Virtual Currency: Getting Zen about Incentivized Offers

Dec

Hello again dear bloggers!
First of all, I would like to wish all of you a great holiday season.
All the best from all of us here at Adsmarket!!!

In my last post, Virtual Currency – Media Types for Online Games Applications, we discussed virtual currency media, and the way it can positively contribute to gaming advertisers and business models. In this post, we will explore the biggest and, some say, the pioneer market for this media type – Asia.

A few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to attend Gstar in Busan, Korea. This conference was an excellent example/reminder for gaming advertisers
concerning the potential of VC and the Asian market place. It also lent decent proportions to the western world, and the fact that over here, we are seeing just the tip of the revenue iceberg.

Believe it or not:
The virtual goods industry in Asia is generating about $7 billion a year in revenue, about seven times the number in the U.S. This means one thing: call it incentivized traffic; call it virtual currency – IT WORKS.

Asian Potential
Here are a few interesting facts:
The Asian population count now a days: 3,808,070,503 of which 738,257,230 are internet users, with a growth of 545.9 % for the past 9 years – and GROWING!This means serious business!!!

The Asian market is producing a significant volume of traffic, but there are drawbacks, to be fair. Due to barriers like language, currency/exchange rate, and user value, however; promoting online games/MMO campaigns and optimizing them is a challenge if you are not local or familiar with the local marketplace.

Even with these challenges, the general assumption is that volume will be high, and with the right content/game you can gain users that will spend more time playing and eventually – paying. Deeper research will show you that most developers/ games companies keep the marketing agenda for APAC in-house. The user value is outstanding, not to mention that demographic wise, this is targeting heaven.

The Fuss Over VC
Getting back to Gstar, after meeting with a few industry veterans, I was surprised to hear that they didn’t seem to understand why the western world is making such a big deal over virtual items and the way they are being distributed.

When I spoke with some of them about recent “industry-shattering” events, like when EA acquired Playfish (tiny cash deal…), Offerpal hiring a new CEO and Zynga launching Farmville.com , they didn’t seem to be excited at all…

“This has been our business model for years…” & “It’s only getting bigger by the year“ were only some of the comments I got back.

This made me wonder: Why is the western world still labeling virtual items as a negative feature? What is it about two different societies that can label this controversial traffic source as a godsend or a disease? In other words, what’s all the fuss about ???

From my experience working with large gaming advertisers for the last few years and monitoring the buzz surrounding the virtual currency platform, the issue is the way it’s being introduced to the user. And I don’t necessarily agree with it.

After all, how do advertising and marketing work? Consumer behavior is amazingly predictable, which is what advertising is based on. Simply put, the consumers who manage their spending and take the time to read the small print are probably thinking the same thing that my friends at GStar were. What’s the fuss about?

We should be happy that the affiliate marketing industry is growing and creating new opportunities for both users and publishers to benefit from. We know that each media type has its own arguments, and just like any competitive industry, the online space requires thinking outside the box.

The only reason to bash on it is if you are jealous that you didn’t think about it before…

If it hasn’t been said before (and it has), here’s some advice for every online consumer – check before you click, and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Landing Page Optimization: A Tutorial from XTEND

Dec

Why is landing page optimization still important? Get ready for landing page
optimization bootcamp!

It is very simple – more revenue! Take a look at the example below to understand
the magnitude:

A $10K a month media buy generating 50K monthly landing page
visitors converting at 3% will generate revenue of $52,500 (based on a $35 Life
Time Value). Let’s assume a 20% improvement which will increase the conversion
rate to 3.6%, and will increase revenue generated from the media buy to $63,000.
A $10,500 monthly revenue lift over one year will lift total revenue to $126,000!

Before coming to XTEND, I worked at Amadesa (a website testing company),
and in many optimization projects we frequently experienced revenue boosts
ranging from 15% to over 100% with the majority of improvements in the 20-60%
range. So if we want to be optimistic with this example, and assume a 40% lift we
could generate an additional $252,000 a year! That isn’t small potatoes…

Walk Before You Run

Landing page optimization can be complex but once you get the hang of it the
results start becoming addictive. Like anything in life you need to walk before you
run, and practice makes perfect. Landing page optimization or any page or flow
optimization can be confusing as there are many variables to take into
consideration:

Should one start with split testing or multivariate testing?
What page elements should I test?
How many versions of each page element should one test?
Do I have enough traffic to reach statistical significance?
Should tests be segmented by media source, geography, day of the
week etc?
Do I need to use a new technology or service provider for testing? If so
which one?

If an organization does not have experience testing, it is recommend to start with a
simple split test or A/B test of the main element on a landing page such as the
layout’s (template) unique selling point (USP) or pictures. It is very important to
test the main elements as they will most likely have the highest impact on the
conversion rate. Make sure each element version in a test is visibly different from
each other, if the changes aren’t bold enough and the versions are only subtly
different then most likely the results will not be significant.

Once you get the handle of split testing you should use more advanced
methodologies such as multivariate (MVT) and traffic segmentation. These

techniques will enable you to test hundreds of combinations of landing pages
as well as traffic sources and other sub segments such as Geography, Browser
type, time of day etc.

Success Will Come

Persistency pays off. Make sure you persist, as it can take a few tests until you get
the handle of what page elements are the most impacting. Also, guiding your
creative team to design and write ideas outside of the box might take some practice.

Remember that you are testing, therefore it is important to experiment outside
stringent brand guidelines as you never know what will make a user respond and
take action.

Test in Waves…

As traffic is usually limited and testing many page elements can be a daunting task,
I recommend testing in waves. Your first wave of testing might be only for the
page layout (template) and your second wave can be for the main graphic and
USP. Your third wave might still be for the main graphic or image but this time you
will test bolder images. In each wave you should strive to learn something, and
even if you don’t gain a lift in conversion rate you can still learn. If your conversion
rate dropped you learned that the tested elements do have impact, therefore you
should continue to test these elements but make sure to create versions that are
different. If the tested elements had no impact (the conversion rate didn’t change)
you should test different elements in your subsequent waves. Basically each wave
provides an opportunity to build on the results and conclusions of your previous
waves until you’ve reached satisfactory results.

The single most important aspect
of optimization is patience and persistence – it will most likely take you a few tests
to see first successes but as shown in the above example it pays off big time.

Useful Links
Tips and tricks from optimization experts:

Google Website Optimizer FAQ’s
Jonathan Mendez – Founder of Omniture Test and Target one of the first
Optimization Platforms.
Tim Ash – Author of the “Landing Page Optimization” book
Bryan Eisenberg of future now

Web site optimization platforms:

Amadesa – A complete platform for website optimization and personalization
Omniture – From analytics to optimization a complete suite of online
marketing technologies
SiteSpect – None Java script based A/B and Multivariate testing platform
Google Website Optimizer – Google’s free website testing and
optimization tool.

Tools:

Website Optimization ROI Calculator
Traffic Estimators

Consultancies

Conversion Rate Experts – international conversion consulting company.
Google Website Optimizer Authorized Consultants.
Widemile – Multivariate testing for agencies.
Maxymiser – UK based Optimization Company.

Dov Yarkoni is the VP of Business Development and Sales at XTEND

We thank Dov Yarkoni for this post. It originally appeared on the
Xtend Blog on October 19, 2009

Unleash the Beast – Part 3

Nov

This is the last in a 3-part series on analyzing online media quality. It’s a doozy,
but an in-depth look. If you missed the other installments, here’s Part 1 and
here’s Part 2.

The Sophisticated Approach
The sophisticated advertiser distinguishes between media sources and offers
a different CPA for each of them. Let’s take a simple example, an advertiser that
sets CPA at 3 levels:

$5 for regular traffic
$2 rate for incentivized traffic
$6 premium rate for SEM traffic.

In this example, all the traffic sources will run this offer, and the ROI will be

positive for all the sources.

Media Type	Quality	Capacity	CPA	Revenue	Total Cost	Profit
SEM	10.00	10,000	6.00	100,000	60,000	40,000
Banners	8.00	20,000	5.00	160,000	100,000	60,000
Email marketing	6.00	30,000	5.00	180,000	150,000	30,000
Pops	5.00	40,000	5.00	200,000	200,000	0
Incentivized	3.00	60,000	2.00	180,000	120,000	60,000
					Total	190,000

In this way, 5 different levels can bring the advertiser up to $300,000 profit from
160,000 users.
Let’s summarize the profit for each advertiser:

	Profit
Unsophisticated advertiser	$60,000
Semi-sophisticated advertiser	$80,000
3 payout levels	$190,000
5 payout levels	$300,000

This model works not only in theory. In my experience working with advertisers at
Adsmarket, I’ve seen many empiric example of how advertisers dramatically
increased their revenue and their profit by handling and monitoring the traffic
sources better. This brings me to two major conclusions:

There is no “Bad Traffic”. You need to find the right payout for each source
in order to take advantage of its full capacity and potential, “Unleashing the
Beast”.
By monitoring and optimizing media sources the advertiser can increase
profit by hundreds of percents, “Controlling the Beast”.

Feel free to contact me at Yuval.bATadsmarket.com to learn more about these tools
and about traffic source optimization in general.

Tips for the Most Conversions: Ad Size

Nov

This is a guest post by Gal Topaz, an account manager at XTEND. You can view
XTEND’s blog here.

Hi Adsmarket Blog Readers,

This being my first guest post for the Adsmarket Blog, I wanted to make sure my
experience working with an ad network like XTEND would contribute to the
audience of an affiliate network like Adsmarket. There are so many things that ad

networks and affiliate networks have in common! So, to start off, I wanted to share
with you my thoughts on their recently released “Global Benchmark Report 2009″,
which, in summary, finds that bigger is not always better when it comes to ad size.

Interestingly, Eyeblaster found that standard banners achieved an average
click-through-rate of 0.1% worldwide, compared with 0.3% for rich media ads. So
if used correctly, the rich media banners have a much higher ROI. From our
experience on XTEND’s ad network, bigger banner sizes have always been equal
to higher click-thru-rates and better performance. This trend was also found in a
study conducted by the IAB [i]. It was found that larger ad units are 25% more
effective in key metrics.

I can use XTEND as a recent example. We are seeing increasing numbers of
Publishers that are offering larger and larger ad sizes in the hope of increasing
their revenue. Advertisers (assuming they have a limited budget and resources)
are facedwith the decision to invest in larger-sized regular banners or rich media
(which, due to their interactivity, make the creatives more appealing).

Of course, size does have an impact on rich media banners but it is not the best
indicator for their performance. What we came to realize is that when adding rich
media to banners, ROI may improve, but the equation becomes more complex.
The report indicates that the effectiveness of rich media banners has much more
to do with creative and placement than it does with size.

What is important about this report is the performance trade-off between size and
creativity. To add a personal note from my experience, I think content is the name
of the game. Size is never as important as a good creative, so I suggest spending
more time creating original content and detecting online trends. Stay simple in
creative and have users put their imagination to work for you.

[i] 1 Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Available at: http://www.iab.net/about_
the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/4426

Unleash the Beast – Part 2

Nov

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series on analyzing online media quality. It’s a doozy,
but an in-depth look.
Did you miss Part 1? Click here.

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced the 2 Qs Formula for revenue and profit:

Revenue = Quality*Quantity

Profit = Quality*Quantity – Price*Quantity = Quantity*(Quality – Price)

Let’s take a numeric example:
Let us suppose in a certain market the following table represent each media source
quality (in life time user’s value), capacity (the number of users they can generate)
and the minimum CPA they want in order to run.

Media	Quality	Capacity	Minimum CPA (i)
SEM	10	10000	6
Banners	8	20000	5
Email marketing	6	30000	4
Pops	5	40000	3
Incentivized	3	60000	2

This is only an example, in different markets the order of the media sources may be
different depend on the criteria of the users and the type of the product or service
you provide. However, there are several assumptions that are almost always true

(but not always):

Targeted traffic has less capacity but higher value.
The best traffic, quality wise, is the most expensive one.

So, let’s take three approaches to the market described in the table above.

The Unsophisticated Approach
An unsophisticated advertiser can’t distinguish between the different media sources,
he sees all the traffic he gets as a one and tries to set one CPA that will fit all. The
traffic he gets is all the traffic that requires a minimum payout that is smaller than the
CPA.

Here is the sensitivity analysis of this advertiser:

CPA	Media Type	Total Traffic (users)	Revenue ($)	Avg quality ($)	Costs ($)	Profit ($)
2	Incentivized	60,000	180,000	3.00	120,000	60,000
3	Incentivized, Pops	100,000	380,000	3.80	300,000	80,000
4	Incentivized, Pops,Email	130,000	560,000	4.30	520,000	40,000
5	Incentivized, Pops, Email, Banners	150,000	720,000	4.80	750,000	-30,000
6	Incentivized, Pops, Email, Banners, SEM	160,000	820,000	5.125	960,000	-140,000

Media = all the media that the Minimum CPA (i) required is smaller the CPA the advertisers offers.
Example – for 3$ CPA only the Pops and the incentivized traffic will agree to work.

Total traffic = the sum of capacity of all media

CPAformula1

Revenue = the sum of the capacity of media times quality
CPAformula2
(Average Quality = Revenue/ Total traffic
Cost = Total traffic x CPA
Profit = Revenue – Cost)

As you can see, the maximum profit for the unsophisticated advertiser is by setting $3 CPA
he gets 100K users with profit of $80K. He is only uses 62.5% of the capacity of the media
and losing all the high quality traffic.

Stay with me here…

You can also see that the average quality is a logarithmic function of the CPA:
Beast3
*The “X” axis is the price and the “Y” axis is the quality

The green line is the “Break even” line when Price = Quality.
For CPA higher than $5 – Price > Quality and the advertiser loses money.

The Semi-Sophisticated Approach

The semi-sophisticated advertiser usually sets one CPA to all media sources but he
adds restrictions that don’t permit low quality traffic to run. Let’s take for example
advertisers who don’t allow incentivized traffic to run their offers. In this case, their
sensitivity analysis will look like this:

CPA	Media	Total Traffic (users)	Revenue ($)	Avg quality ($)	Costs ($)	Profit ($)
2	None	0	0	0	0	0
3	Pops	40,000	200,000	5.00	120,000	80,000
4	Pops, Email	70,000	380,000	5.42	280,000	100,000
5	Pops, Email, Banners	90,000	540,000	6.00	450,000	90,000
6	Pops, Email, Banners, SEM	100,000	640,000	6.40	600,000	40,000

In our example, by not allowing incentivized traffic, the advertiser get more profit

than the unsophisticated one ($100,000 instead of $80,000) but uses only 43.75%
from the traffic available.

Go to Part 3…

Unleash the Beast – Analyzing Media Quality

Nov

Contributed by Yuval Ben-Harush, Director of Advertiser Relations

This post is divided into three parts.

Very often I use the word “Beast” to describe the World Wide Web. It is an

amazing advertising platform that can bring you unbelievable quantities of

customers, from all over the world, at all ages, genders, and socio-economic

levels. Unleashing the beast, meaning using all the traffic sources available,

can bring you, as an advertiser, millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands

of potential clients every day. That’s a fact.

The problem is that this Beast can eat you if you fail to control it. I have seen it

happen that failure to monitor, optimize and control traffic can cause companies

to lose a lot of money.

The Two Q’s Formulas

In order to understand better the beast model, let’s go back to the science of

performance: The two parameters that control the revenue are the two Qs:

Quality and Quantity. From that perspective, “Quantity” is the number of users

(the conversions) and Quality is measured by the users value ($$$$)

Revenue = Quality*Quantity

Profit = Quality*Quantity – Price*Quantity = Quantity*(Quality – Price)

As you understand, in order to maximize revenue and profit we need to maximize

the two Qs. Of course, in order to make a positive profit the following equation

must exist:

Quality > Price

The challenge begins when unleashing the Beast. Working with the large quantities

required from large networks (like Adsmarket) that contain a variety of media

sources, each media source brings a different user value (quality), has a different

capacity (quantity) and asks for a different CPA (price). The unsophisticated

advertiser, the one that does not know how to control the beast, might decide

on a uniform price for all the publishers based on the average quality of users; in

this way he prevents good, high quality publishers from running his offers.

Go to Part 2… and stay tuned by signing up to

RSS feeds!

What’s in Your User’s Mind?

Oct

This is a follow-up article from Yuval’s first post, The Science of Performance, Explained, posted on October 3rd, 2009.

In my last article, “The Science of Performance, Explained ”, we discussed the most important parameters for publishers in order to make your offers as an online advertiser attractive and to generate high volumes of traffic. One of the parameters was the offer conversion rate. High conversion rates are not only in the interest of the publisher, they need to be in the interest of the advertiser as well. Relevant users need to be converted into action quickly and easily in order to optimize traffic and decrease marketing expenses.

Many books, articles, posts, and eBooks have been written about how to build a good landing page. This is not my intention for this article (but later on I do give you some tips…). I want to discuss with you my way of reviewing, analyzing and building an offer.

The first master rule in building an offer I learned from a very big Israeli affiliate: “Think like a first time visitor in all of your offers”.
You are probably saying now: “This is obvious, tell us something we don’t know”, but unfortunately, most of the advertisers don’t follow this online marketing rule. I review hundreds of landing pages every month and I can tell you that 90% of them can convert much better with a few small changes.

So, let’s talk about the users:
The user is exposed to a lot of data while he surfs the web. There are many so many options! The number of web pages is almost infinite, he sees dozens of banners with every visit, gets more than a few marketing mails every day and every search he does in Google shows hundreds of millions of results.
This causes a very severe users symptom – they are impatient! The average user visit on a web page is less than 5 seconds!
Users have their trigger fingers on the mouse over the “back” button before they see the content of the page, and are moving forward to the next page (BTW, many statistics systems don’t even count fast-bouncing users, so don’t count on them to see the stats of your landing pages).
The user asks himself 2 questions when he visits your site (in this order):

What’s in it for me? – Why should I stay in this website? What can I find here? What’s my incentive?
What do I need to do? – in order to get the incentive from the first question.

As you probably understand by now, you have less than 5 seconds of attention span to explain to the user why should he stay in your website. That’s mean that you need to explain your offer, your product, your service and what makes you different in 3-5 words or a clear image. “Free iPhone”, “Best Pizza in Manhattan”, “Low-cost Flights in Europe”, “Win a Wii”, “1 Day Loan”, “IQ test”, “Online Games”, image of a PSP, screen shots from MMORPG etc. Reading is working too hard, so if you are not doing SEO, content is your enemy. Keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

One of the first sales tips I got from my father was “If you want to sale jewelry to a woman show her 3 options to choose from. If you’ll show her 20 options she won’t be able to decide and she will leave without buying”. Too many options is too much work, so:

Keep the opportunities for thinking limited
Remove navigations bars
Minimize the number of fields the user needs to fill
Lead the user’s eye to the important places in the page
Keep the important buttons (“Submit”, “Check out”, “Order Now”…) above the fold and use a clear call to action.
Make sure your banners and landing pages match. If a user liked the banner and the offer in it and decided to click on it, he should get the same offering and the same look and feel in the landing page.
And again, keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

One last point, why build one landing page when you can build 3? One of the advantages of advertising online is the simplicity of testing and optimizing different creatives to see which performs better and to improve their conversion; it is cheap, easy, and should be a mandatory step in every new offer launching. My dear friend Dov Yarkoni at Xtend wrote a good post about landing page optimization on the Xtend Blog.

