Affiliate

Affiliates Without Cookies?

by Travis Ketchum · 0 comments

I had the pleasure of speaking with the twins from HasOffers during SeattleTweetup and they had some seriously interesting things to say about the affiliate world in general, how messed up it all is. Affiliate marketing right now is much like the world of SEO where it is considered black art and shrouded with people who are “scamming the system” to make a few bucks, lease a Ferrari and look like they are making it big.

Since this is the reputation that the industry has, many large advertising agencies who hold the real purse strings have been hesitant to drop the big dollars on affiliate/performance marketing and the beginners are all that is left standing because the big dogs need to move the needle more than a few hundred thousand. So how do you get more money infused into the industry? You give it transparency and make people accountable for their performance. An advertisers worst nightmare is spending X dollars to acquire a sale or lead that they would have nailed down anyway since it just increases their expenses and the customer ends up taking on the burden. They want nice, tight efficiency in their advertising spend and I think HasOffers may just have something to show for it.

Check out the press release below to read more about the latest Beta on how HasOffers hopes to shake things up by shinning a light on those who have been using shady practices to skim commissions off the top of the affiliate pool and sign up to see what’s new. I think you are going to be pleasantly surprised with what they have come up with, one of the things that Lucas mentioned to me is that this was the hardest decision they ever had to make because they had to “burn the house down and start over”. If someone is willing to take a successful ramp and burn it down to completely change the game, shouldn’t you at least check it out?

Full press release below:

HasOffers Admits Online Advertising Is Broken

Tracking technology provider announces development of “Adtribution”
(www.adtribution.com)

SEATTLE – June 14, 2011 – HasOffers (www.hasoffers.com ), a two year old technology company tracking more than $300 million dollars in ad spend per year, admits online advertisers are forced to operate in a broken model. The industry is completely reliant on direct response campaigns which have no way of compensating the millions of other publishers providing valuable brand engagement before the user’s last interaction.

Today, HasOffers announced the development and beta application process of a new cookie-less technology enabling advertisers to see the true influence of multiple affiliate and publisher relationships on a single user. Apply to be among the first of a select group of advertisers, networks, and publishers with access to the AdtributionTM Beta (http://www.adtribution.com ), coming this summer.

“Everyone realizes buying habits are changing as users spend more time online, yet advertising platforms have stayed the same,” said John Marsland, User Acquisition at Zynga. “Each user influenced by multiple publishers, and advertisers need the ability to compensate those publishers based on the part they played. That’s why I’m excited to see what HasOffers has come up with.”

Performance advertising, also referred to as affiliate marketing, has become an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone, making it the fastest growing advertising channel. Yet the disparity between increasing Internet usage and online advertising budgets remains tremendous. Even though performance advertising has laid the sales foundations for companies like Amazon.com, Netflix, and even Groupon, it is still very limited by the tracking technology available to support it.

“We hear from people all the time – my affiliate program sucks,” said Lucas Brown, CEO of HasOffers. “Frankly I’m not surprised. That’s the real reason we entered into the performance advertising space, because we believe technology needs to fill a gap. Advertisers have no transparency, and they are often double and triple paying for acquisitions while some of the most valuable publishers are losing out big on commissions. This makes it really difficult for advertisers to increase their online advertising budgets and allow the industry to grow. We’ve been working on a new way to measure influence on buying decisions and can’t wait to unveil the beta this summer.”

To support long-term growth in performance-based, online advertising, HasOffers is currently in production on a second edition that targets the need for more reliable, more transparent tracking technology to support advertisers, networks, and publishers in a quickly changing Internet landscape. Apply for access to the AdtributionTM Beta at www.adtribution.com

 

About HasOffers

HasOffers ( www.hasoffers.com ) currently provides a software as a service for online businesses to track and manage their own affiliate programs. With more than $300 million in annual ad spend tracked by HasOffers, they positioned themselves as an industry leader in less than two years, being named “Service Provider of the Year” for 2010 by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). For more information, visit www.hasoffers.com or follow us on Twitter @hasoffers.

