:

• We chat a bit about Greg & Ian’s fellow panelists Jason Rubacky and Logan Thompson.
• The stereotypes CPS marketers have about CPA marketers.
• The vast differences between the way the “older” CPS marketers party and the way “younger” CPA marketers party.
• Bridging the gap and learning from the other side of the coin.
• Put Greg & Ian’s panel on your Affiliate Summit Schedule! Sunday, August 21st from 11:00 am – 12:00 pm in the Gramercy Suite.
• Eric guarantees he’ll have a front row seat.  No heckling!
• Show some love to today’s co-host Eric Nagel! Blog: EricNagel.com & Twitter: @esnagel

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!

Performance Marketing Leadership Summit 2011 Recap

Posted on Apr 21, 2011 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

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.
• 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.

Cribbed Content for May 29th

Posted on May 29, 2009 in Rambles | 5 comments

At first glance when starting to compile this week’s Cribbed Content, it didn’t look like much was going on.  My Google Reader was kind of light, as were the other scoops and news coming across my desk.  But then when I really started to dig, I found some cool stuff!  Including a really easy Twitter Contest from DIY SEO to win a Kindle!

• Last week I reported that Affiliate Summit East 2009 was all sold out of booths.  They’re now all sold out of Meet Market tables as well, the first time for them that they’ve sold out of exhibitor space before Early Bird pricing was done.  Congrats to the ASE09 team!
• Speaking of Affiliate Summit, co-founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins were in Dallas at the Inbound Marketing Summit speaking about monetizing blogs.  Missy was kind enough to share their slides from the presentation.
• Affiliate network ShareASale is toying with an Affiliate API and has released the initial sections for use.
• Google recently changed their trademarks policy in regards to AdWords paid search ads.  Search Engine Land wrote an article on how to protect your brand under Google’s new trademark policy, and Geno Prussakov also wrote an article on how this applies to affiliate marketing.
• Apparently Google mucked around with PageRank… AGAIN… and devalued Twitter profiles.  Which is fine with me since I realized awhile back my twitter page was  PR9 when this here blog was only PR2 (currently my twitter page is a PR3).  What really irritated me was that, out of nowhere, this blog went down to PR0 out of nowhere with no real changes other than a redesign (that, if anything, should have HELPED SEO).  So in my opinion Google can shove with with their PageRank racket anyway.  Anyway, Andy Beard explains a few things about the change.
• I’ve seen a certain someone from a certain CPA network tweeting a lot in the last two days about making money from Twitter with CPA ads.  That seems to be ALL this person is tweeting about and it’s getting on my anti-spam nerves.  So instead of calling this person out, I’ll be passive-aggressive and just pass on this article for everyone: 10 Irritating Mistakes that People Make with Twitter. Thanks Nikki Pilkington for a good article right when I was thinking about it!
• I’m a big fan of to-do lists.  There’s been some talk about different apps recently (I was turned onto Toodledoo and love its integration with iGoogle homepage).  Nate Moller wrote a great article on why to-do lists are key to entrepreneur success that any slightly unmotivated or scattered entrepreneur should read!

ad:tech San Francisco: Performance Marketing – Getting the Most from Your Marketing Dollar in a Tough Economy

Posted on May 4, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

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.

Affsum Session: Reaching Aggressive Goals without Monetary Incentives

Posted on Jan 23, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

Date: Monday, January 12th, 2009.  Session 4c, 11:30am.
Session Description:  This session outlines how to best manage affiliate relationships to reach major revenue goals without additional budget. Tactics focus on non-monetary incentives to increase affiliate performance. The panel consisted of:

• Chris Kramer, Co-Founder & Media Director, NETexponent (Moderator)
• Darren Eilers, Founder & CEO, DME Media, LLC
• David Lewis, CEO & Founder, Cashbaq
• Kevin Smith, Affiliate Marketing and Business Development Manager, Brown Shoe Co. – Shoes.com

OK, this session wasn’t what I expected it to be.  It seemed more like a session on how to treat or work well with super affiliates, which I’ve attended before and got kind of the same tips from.  Maybe I perceived this wrong, but I expected some tactics on how to creatively promote affiliate programs without money, but it turned out to be how to fire up your top affiliates, and still mentioned money.

Bullet Point Review!