If you have any questions, if you want to consult me about defining a flow, designing a landing page or banners, testing and optimizing, don’t hesitate to contact me at Adsmarket! We have the experience needed, we promoted thousands of creatives and landing pages, we know what performs well and what doesn’t, we know the publishers abilities, we have a team of very talented designers and most important we are here for you, to help and consult.

The Science of Performance, Explained

Oct

Yuval Ben-Harush here, Advertiser Relations at your service! Many advertisers ask for our consultancy – “How can we make our offers more attractive and how can we bring more users to our offers?” The first question I ask them is: Who are your customers? The users? – Wrong! Your customers are the publishers! If you will keep in mind that your offers need to be attractive to the publishers, and take the right actions, they can drive unbelievable volumes of users to your offers.

There are two important parameters that you control as a saavy advertiser that influence the attractiveness of your offers to the publishers:

The first one is the most obvious one and the most easy to control: The Payouts (for CPA offers)! Your payouts need to be competitive (compared to other advertisers from the same category for the same countries) and must be profitable for the publishers, meaning, the cost of media will be lower than the total revenue.

Total revenue > α * Total cost of media

Total revenue = CPA * Total number of conversions

Total cost of media = CPC * clicks (or CPM * impressions)

α = the ROI the publisher expects

As you can see in the Total Payout formula above, the second parameter that the publisher takes into consideration is the number of conversions per the traffic he sent. Since the advertiser is usually responsible for the creatives, including landing pages and banners, you have the power to influence the conversion rate for the publisher.

To explain the idea better, let’s take an example:

“Sylvester” is a publisher who wants to run a movie selling campaign in the US. In Adsmarket there are two companies who have such campaigns – Rambo LTD and Rocky INC. Rambo LTD offer $10 CPA per movie sale and Rocky INC offer $5 CPA per movie sale. At first glance, it looks like Rambo LTD offer, $10 payout, is more attractive for Sylvester; however, after testing both of the offers, Sylvester found out that out of 200 users (200 clicks) sent by him to Rambo LTD there were 2 sales (1% conversion rate). Out of the same amount of users sent to the Rocky INC offer there were 6 sales (3% conversion rate). The total incomes from Rambo LTD and Rocky INC are $20 and $30 respectively. Surely, Sylvester will prefer Rocky INC offer because, per 200 clicks, the revenue is higher. If the cost of media is for example $12 per 100 clicks (CPC) the conversion rate makes the different from a profitable and non-profitable campaign (see the table below).

	Rambo LTD	Rocky INC
CPA	$10	$5
Clicks	200	200
Conversion Rate	1%	3%
Conversions	2	6
Total revenue	$20	$30
Total cost for 200 click (CPC*2)	$24	$24
Profit	(-$4)	$6

In order to compare performances of different campaigns with different amounts of traffic, publishers usually measure the profit per 100 clicks (EPC) or per 1000 impressions (eCPM).

EPC =	Total revenue * 100
	# of Clicks

eCPM =	Total revenue * 1000
	# of Impressions

In our example, Rambo LTD’s EPC was $10 and Rocky INC’s EPC was $15.

The EPC and eCPM functions elaborate the conversion rates and the CPAs. Bottom line, the publisher looks for the following as proof of a worthy campaign:

EPC > α * CPC

eCPM > α * CPM

How can this work to your advantage as an advertiser? By changing and adjusting the Payouts (CPA) and the conversion rates you can influence the publishers EPC and eCPM. Improving these values makes your offer more attractive and by that, encourages them to send more users to your offers.

