Day 2 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
Monday January 18th
Day 2 of Affiliate Summit for me started off a bit rocky. I was far from hung over, but I awoke with the familiar feeling of an impending migraine. I decided that, despite the morning keynote by Dr. Robert Cialdini not being recorded, I’d have to skip it in favor of some more quiet time before the storm to dispel the headache on the horizon. Luckily it worked and I went down just at the end of the keynote to catch up with some folks to get the cliff’s notes version of the keynote and to find my first morning appointment. Luckily, the staff were handing out little cheat sheet cards with the main bullet points from the keynote, which I got and took note of.
I mentioned I had a meeting. I learned a valuable lesson at this conference – don’t just research what the person you’re meeting with does, research what they look like! We’d decided to meet in outside the theater after the keynote, and man was that a bad idea. A sea of unfamiliar faces and I have no idea what this guy looks like! I hang around for about 15 minutes, trying to find someone who looks like they’re also looking for someone, to no avail. I check my watch and decide that I have to move on in order to get to the session I wanted to go to. So now I know that next time I have to meet with someone, I’m either going to meet them somewhere not so busy or snoop on their Facebook profile to see what they look like!
My first session of the day was Product Datafeeds: The Next Level, which by nature was dry, but sill interesting. Scott Jangro did a great job as moderator and I did my best as a student. I figured that I know the basics about datafeeds, but moving on in my career to a company that provides a coupon feed, I better learn more! A full review of that will come later today.
After lunch, I did some time working in the For Me to Coupon booth in the expo hall. I’m glad that I did some homework about the basics of the company before standing in the booth, because we certainly didn’t have a whole lot of downtime to chit chat. People were coming by nonstop asking questions about the service, which is awesome. I was put to the test many times on my knowledge, and thankfully only had to defer to Forrest & Nate a few times for questions I had no clue about. But it was also a great opportunity to learn more nitty gritty stuff about the service when more technical affiliates stopped by with really detailed developer questions. A great introduction to my new job!
I ducked away from the booth for some rejuvenation time in the blogger lounge, then on to the Oprah, Flogs and FTC: Hot Topics 2010 session. It was interesting, but frustrated me that the presenter went through a LOT of good information in his presentation much too fast. I’m incredibly happy though that the presentation has been uploaded to SlideShare, so when I post my recap of that, it’ll have the presentation link!
Before the activity for the evening I had a lovely few drinks with Heather Smith, Julie Vazquez, Lori Herren, & Joe Vaughn from Izea. After playing with the Microsoft Surface table in the iBar, we moved our operation over to the All American Bar & Grill for the 20 cent chicken wings! It’s the Rio’s 20th anniversary, so they had all sorts of deals like that. About 60 wings, a basket of fries, and a few sodas all came in under $30! I learned a TON more about Izea and their products sitting with two insiders and Joe, a sales manager from Izea.
After dinner, it was time for our evening activity, one of my favorite activities hands down anywhere – TRIVIAL PURSUIT! They set up the Wii on a large screen and popped in the game. I was happily chosen 3rd or 4th for Team Missy Ward and we proceeded to kick ass. Of course, another team came from behind in an upset win, but it was a TON of fun playing the game. I know this is a game I’ll have to get for my wii. It was good times, and everyone who played & stuck around until the end was generously given a complimentary Gold Pass for Affiliate Summit East 2010, which we’ll be using to bring Dominic along!
For a normal, sane person, trivia’s end at midnight would have been the end of the evening, but oh no. Now it was time to wander over to McFadden’s Restaurant & Saloon for a party once again thrown by the folks at GTO Management in conjunction with MakeBeer.net. Coopers Brew makes some fine beer and their affiliate program is for the home brew kits that they sell, which are handy for the home brewer. It was a great time with displays of male competition and a punching bag game. A few heads hit it and then headed off to another club, but I was done for the night around 2am so I headed back to the room to get some sleep before my early meeting!
Read MoreDay 1 of Affiliate Summit West 2010
Sunday January 17th
I’d arrived in Las Vegas Saturday afternoon, so I was all ready to get busy Sunday morning. My morning meeting had been rescheduled, so first on my agenda was meeting with a client of PMG. We had a good meeting, discussing Valentine’s Day promotions and going forward & my departure. It went well, though the food was a bit lacking. It was our fault though for getting a late start & needing to run to the Sports Deli instead of sitting down at the All American Bar & Grill as we’d sort of planned. Afterward I went over to the Meet Market, which was OUT. OF. CONTROL!
The Meet Market could not be contained to just one room! There was a smaller room first, which I thought was the whole thing until I didn’t see a few companies that I knew had tables (namely PMG). So I got in & out of there as fast as I could and found the other portion of the Meet Market, which was in a larger area adjacent to where the expo hall would be the next day, and it was not as stuffy, but still a mad house. I wandered to see what was there, but still had to high tail it out of there after talking to some people.