• The majority of affiliates say they make most their money from less than 5% of the merchants they promote.
• David says: compensation does matter.  We’re willing to promote products and brands with zero compensation up front.
• David says: if you know our business, we’ll talk to you.  Without knowing that basic fact, all of the other things you can say don’t matter.
• Darren says, to managers: relationships matter.  Keep in mind that everyone does things differently.  They do expect a better relationship than any other affiliate.
• Darren says, to fellow affiliates: You can’t expect a merchant to call you back unless they have an incentive to.  So the affiliate has to sell you on themselves.  Pitch you.
• David says: the compensation has to sometimes be different for loyalty sites.  Get datafeeds cleaned up.  Better sales will come from that and the creativity affiliates use with datafeeds.
• Darren acknowledges: we know that it’s sometimes an uphill battle for merchants to get the datafeeds fixed by their IT departments, but if the affiliate doesn’t get the datafeed that’s clean, they have to go with someone else.
• David notes that he’s personally working hard to create a standard taxonomy that everyone uses for datafeeds to make that portion of the industry more uniform.
• The key is keeping it updated.
• Chris noted that the number 1 thing affiliates wanted from them are custom landing pages.  The second was product feeds, third promotions and incentives, and fourth was coupon code offers.
• Kevin wants affiliates to know that they can get help when they need it.  The more information we as merchants can give the affiliate, the more money they make, more sales for us.
• David warns that the conversions really have to be solid.  It’s better for the merchant and the affiliate.
• Kevin includes information about the products and company in their newsletter.  He tosses out as much information as he can that will help the affiliates.
• It’s hit & miss in terms of the merchant giving information to the affiliate in terms of what they’ll use.
• A lot of the money they make is reinvested.
• David uses an analogy of a bobsled team for the merchant.  They’re the head of the team and just need the push from the merchant to get rolling down the track.
• Darren advises that you take your top affiliates and let them help you test landing pages.  He’s usually willing to work with merchants that ask for that kind of help since he’ll ultimately receive the benefit.
• Chris warns though that a lot of affiliates don’t want to be guinea pigs and how often are you willing to take the risk?  Darren responded that it depended on how long he’s worked with and trusts the merchant.  He doesn’t mind being a guinea pig if it means he can make more money.
• David warned against merchants making knee-jerk reactions.  Use the data and make decisions based on that.
• Darren says if you know them and spend the time to get to know their business and form a partnership, merchants are usually more willing to give them inside data to help them out.
• Are there three different teams compensated separately?  Many merchants have the SEO team, SEM team, and Affiliate team.  If the program is run correctly the affiliates help all three teams.  it’s all of our sales, not my sales or your sales.
• Kevin says more affiliates looking at CPM than CPA – with the economy there’s not as much money out there for CPA offers anymore since they don’t return like sales do.
• David relayed something he read that said 73,000 stores will close in the US this year (estimate).  If someone comes to them and says they’re cutting their commissions, it’s a mistake but OK, they’ll look at your competitors more.  Someone has something similar and will boldly raise their commissions to stand out.
• Darren warns that before you lower commissions across the board, take a look at your top affiliates.  Weed them out and tier your structure.  Maybe increase compensation for the top affiliates and lower it for the others.
• David says to reward those meeting your goals.
• Kevin notes that they did that and it worked great.
• Kevin adds not to be knee-jerk reactionary.  Try to look at a monthly picture.  For them the 2nd Saturday of every month is their big Saturday Sale, and affiliates know that.  Being transparent helps them stand out.  Allow them to lean on the merchant.  Brand equity is very important.
• Kevin has seen more volume with coupons and loyalty sites.
• Chris shares more poll results amongst affiliates: What matters most before joining?  1. Commissions 2. Product being sold 3. Brand 4. Tracking platform 5. Terms and conditions 6. EPC 7. Affiliate manager/outsourced program managers 8. Return days 9. Action occurrences
• Darren says to look at your affiliate manager very closely to analyze the relationship.  When the AM gets to know what the affiliate does, they can customize incentives specifically for them.
• Darren also says to give your top affiliates your true top performing keywords.
• Chris asks if a big brand can get away with paying less commissions.  Darren says they can if their conversion rates are higher.
• Chris asks how much competitive research do you do?  Darren says they know what the published commission rate is.  They also look at the EPC but that doesn’t really tell them too much.
• David notes that they’re big and kind of already have the big brands, so they ask different questions before they join a new program.  Are you making our life easy?  Do you have an 88×31 non-animated gif?  Do you link to the homepage or deep link?  Is it something we think our members will see as quality?  Does it look like it’ll convert?
• Darren says he’ll try to get a hold of the affiliate manager to work with them to improve their site, but there’s only so much they can do so sometimes it’s hard to do that.
• Kevin creates banners on a daily basis.  They’ll accommodate different sizes if asked.
• Although David says he doesn’t look at banners.  Darren advises that they have to meet the challenges of Google changing, so they need to change.  Banners have been around so long and they’re surprised that there’s still so much emphasis on banners. They do their own creative because it’s faster and they know what will work with their visitors.  If the merchant won’t allow that, it’ll hurt them.  They’ll work within their guidelines for sure.

There was a lot of good information and wasn’t much time for a Q&A session, so there was none.  Despite it not being what I was going in for, it was still a good session and dropped some handy tips from some top affiliates.  There was also some good data points in the slides, so here they are for your viewing pleasure as well:

Online Marketing Glossary: Cost per Action

Posted on Jun 17, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing |

Cost per Action (CPA):

• The cost metric for each time a commissionable action takes place.

CPA is a blanket term that describes most of the affiliate structure. There are more specific models with their own descriptions that fall under this term.

____
Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine