Using Analytics to Identify Affiliate Abuse – By David Naffziger

by FeedFront Staff on March 5, 2010

Detecting affiliate abuse is one of the more challenging aspects of affiliate program management.  Since the majority of affiliates add value to a program, identifying the abusive affiliates can feel a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.

The performance data provided by the affiliate networks is one of the most valuable aspects of the affiliate program, and can be used to identify affiliates engaged in abusive behavior.

Study the Inbound Referrers

Most visitors to your Web site come with information in their request that tells the Web site where the visitor came from. This information, known as the “referrer”, is used by programs such as Google Analytics to identify traffic sources.  There are three important patterns to look for:

  • Referrer from the Search Engines: If the referrer shows one of the search engines as the source, the affiliate is probably purchasing PPC ads and using an uncloaked affiliate link in their ad.
  • Referrer from Webmail Clients: Affiliates using email as a marketing tool will often show referrers from web email clients.
  • No referrer: A number of trademark bidders (or affiliates trying to mask the source of their traffic for other reasons) are using cloaked affiliate links with a referring technique that strips the referrer from the user’s session. 

Not all networks provide full referrers, however they often provide a report that at least shows the domain the traffic came from.

Understand Abnormal Conversion Rates

Affiliates using different promotional methods will have different conversion rates in your program.  Significant differences in conversion rate from your program average might indicate something is amiss. 

For example, unusually high conversion rates can be indicative of trademark bidding, while unusually low conversion rates (coupled with high traffic) can be indicative of adware.

Many merchants group their affiliates into categories (email, SEM, coupons, website, etc.), and then study the performance of the affiliates in each group.  This approach allows for a clearer identification of suspicious activity.

Study Transaction Timing

Just looking at when an affiliate’s transactions occurred can also be very informative.  Two things to look out for:

  • A temporary traffic surge: A quick, short burst of traffic could have come from an unauthorized email campaign or a successful social media campaign. Regardless, it is probably a good indication to look further.
  • Off-hours transactions: Transactions that only occur at night or on weekends might be indicative of a day-parted PPC campaign.

 There are plenty of good reasons why a non-abusive affiliate might be using a technique identified in this article.  Simply discovering an affiliate that matches one of the patterns above does not confirm the affiliate was doing something wrong. 

The best approach is to develop a relationship with the affiliate so that the merchant understands their promotional methods. These techniques should be used to identify affiliates that warrant closer investigation.

David Naffziger is CEO of BrandVerity, a firm that detects affiliate violations of merchant paid search policies.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

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Unleashing the Potential of PPV Advertising – By Bryn Youngblut

by FeedFront Staff on March 4, 2010

So what exactly is PPV advertising?

PPV (pay per view), also known as CPV (cost per view) is usually referred to as contextual advertising. PPV is technically adware; not to be confused with spyware. Adware comes from an ad-supported program that a user installed onto their PC, which they agreed to when installing it. PPV allows you to not only bid on keywords but also domains (URLs).

So what’s so good about PPV? From my experience, it is incredible if done right. I have some campaigns, for instance, where I spend approximately $50 on a day and they each generate thousands in revenue. Not bad, eh?

Why am I sharing this information? Probably because I am a mad man or maybe because I do well enough that I feel like giving people some inspiration. It has always helped me in the past.

Now that you know the basics, I will walk you through the steps to get started. You’re going to need to be signed up for a network. For beginners, I recommend signing up for MediaTraffic, and when you are more advanced, try out TrafficVance.

The first step is to choose which product or service you want to promote. The most recommended are simple and short-form submits; but don’t limit yourself to these.

After you have chosen an offer, it’s time to start researching keywords; and most importantly URLs. There are a number of ways to do this. If you are not familiar with the process, just search around the Web for keyword researching tools.

As far as finding URLs goes, it’s pretty simple, but does require some creativity. What I typically do is a simple search for my offer or things related and copy down the URLs that come up. Then I take those URLs over to Quantcast.com and get a ton more related Web sites using the “Audience Also Likes/Visits” feature on the right hand side.

Once you have your list of keywords/URLs, it’s time to setup your campaign. It is VERY important that you track everything, so you can eliminate the keywords/URLs that are not converting.

The most common question I get is “Should I direct link the offer or use a landing page?” and I always reply that if you’re not sure, why don’t you split test it and find out? Some offers work well direct linking to them, and some do much better with a jump page.

If you take PPV serious enough, you will likely experience a financial rollercoaster. You WILL lose money testing things. You WILL have unsuccessful campaigns. You WILL fail, and that’s life. But if you make it past all the failures and don’t give up, success could be right around the corner…

Bryn Youngblut is a full time entrepreneur and affiliate marketer, and he blogs at www.Bryn.me

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

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How To Recycle Your Affiliate Blog Content – By Justin Premick

by FeedFront Staff on March 4, 2010

If you’re one of the many smart affiliate marketers who blog regularly, I bet you put a lot of effort into creating high-quality content.

 Often, that valuable content is timeless, but only appears on the most-viewed part of your blog – the homepage – for a short time. Other posts push it off your homepage and into oblivion.

This is frustrating, after all, new visitors could benefit from this content, right? Even if they sign up days, weeks, months or years after you publish it.

 Fortunately, with a simple email marketing tactic, you can resurrect your content from the depths of your blog and keep it in front of your ever-growing, ever-changing audience.

 Turn Your Blog’s Best Content Into an Automated Email Newsletter

 There’s no reason to put all that hard work into creating great content, then get just one round of visits, comments and sales from it. Why be satisfied with that?

 Much of your blog’s content isn’t only relevant at one particular time. And to borrow from an old NBC slogan, if subscribers haven’t seen an old post, it’s new to them.

 Get that old content out to them and make it fresh again!

Create an Autoresponder Campaign For Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps

1. Identify Your Best Content

 Go through your old blog posts and decide which are the truly high-quality ones that new subscribers need to see.

2. Turn Each Post or Group of Posts into an Email

 A couple ways to go about this:
The fastest, simplest way is to just copy and paste your full post content into an email, style as you see fit, and save. No introduction, no conclusion, just the post as a standalone email. A little boring/dry but it can work.

Paste a compelling excerpt from your article, link to the full post, and add a brief introduction and conclusion to the email.

I like this method because it encourages click-throughs, but you may find that including the full post is better.

If you have two or more good posts on a topic, write an email that combines the ideas in those posts and links to them in context (you might be doing this with blog posts already). Or, just write a simple introduction and then provide a list of links to your posts on that topic.

3. Put Your Emails in an Autoresponder Series

 Once you have your emails together, plug them into your autoresponder.

 As you create each email, think about how much time you want to pass between those messages and schedule accordingly.

 Remember, new subscribers will also be getting your new posts (right?), so don’t space the emails too close together.

 As you create more quality posts, you can continue adding autoresponders or edit your existing ones to work those posts into the emails you’ve already created, and get even more clicks and traffic to your affiliate blog.

Justin Premick is the Director of Education Marketing for AWeber Communications, and you can follow him on Twitter @justinpremick.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

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Being Different Can Be Very Profitable – By Andrew Wee

by FeedFront Staff on March 3, 2010

In the online marketing world, it can be a struggle to get your voice heard, especially since many marketers will be adopting similar tactics when it comes to promoting products to their prospects.

The proliferation of competitive intelligence and spy tools means that a new affiliate can create a clone copy of another affiliates campaign, often within a few hours.

The net result? A potentially profitable campaign, although with an uncertain lifespan.

Instead, affiliates who are planning to be in the industry for the long haul can better channel their energy to create a sustainable presence on the Internet. The following factors can help you shape the direction of your business

Improve on How Everyone Else is Running Their Business

Think of companies like Apple, FedEx and Twitter and see how they positioned themselves above the competition. Although personal computers, overnight delivery and social networks had been around before these companies were established, these new entrants looked at where the bar was set in their industry and moved it up a couple of notches.