Next up was a session, which you’ll see a recap & notes for soon. After the session I went in search of the bloggers lounge, which was way out in the boonies. Lori Herren was awesome enough to go get Heather Smith and I cool buttons from the Facebook table. I hung out in there for awhile to mooch off the internet capabilities to upload photos I’d taken at the session before. I had every intention to purchase the internet access in my hotel room, but it wasn’t working and I did not have the patience for tech support. So I ended up staying downstairs until Lori had the inspired idea to go get dinner from the local In-N-Out Burger.
We got back and pretty much went straight into the ShareASale Under the Stars Party. It was awesome, as usual, with a terrific spread of pizza, bread & cheese plates, ice cream sundaes, cupcakes, a chocolate fountain, and of course, open bar! They had a plethora of things to do, from Wii Sports games, stand up arcade games, darts, fun gambling (no money involved), the photo booth, a DJ, dance floor, Karaoke, and the most awesome of all – a JUMP HOUSE! I was not adventurous enough to get into that bad boy, though I really, really wanted to! At one point, the spire knocked into the chandelier in the ballroom and knocked some panels off – party foul!
I had a good time with the chocolate fountain in particular & shaking my booty on the dance floor when they were giving away feather boas. I wasn’t even drunk! But who can resist a feather boa? I attempted to stay sitting for most of the party because I knew that the Strike Out Breast Cancer charity event was coming up afterward. I’m already a bad enough bowler, so I needed to conserve energy! Maybe I should have partook in the Wii Bowling to gain some confidence!
On to the bowling – it was fun despite my atrocious score of just 39. It began at midnight and was hosted by GTO Management, BowlingShirt.com, Things From Another World, and Affiliate Marketers Give Back as a fundraiser for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. We got awesome pink and black bowling shirts with the logo of the event on them, and had a great time. There were over 100 people there easily by my estimates, which is quite a feat for an event that started at midnight! It was good times, and I dragged myself back to the Rio and straight into bed to get ready for day 2!
Read MoreBack from Affiliate Summit West 2010
I have returned from another successful trip to an Affiliate Summit, this time the conference was Affiliate Summit West 2010. It was an interesting trip, considering the new direction my career is now taking.
So here’s the scoop – at the end of the month, I’ll no longer be working as an outsourced program manager with Paulson Management Group. They are bringing all work in-house to their Boulder, CO office. – which means that I’d have to move from California to continue to work with them. Instead, I’m going to be transitioning over the next two weeks to work in client support and sales for ForMeToCoupon.com, an automated coupon feed service for affiliates. I’m excited for the transition, into yet another aspect of affiliate marketing.
So at this Affiliate Summit, I did double duty. I both represented Paulson Management Group and the client whose program I still manage, and represented ForMeToCoupon.com in their booth as well during the expo hall hours. It was very interesting, but worked out better than I’d imagined. Amy with Affiliate Summit was awesome enough to print me out a second version of my name tag badge that had the FMTC company name on it so I wouldn’t confuse anyone (more than I might already have confused people). So, enough about my new role, which I am very excited about and have already started working on.
I didn’t go to as many sessions as I normally like to at a conference, what with the meetings I had and the time I put in standing at the FMTC booth. Those recaps will come soon. Until then, some brief recaps of my days at Affiliate Summit West 2010 are soon to come! I don’t want to write the longest post in the history of TrishaLyn.com, so I’ll break them up. You can see them later!
Read MoreAffsum Session: Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages
Date: Tuesday, January 13th, 2009. Session 8b, 2:00pm.
Session Description: Learn how to optimize your landing pages and increase conversion rates by 50-500% using simple techniques and technologies. Get that competitive edge by increasing margins and return on marketing spend. The panel consisted of:
- Olivier Chaine, CEO & Founder, magnify360 (Moderator)
- Trevor Claiborne, Product Marketing Manager, Google
- Lisa Crossley Hunter, Senior Director of CJ Search, Commission Junction
- Beth Kirsch, VP of Marketing and Business Development, uAmplify
I was expecting some gems in terms of site optimization, and boy was I not let down! I’d heard Lisa and Olivier speak last September at CJU, so I knew I was in for good stuff from them. I mentioned this session as one I planned on attending before leaving and Trevor stopped by to say hi. I had a chance to chat with him briefly in the bloghaus after the session and let him know what a great job they did as well.
Bullet Point Review!
- 98% of your traffic is wasted.
- 2% is the average site conversion rate.
- Copy heavy pages perform better later hours.
- There isn’t one magic answer.
