ats that make the most sense for them or their company. For instance, each company department could develop its own distinct dashboard to quickly access site performance statistics that relate to department goals. Keep in mind:

To read later

AdWords Remarketing: A Step-by-Step Guide

October 7 by Pamela Lund

Retargeting, or remessaging, is an advertising strategy that allows you to target users who have visited your website with ads to entice them to return to your site. It is generally used to encourage users who didn’t convert to come back to complete a purchase or other conversion step. But, it can also be used for a variety of reasons including product upsells, branding and social engagement. AdWords Remarketing is Google’s version of retargeting advertising. It is an easy platform to get started with retargeting in an interface that you’re already used to as an AdWords customer.

Setting up AdWords Remarketing

Identifying Your Audiences

Audiences are the groups of people you want to target or groups of people you want to exclude from targeting. Audiences will be unique to your business. You will need to determine which pages will be triggers to retarget users and which pages will remove that retargeting — each of these is an audience. You will include or exclude these audiences for each ad group to ensure you are targeting the right people. This is achieved with custom combinations, discussed in detail below.

1. Audience: People who visited a key page

• If a user viewed a page with details about a specific product or service, target them with ads about that offering

Custom combination: People who added an item to a shopping cart but didn’t complete the purchase

• The “added to shopping cart” audience included and the “complete purchase” audience excluded
• Entice these users back to complete the purchase with a free shipping or discount offer

2. Audience: People who signed up to receive information about future product releases

• When the product is released, target these users with ads for that product

Custom combination: People who visited part 1 in a content series but didn’t return for part 2

• The “viewed part 1 page” audience included and the “viewed part 2 page” audience excluded
• Delayed targeting (discussed below) can be used to schedule targeting at optimal int

IF something happens e.g. a photo of you is tagged THEN you can do something (THAT) such as add to a dropbox - going to give this a try later!

Matt Swan, Client Strategist at Affiliate Window & buy.at explains how to ensure the successful launch and development of an affiliate campaign

Launch Phase

When launching, it’s essential that objectives are in place from the offset. Is the intention to drive sales volume or to increase brand exposure across a significant number of affiliate partners? By understanding this, a suitable strategy can be created and implemented prior to initial launch.

In the launch phase it’s important to generate awareness of the programme. By utilising an effective communications strategy, the campaign will be front of mind to affiliates. Account managers will be aware of affiliates that are a good brand fit and will be able to engage with these partners to join the programme. Additional communication channels such as the A4u forum and network blogs can be utilised to inform affiliates of the campaign launch.

It’s important to be aware of what competitors are offering - both in terms of affiliate commissions and also customer proposition. An affiliate programme needs to remain competitive for affiliates to promote it. While the commission rate offered is likely to attract affiliates, if the consumer offer isn’t strong enough to attract conversions, publishers are less likely to promote the programme.

Once launched, it’s important that affiliate approvals are carried out regularly. Affiliates identified as having a strong brand fit and ones likely to drive volume should be personally invited to join the programme and immediately approved.

Additionally, it is imperative that timely sales validations occur. If sales are left pending for a lengthy period of time, affiliates are unsure as to whether they will be validated. With this uncertainty, they may be unwilling to re-invest in further promotion.

Growth

Following the successful launch of the campaign, advertisers should take stock of their programme. It’s important to understand if campaign objectives are being met and whether there are any gaps within the current mix of affiliates promoting.

More targeted affiliate recruitment should occur during this phase. Learn from the current affiliate base, to recruit similar affiliates to those that are currently performing well on the programme. It is important to build relationships with top performing partners. It’s beneficial to understand how they are promoting your brand and what additional scope there is for increased exposure – whether this is onsite placements or inclusions within targeted email newsletters.

Top performing products and offers should be outlined in order to aide affiliate promotion. Any additional insight advertisers can provide will help their affiliate base convert traffic to sales.

Maturity & Assessing Value

As the campaign continues to mature, reviewing and optimising the campaign is crucial for future success.

By this stage advertisers will have amassed a significant amount of data. This allows for benchmarking across other online channels. Traditionally, being premised on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model, the affiliate channel has proven to be a cost effective one. Benchmarking will allow advertisers to ensure that this continues.

Additionally advertisers will have acquired data around each of their affiliate partners. Previously, advertisers may only have been concerned about sales volumes - they are now beginning to scrutinise the value of these customers. Metrics such as new customer delivery, average order values and lifetime values of customers are important factors when assessing quality.

When the value of top partners has been ascertained, advertisers are able to work more strategically to ensure they deliver valuable customers. For example, if one partner has slightly lower than average AOV’s, what could be done tactically to drive these basket values up? Similarly, if another affiliate is seeing a high proportion of existing customers how could you help attract new customers? Working closely with key partners is vital to see continued growth for a mature programme.

Once the programme has seen initial levels of success, it is essential to analyse the value being driven by individual partners so the channel can continue to be one that delivers a significant return on investment.

Matt Swan
Client Strategist, Affiliate Window & buy.at

 

 

Top tips: The vital quarter- Preparing for Christmas 2011

October 27, 2011

As the festive season approaches, how can affiliate marketers capitalise on the consumer rush? Owen Hewitson, Client Strategist, Affiliate Window & buy.at offers some tips on the peak days on the ecommerce calendar to prepare for, and which types of affiliates will have the most success this Christmas...