Illuminate Public Relations

Minou Nguyen Partner

E: [email protected]

P: 206.779.4559

Steve Stratz Partner

E: [email protected]

P: 206.300.913

Advertising Fragmentation

by Travis Ketchum · 2 comments

dictionary-homepageJust as when you are identifying your clientele, you must break down your advertising efforts into fragments to boost the success within each segment. Those who plan on advertising anywhere and everywhere are most assuredly doomed to losses, because while advertising can drive sales and is necessary to garner attention for your product or service; a poorly implemented advertising strategy is going to cost you more than you could make back. That is the unfortunate truth for most early marketers.

So how do you decide which advertising strategies will work best for your brand? The decision is highly dependent on the type of product that you sell, or if you provide a service. One of the basic rules that you will learn in any promotional management class is that you do not stretch your promotional budget to meet your objective, you make your objective fit your budget. So with an emphasis on startups, here is the generalized breakdown for promotional strategies.

Affiliate

The biggest draw for startups towards an affiliate model is that it requires little to no upfront cost to start moving products, or gathering clients. The most involved part of this model is setting up the program and adding to the catalog.

Affiliate systems work by have a vendor or service provider sharing either a set dollar amount, or percentage of their sale (also pay per lead is considered affiliate). This usually works out for the vendor because it hedges the amount of money they need to spend in order to gain additional sales and grow their customer base. Affiliate marketers also like these kinds of programs because they are typically very in tune with what type of traffic they can channel and at what cost. For the marketer, these programs are essentially arbitrage.

{A great way to start your own affiliate program for free is through Has Offers [link] }

Pay Per Click {PPC}

PPC advertising is a great way to get traffic as quickly as possible, especially if you are using a major search engine to deliver the ad inventory. The idea behind PPC is that you create ad copy, select keywords to bid on, and pay each time somebody clicks on the link to go to your website etc. Click fraud is a known problem that many ad networks are combating daily, however if you know how to leverage the metrics that decide your cost per click, PPC can be a great way to drive sales.

{Google AdWords is certainly the market leader right now, and has the highest search volume thanks to Google}

Cost Per Thousand Impressions {CPM}

Impression based advertising is more for the major brands, or for particularly large promotions where a firm wants to raise awareness of their product or service (typically a particular line within a series). This type of advertising usually yields lower returns on investment for direct sales; however this type of advertisement can be attention grabbing if you have a great designer. The goal here is to really reach the magical 3 real impressions per user so the message sticks with them.

{Yahoo! has a very dynamic impression based network, at least until Bing replaces Yahoo! search[link] }

Cost Per Day: Take Over

Arguably one of the most effective forms of advertisements, cost per day also carries the highest ticket price. From a consumer perspective, these ads typically “take over” an entire website, or an entire category (often home page) in order to saturate the advertising impression with the customer. I feel that this is better for the consumer because while you can’t escape the message at hand, the ads are often thought out to much more detail, more creative and reduce overall clutter on the affected website.

The advertisers like these take overs because they know that each and every person visiting that page will see their promotional message and often times has the value added ability to make large portions of the site clickable for the consumer to find out more information. A great example of this is illustrated above from dictionary.com using its backsplash as a type of digital billboard.

MG Siegler from TechCrunch finds this approach appalling stating that is “God-awful” and “greedy”. What he is missing is that these condensed take overs result in a cleaner advertising experience for the consumer and a higher quality experience for both parties. {article}

The bigger the firm, the more diversified your promotional strategy can be, but while you are still small you should be focusing on narrow casted promotion with affiliate and ppc promotion. It isn’t until your firm requires large scale brand recognition (read outside of your local area) that cpm and take over’s are a logical step within your promotion.

What do you think about large scale take over advertisements from both perspectives? Is MG Siegler from TechCrunch.com correct in describing these digital billboards cancer to the internet?

Definition {Arbitrage}: Profiting off of the imbalance within two markets.

Example {Arbitrage}: It costs me an average of $15 to produce a buying customer to site X using my e-mail lists. Site X value’s each paying customer at more than $20, and therefore pays out an affiliate commission of $20 per new lead. The arbitrage in this case would a market imbalance of $5.