Within the affiliate marketing context, most affiliates are promoting their campaigns primarily through text and graphics, thin affiliate sites, which may not provide much value beyond specifications lifted from the merchant’s site and product pricing.

Going the extra mile to create additional content, especially catering to buyers earlier in the sales cycle, can help boost your conversions.

Although there have been numerous presentations at trade events and seminars about the power of video in branding yourself and getting more sales conversions, there are just a handful of affiliates who use these services, and more importantly, use them well.

Always Be Testing

Department store pioneer John Wanamaker has been quoted as saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Although Wanamaker, considered the father of advertising, came up with the words in 19th century, the saying still hold true when it comes to online marketing today.

You won’t know what will or will not work when it comes to a traffic or conversion tactic in a campaign. I’ve heard more than my fair share of stories about marketers trying something wild and unexpected on a whim as they’re setting up a campaign, only to have it go gangbusters on them.

Unfortunately, you won’t often read blog posts or forum postings about these techniques because they’re some of the key tools of the trade. If you do hear about them, it’s usually after some time has passed and the affiliate has made a killing and moved on to something new.

The lesson here is to think about what you’re doing in your business and find ways to innovate. Creativity can pay off very handsomely in these circumstances.

Andrew Wee blogs about affiliate marketing at WhoIsAndrewWee.com and is co-founder of the InternetMarketingCookbook.com resource site.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

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The Quest for Social Marketing’s Holy Grail – By Larry Bailin

by FeedFront Staff on March 1, 2010

Social networking giant Facebook recently surpassed Wikipedia as the fourth largest Web site in the world while micro-blogging powerhouse, Twitter, reportedly handled 5,000 tweets per minute when the king-of-pop passed. These announcements have businesses scrambling to social Web sites like they were, well, the Holy Grail of marketing success.

Here’s the thing about finding the Holy Grail: what do you do once you’ve found it? Companies large and small, although excited over the promise of social marketing, often have no idea what to do in this new and unfamiliar space.

Certainly, there is no shortage of social marketing gurus, experts and even ninjas (yes ninjas), but you can’t rely solely on these social Sherpa’s to achieve true success in your social quest.

A good or even average social media consultant can help you traverse an unforgiving social terrain by creating a sound social media strategy and implementing best practices.  

However, you can only be catapulted to success if you have something worth flinging into the air.

Success is imminent when you realize that the knowledge necessary to succeed, no matter the marketing vehicle, comes from within. You have intimate knowledge of your offerings. You understand your customer’s wants and needs as they relate to your services.

Most importantly, you know how to speak to a customer, and that is what will ultimately deliver success in the social space.

 Let the gurus obsess over the perfect formula of Re-Tweets to Tweets and which shortened URL gets clicked the most.  You need to spend more time strategizing the creation of valuable dialogue.

Study your customer’s wants and needs, misconceptions and objections, then create shareable contributions that educate and subtly entice. Contributing, educating and subtly enticing – sounds a lot like selling. Despite popular opinion selling is not a bad thing.

There is nothing wrong with using social media to attract and convert customers, just learn to sell in a friendly non-disruptive way. Learn to join the conversation as opposed to interrupting it. You have to sell without selling.

You may be asking, how do you sell without selling? Let me share a little secret with you: it’s not so much a secret as an often overlooked resource.

 I’m frequently asked to recommend books on social marketing. There’s no shortage of books about the intricacies of Facebook and Twitter, but the greatest book ever written on achieving success in the social space was written 70+ years ago.

In my opinion, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is the Holy Grail, the secret to social nirvana. This book teaches you to speak, think and write with the intent to persuade. Carnegie’s book teaches you to think like a customer and provide value in order to evoke a desired outcome.

Social websites and ninjas come and go. When you master the skills to think like a customer and subtly entice, your next quest for marketing’s Holy Grail will be a short crusade.  You’ll only need to look inside yourself.

Larry Bailin is the author of the bestselling Internet marketing book, Mommy, Where Do Customers come From? and CEO of Single Throw Internet Marketing.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

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