In my next articles we will discuss ways to improve the conversion rate of a landing page and what is the right way to change and optimize the payouts.

Adsmarket is at Ad:Tech London: Sept 22-23, 2009

Sep

Ad:Tech London starts today! The Adsmarket StreetTeam is at Booth #250, handing out Publisher promo coupons like the dickens…
There are still available meetings with our representatives, so if you want to meet us please send an email. Make sure you stop by the booth to say hello to Gabi, Sheila and Menachem, and that you read The Adsmarket Blog!

If you’ve got some spare time and need some stuff to do, check out this fun site on unusual London attractions. It beats looking at the Crown Jewels, which you can’t even try on! Bah!

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King

Jul

[Note: I titled this post from the book “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. The book is completely unrelated to affiliate marketing, so take that in mind if you go out to buy the book later on today ]

Maor Sadra here! The online advertising world is a jungle today (cue monkey sounds). There are so many sites, blogs, affiliates, publishers, media networks, etc. The more you spend online, the more likely your ads are being placed on thousands of sites. This is generally good news, but can marketers control their spending and optimize the results in this chaos?

If an advertiser is working with a blind network, there isn’t much they can do to track results by site or affiliate. You can never really predict results as you don’t control which affiliates or sites are running your offers. So what should advertisers do?

The two remaining options: transparent, or half-transparent (or half-blind, depending on how you look at it), will support an advertiser’s efforts to do better business, but only one of these really comes through for the advertiser.

On completely transparent networks, an advertiser can view a list of publishers running their offers and find out which publishers or sites are bringing them the most impressions & clicks. But it’s very possible that only 1/10 of the sites actually generate the results from beyond the click. Many networks and publishers prefer that the advertiser will not know this, fearing that the advertiser will optimize the campaign by limiting it to the best performing sites (which creates more work for the network employees to do, and leads to less revenue for the network…). When networks do this, they are ignoring the simple fact that the advertiser will drop the network entirely if the results are generally not good…

Some advertisers still choose to go with a transparent network without the ability to track results by site. I ask you: Why? Does it help the advertiser to know that an expert PPC affiliate c

alled: “expertPPCaff1982” is running their campaign, if they won’t know how good the long term results are from this affiliate?
I recommend that an online advertiser today use a sort of modified transparent network, which allows them to independently track a few parameters. While the name of the network can remain static, other parameters should be dynamic. A good example of this is tracking the performance by site or affiliate in an independent system.

Sounds like a lot of data? It is.

Sounds like a lot of work? It’s not really.

By tracking results per site/affiliate, advertisers can periodically analyze data to optimize and improve the results of the campaign over time.

Using this dynamic method of tracking will allow advertisers to find sites/affiliates within the network where there’s a high potential for quality traffic, and as every advertiser knows, finding quality sources is like finding gold! For these strong performers, advertisers can raise payouts or create customized marketing material or landing pages to increase the level of quality traffic. The opposite is also true; tracking also allows advertisers to spot which sites or affiliates drive lower quality traffic and make one of two calls: drop the site/affiliate from the campaign or optimize the creatives/landing pages to improve the results.

I always recommend that advertisers use a simple numeric site/affiliate ID, enough to get control over the results of their campaigns, and I encourage advertisers to identify sites or affiliates that drive quality traffic, which leads to a solid, trusting, relationship and mutual success. A true “win-win” situation.

I admit, for the advertiser it’s sometimes a hassle to manage a large advertising budget online on multiple channels with multiple CPA /ROI targets, but it the long run it’s worth it!

So my tip this time is pretty simple: It’s better to have at least one eye to see the true results than being totally blind. You don’t want to miss out on the amazing things you’ll stumble upon!

Grupo

Matomy Media Group

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