Growing audience and sales using new types of affiliate partners
With any marketing activity you are always looking for more. More sales, more revenue, more traffic, more, more, more!
It’s no doubt the same for your affiliate programme. You might have been running your programme for a while, or might have just launched it. Regardless, affiliate recruitment is an on-going process. It should be something that you never stop doing as there will always be new and exciting affiliates emerging, or potential partnerships that you have yet to explore.
I tend to summarise the reasons for affiliate recruitment into four main areas.
The first thing you need to be sure of is that you have the biggest volume drivers on your programme. While these affiliates may only account for 20% of the programme they might contribute 80% of the sales, so make sure you…
How Programmatic Marketing will transform E-Commerce
E-commerce, which now accounts for 8% of all retail sales in the U.S., is already growing quickly. But that rapid growth is likely just the beginning. The rise of programmatic marketing promises to make selling and buying over the Internet easier and more efficient than ever. Let’s take a quick look at the future of e-commerce.
By now you may have heard about Site Retargeting
What is Site Retargeting?
Site Retargeting, a marketing technique that targets users with display ads after they visit a site with the aim of bringing them back for a conversion. For example, if you look at a couch on the site of a furniture retailer, you might then browse to another site and see a display ad for the couch you just viewed.
Site Retargeting has now evolved into Programmatic Site Retargeting (PSR). Whereas basic Site Retargeting targets primarily by the page a user…
Which brands are using Instagram effectively?
Instagram and advertising. It seems to be causing quite the stir as the Instagram user-base has already made it clear that they don’t want to see the platform commercialised by Zuckerberg. For example, late 2012 saw Instagram’s terms of service change and then change back when users objected to the possibility that their photos would be used in ads.
Brands just need some imagination
Whereas Zuckerberg may struggle to easily monetise his Billion Dollar investment, the reality for brands is that they don’t need to wait for advertising to gain exposure in Instagram, they need some imagination. There are a number of brands doing this already and surprisingly, Instagram users seem to love them for it.
A number of brands have adapted well to the nature of Instagram and its users, appreciating that ‘exposure’ comes with adding value to the Instagram community, not trying to interrupt it. Companies…
Five steps to clean up your on-page act
If you were to take a survey of blog posts on SEO in the last year I’d be willing to hazard over 60 per cent concern themselves with content marketing and online PR – what we used to call off-page SEO. Attracting links to your website using good quality content is crucial to SEO, but it's worth remembering it’s immaterial if your site is not technically healthy...
By that I mean your website needs to be set up so it’s easy to crawl for the Googlebots, while also optimising for users at the same time. Often even the smallest on-site changes can have significant impact on your search rankings so they should be at the top of your to-do list. If you aren’t already, here are five steps you should take to optimise your on-page.
5 steps to optimise on-page
1. Don’t over-optimise
Stuffing keywords into your…
4 Steps to creating a plan for online customer acquisition
Having a digital marketing strategy for your organisation is essential to ensure your marketing activities are supporting specific marketing objectives. The rise in the number of different digital channels available to target your customer base continues to grow as shown by this BIG list of todays customer acquisition channels by David Sealey, so withough without a sound framework in place to manage, monitor and measure organisation performance, not having a digital communications plan could prove disastrous.
In a previous post, I provided an actionable plan to help create a retention strategy using key digital tactics. Retention by its definition is 'maintaining or preserving your existing customer base loyal to your product offering.
This post will is an introduction to creating an outline framework to create a plan for online customer acquisition techniques - defined as tactics to help drive traffic or generating a lead or purchase…
Measuring mobile activity with Google's mobile calculator
eBay Europe recently reported that UK consumer spend on mobile has increased by 55% year on year, and is set to grow a further 115% over the next 12 months. Olivier Ropars, Senior Director of mCommerce at eBay Europe urges retailers to 'act now to turn this opportunity into an exciting reality'.
I’d argue that leading retailers have made a serious investment in mobile already to improve the shopper experience throughout the purchase cycle.
The IAB’s mobile retail audit of the top 50 UK retailers shows that most have invested in mobile: 74% now have mobile optimized sites, 62% have a mobile app, 48% have optimized their mobile search, and 14% have WiFi in-store. Leading brands are seeing healthy returns: eBay generated $8 billion in sales from mobile last year.
But the mobile opportunity which Ropars describes is far from…
This research report from Quantcast is particularly interesting, especially given their specialist expertise in the display advertising category.
The premiss of their report is essentially
People who are on a website have different needs to those searching for one, yet digital marketers look to optimise for clicks in similar ways.
Search advertising is an understood CPC (cost per click) model, where buyers have an intent and are served advertising that they’re interested in. In short, if you’re happy with the CPC, it works.
People on a website tend to want the information on the website, not look to click a banner and leave it, there is a reason or intention to click away at the earliest opportunity - regardless of whether it’s a display ad or link.
Click conversion is better aligned to where there’s purchase intent and a desire to click. This is inevitably lower down the sales funnel.
Click measurement is not a…
A checklist and examples of all the key AdWords changes you should review
2013 has seen some of the biggest shake-ups in Google AdWords to date. For example Enhanced Campaigns became mandatory on the 22nd of July, so this post looks at some of the recent changes to AdWords and how you can use them to your advantage.
Device Targeting and Bid Adjustments
The most controversial change from Enhanced Campaigns has delivered is the shake up with device targeting. In previous times, best practice has always been to target mobiles and tablets in separate campaigns (away from desktop campaigns) because they perform differently. This also allowed the advertiser control over the split in spend between tablet, mobile and desktop.
The AdWords interface has now changed so dramatically that you can no longer target tablets separately because Google believe they perform in the same way as desktop devices (in my experience they don’t, but who…
A great summary of the key decisions you need to take to rank in different countries
Making SEO effective for site(s) in different countries has been a long-standing challenge for ranking in local markets. Google has introduced different tools in recent years to help, but you need to be aware of them. Jimmy McCann summarised these in his checklist of 10 common international SEO mistakes to avoid and we also detail the techniques in our 7 Step Guide to SEO.
Now Aleyda Solis, a widely recognised leading International SEO Expert in Spain, who has produced a fantastic summary in this step-by-step SEO checklist of issues to consider in this infographic.
We are sharing this as it provides actionable steps for companies growing their overseas traffic in new or existing countries.
…
LinkedIn July 2013 updates: New Sponsored Updates and Company Page Analytics
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: LinkedIn sponsored updates and Company Page Analytics update
Here are a couple of LinkedIn announcements from July that are both useful for B2B marketers to be aware of. They're both related to company pages.
First, you can now sponsor updates to give them more visibility in people's feeds - like Promoted Posts on Facebook and Promoted Tweets on Twitter. Spotting a pattern here? In this case, they're Sponsored Updates.
All companies with a business page can now reach out further to members on the network, similar to existing paid advertising on LinkedIn, and reach a targeted profile of LinkedIn members outside of their Followers or groups who may not be familiar with them. These will likely get much higher clickthrough rates and so more revenue for LinkedIn compared to the existing incidental ads which are easier…