Christmas is a two-stage event

For affiliate marketers Christmas is essentially a game of two halves, their efforts divided between the pre-Christmas rush and the post-Christmas sales.

This means affiliates have to focus on both on the key period in early December, whilst preparing for ongoing post-Christmas sales where retailers are likely to respond to intense competition by varying the start dates of their sales.

For their part, advertisers have to retain enough flexibility in their carefully-planned marketing calendars to take advantage of affiliate opportunities arising at short notice, using them to convert potential customers before they buy elsewhere.

Which days will be biggest?

Last year the import by Amazon of Black Friday, the traditional start of Christmas trading in the US following Thanksgiving, produced a flurry of headlines anticipating an early sales peak. Monday 29th November – ‘Manic Monday’ – was predicted by some to overtake the first Monday in December (the traditional peak) coming right after payday and fuelled by the early discounting of 2009.

Whilst Monday 6th December remained the biggest day on the Affiliate Window network, an early start spurred by Amazon’s Lightening Deals at the end of November looks likely again.

Post-Christmas Day, no clear peak stood out in 2010 due to staggered sale dates. Whilst Boxing Day has historically been the focus, sales through tablet devices may herald an unexpected sales bounce on Christmas Day itself.

Affiliate Window saw sales from the iPad overtake the iPhone for the first time on Christmas Day last year, perhaps because shortly after unwrapping their iPads new owners went online and bought something.

Whilst there is not expected to be a UK pre-Christmas release for the Kindle Fire, iPads 2 and 1 are sure to be popular gifts, and have consistently converted at rates better than the network average. This could fuel a significant sales spike on 25th which affiliate marketers might want to prepare for.

What types of affiliates will do best?

The promotional methods affiliates used to generate the most commissions last Christmas did not differ from what Affiliate Window records at other times. Plotting affiliate commissions over Christmas shows a strong correlation between those that use content and those that use incentives as their dominant promotional method. There were however some interesting anomalies.

Affiliates specialising in email appear to have missed a trick. Whilst peaks and troughs characterise email marketing, their peak was on Monday 13thDecember, with far fewer commissions earned the previous Monday despite this being the top trading day network-wide.

Paid search providers also saw a late peak. Thursday 16th December proved to be their most lucrative day, likely due to stronger calls to action in ad text focused on encroaching last delivery dates.

For their part, comparison affiliates found the post-Christmas period more lucrative. Thanks to the introduction of the VAT increase on 4th January this was by far the highest earning day for comparison sites.

Whilst it has traditionally been thought that price comparison figures earlier on in customers’ purchase paths but loses out as the last referrer, perhaps suddenly finding that their goods cost 2.5% more made consumers less eager to shop around aggregating incentives like cashback and voucher codes to calculate the best price.

When the last order date passes

Consumers have plenty of opportunities to shop online even after the last delivery date passes. Affiliates can switch their efforts at this point to promoting advertisers that offer gift vouchers or downloadable products catering for last minute shoppers unwilling to endure the hassles of the high street. For shoppers still willing to venture outside, retailers such as Debenhams have shown how award-winning campaigns can be conducted using geo-targeted incentives available through affiliates’ apps to drive increase footfall and new customers on the high street.

More broadly, mobile transactions tracked on Affiliate Window have almost quadrupled since last December, and eDigital Research reported that 22% of users reached for their mobiles when doing their Christmas shopping last year.

The broad consensus amongst speakers at the recent a4u Expo that mobile was the trend to watch out for next year is telling: affiliates which can build case studies from their work this Christmas will be advertisers’ first pick in 2012.

Expecting the unexpected

Two one-off events had a significant impact on last Christmas. First, the heavy snowfall from 24th November – 26th December reduced footfall on the high street and, according to estimates by Toluna and Econsultancy, this delayed 26% of deliveries.

Second, January’s VAT increase pushed consumers into buying higher value items sooner. Increases in the home appliances, electronics, computing and furniture sectors saw AOVs on Affiliate Window peak at £122 compared to a £65 average. Perhaps the lesson to take from this is to prepare for the impact of contingent one-off events and retain flexibility in budget, resource and time to react to them.

By Owen Hewitson
Client Strategist
Affiliate Window & buy.at
www.affiliatewindow.com/

To read later

DI DI DI DIIIII

Studies Show Search Ads Drive 89% Incremental Traffic

Thursday, July 21, 2011 | 7/21/2011 08:10:00 AM

Labels: search ads

Posted by David Chan and Lizzy Van Alstine, Quantitative Management Team

Advertisers often wonder whether search ads cannibalize their organic traffic. In other words, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic results increase, and make up for the loss in paid traffic? Google statisticians recently ran over 400 studies on paused accounts to answer this question.

In what we call “Search Ads Pause Studies”, our group of researchers observed organic click volume in the absence of search ads. Then they built a statistical model to predict the click volume for given levels of ad spend using spend and organic impression volume as predictors. These models generated estimates for the incremental clicks attributable to search ads (IAC), or in other words, the percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused.

The results were surprising. On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals. The full study can be found on here.

Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook

Next time someone asks if they really need PPC as well as SEO