- Ask yourself these questions about your visitors:
- Why are they here TODAY?
- How do they THINK?
- How do they BUY/STICK?
- What kind of dialog is best?
- Google’s website optimizer is a free tool to do this for you.
- A/B testing is your friend.
- So is multivariate.
- Best practices: start now, test often.
- Resource: Google Website Optimizer
- Share search channels.
- Cooperate with other departments with
- Ad copy
- Natural listings
- Trademarks
- Display URL Usage
- After testing, what works for affiliates is often different than what works for search.
- One page tested, search conversions went up 60% but affiliate went up 454%!
- You could be losing tremendous amounts of revenue by not optimizing.
- Don’t start without a plan.
- Don’t just copy what someone else did, it probably won’t work the same for you. TEST!
- Don’t assume an optimized page today is going to be optimized 6 months from now.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Just make sure you’re sending the most qualified traffic to the merchant page; you can’t really optimize their site or spend your time trying to help them that much.- How much data is needed? Generally speaking 100 impressions per change, but really, use a tool – they’ll tell you when enough data has been collected to pick a winning optimization.
- Is there a hierarchy of what to test? Not really, just pick a few things and go small first. Multivariate is complicated so start with something more manageable.
In the end, I really enjoyed hearing more from Lisa and Olivier – their expertise seems to know no bounds! Trevor also nailed it with the information about the Google Website Optimizer – my fellow attendees and I speculated that he was why most people came, to learn about the free Google tool! Unfortunately I wasn’t impressed by Beth – her speaking was really mumbled so I couldn’t quite pick up everything she said, and most her slides related to case studies and not a lot of tactics. Maybe at a smaller venue or had I been closer to the front I might have been able to hear her better. Ultimately these tidbits did well, but the slides will really tell you the background behinds these notes, so here they are!
View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: asw09 affiliate)
Also, Mike Buechele strikes again: Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages.
Affsum Session: Affiliate Videos: Where Do They Work Best?
Date: Monday, January 12th, 2009. Session 5d, 2:00pm.
Session Description: How are videos being used by affiliates and merchants? A detailed look into how and where they are performing best with suggested hints and tips to drive better click through and conversions. The panel consisted of:
- Marty M. Fahncke, President, FawnKey & Associates (Moderator)
- Michael Jenkins, CEO/Founder, MarketLeverage
- Melissa Salas, Director of Marketing, Buy.com
- Jonathan Stefansky, EVP Sales and Marketing, Qoof
This wasn’t the panel I had planned on going to, but I’m glad I went and checked it out. There was some interesting factoids dropped and I enjoyed the Twitter going in the background with the anonymous admirer of Melissa asking if she was in the videos.
Bullet Point Review!
- There’s tremendous potential.
- Consider your site when trying to figure out what will work.
- Besides person to person, video is the second highest sales driver.
- ML looked at 2008 as the year of infrastructure.
- Big marketers have taken note of online video.
- In 2007, 59% of internet users watched video online. In 2008 that skyrocketed to 77%.
- With banner blindness there’s a need for a new type of creative.
- Banners are the lowest performing; video overcomes even the success of text links.
- Give the affiliate a better way to convert.
- Low cost for affiliates – no streaming costs, no hosting costs, widgets are interactive.
- Attention spans are around 3 minutes.
- Content must be engaging and capture the user within 15 seconds.
- Networks and merchants wouldn’t invest in video if it didn’t work.
- Affiliates are very eager to receive the best content for the least work.
- People who are in video now are in it for it’s potential, not the actual of today.
- 77 million unique visitors on YouTube (my notes might be wrong on that, and I didn’t write down if that was per day or per month, but I think it was per day.)
- MLTV raises brand awareness, bloggers talk about it.
- Companies are very sensitive to UCG (User Generated Content).
- DO: think about the shelf life of a video. Videos about how to do something instead of a hot trend or product will be relevant longer.
- DON’T: set your videos to auto play with sound. It’s incredibly intrusive, especially if someone’s at work, which is where most people view videos due to faster broadband connections.
- DON’T: go over 3 minutes.
- DO: grab attention within the first 15 seconds.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Where are things with .tv domains? They’re increasing in popularity, but they still don’t get near the traffic a .com domain does.
- How do you track this? Qoof embeds links with the AID and PID for tracking. Others use view time, page views, how long people stay on the page, etc. to track success.
Once again, Michael Buechele of 11|15 Media blogged about this session for the official Affiliate Summit Blog. Check out his recap for anything I may have missed while tweeting ;): Affiliate Summit West 2009 Session Recap – Affiliate Videos: Where Do They Work Best?
Read MoreAffsum Session: Reaching Aggressive Goals without Monetary Incentives
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:
Read More
