AffiliateBenchmarks Report Released

December 7th, 2009

Last month, NETexponent’s research division announced the general availability of its second annual report.  The report is based on the results of the most comprehensive survey of the affiliate industry to date.  Not only did Affiliatebenchmarks (with the help of key partners such as Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, Shareasale, Linkshare, MediaTrust and more) secure over 3500 survey respondents, they also grouped respondents into categories based on affiliate advertising income and experience in the space.  This strategy allowed for deep analysis into different profile segments and the unique opportunities and challenges for each.

The 2009 AffiliateBenchmarks report is also the only one of its kind to collect data for the benefit of affiliates rather than strictly for advertisers.  The digital advertising industry is evolving and changing by the moment.  Because many affiliates are getting into the space on a part-time or hobby basis, it’s important they have an up to date resource of information to turn to for maximum return on their time and resources in the channel.  That’s not to say, however, that advertisers can not also benefit from the report.  In fact, the insights into the preferences and practices of affiliates today are invaluable for advertisers looking to forge the most lucrative relationships.

One thing that is clearly evidence by the report is that the affiliate industry is growing at an incredible pace.  In fact, nearly half of all survey respondents joined the industry in the past two years alone.  The growth and momentum in this industry further speaks to the importance of research and education as a foundation for new affiliates to come quickly up to speed on the best practices and leading techniques that are driving success for more established affiliates.  This report contains data on which merchant categories will likely produce the greatest revenue for affiliates and the best of all the tried-and-true methods of driving traffic to your site.

What this report provides affiliates is a one-stop shop resource and a wealth of insight on how to grow their businesses and become more successful in their techniques and practices.  Affiliates will learn what networks are getting high marks from their peers, what advertising channels are returning high profits, what types of programs (and how many) successful affiliates belong to and why- and much more!  More established affiliates can turn to the report as a watermark to learn how their practices compare to those of their competitors.

Response from the overall affiliate and advertising industry has been extremely positive, and we are already looking forward to expanding on the report in the next year.  To download the full AffiliateBenchmarks 2009 report, visit: http://affiliatebenchmarks.com/products-page/.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing, Research by Alex W. | | 0 Comments

Amazon Kindle 2 - First Impressions

February 25th, 2009

What does the Amazon Kindle 2 have to do with search and affiliate marketing you might ask? Well I will tell you…

A. NETexponent manages paid search and affiliate marketing programs for leading companies in the audio book and ebook markets. Kindle is an ebook reader and can play audio books. I strongly believe that we cannot effectively market our clients products and services unless we fully understand their market. Kindle has small market share but plenty of buzz and opportunity for fast growth.

B. Kindle has Wispernet, Amazons 3G wireless network that allows Kindle users to connect to Amazon anywhere they go. This technology is a new way for users to shop and the fact that Amazon provides it for free is very interesting. Could this be used for email? web browsing? general e-commerce?

C. Kindle users can read books, blogs, newspapers, and listen to audio books. Ads are stripped out of blogs and newspapers but they could come back and i wanted to see what the experience was like.

D. Finally, I just plain love gadgets and new tech

So…Here are my first impressions

Pre-Kindle 2

I did not own a Kindle 1 so I am not sure how Amazon handled the launch of that product. The first thing Amazon did really well was send an email to me a few days before my Kindle shipped welcoming me to the Kindle family and telling me to get ready for my new Kindle’s arrival by building my library at Amazon.com. It was a nice email, not salesy.

Arrival

My Kindle 2 shipped early and arrived via 2-day shipping when I only ordered via regular 5-day. All in all I got my Kindle 8 days early! Great management of expectations here. Amazon clearly under promised and over delivered. (this is a trick well known to Dell and Zappos customers)

My First Time

The Kindle came pre-charged so I didnt need to wait a while to charge it. (nothing worse than getting a new toy and having to wait to use it) There is NO set-up necessary. Amazon pre-programmed my Kindle with the email and one click account settings associated with the account I used to make the purchase originally. Brilliant! The Wispernet (wireless 3G) service was already enabled and connected out of the box. Pre-loaded on the Kindle was instructions (no need to waste paper on these) and a nice welcome note from belly laughing Bezos

The screen resolution is very clear and it reminded me of an old black and white palm pilot. Nothing sexy about the resolution but it is easy on the eyes so reading long hours would not be an issue. The Kindle itself is really small…it is actually THINNER THAN MY IPHONE. The dimensions are about 1.75 IPhones long and 1.2 IPhones wide.

I quickly figured out how to download a book and bought an issue of The Financial Times, another great NETexponent client. (we love supporting our clients) The purchase only took a few seconds and the download only a few more. I had my first Kindle purchase all set in less than a minute. This speaks volumes about the Wispernet speed. (which I could easily see being used for reading text email)

Speaking volumes is a great transition to another functionality the text to speech option on Kindle, where the device will convert any text into spoken word. You can listen via the internal speaker or through headphones. Our audio book client team was especially interested in this function. I was surprised how good it sounded. It sounded no worse than any GPS device on the market and certainly way better than the Speak-And-Spell voice I imagined.

I was disappointed because I could not find any way to download audio books and play them on the Kindle. I know it is possible but I could not figure out how to do it on my first attempts. If anyone knows how to do this please tell me via comments.

Posted in NETexponent Clients, Online Marketing, Research by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

What Role Will Display Advertising Play In Your 2009 Marketing Plan?

November 24th, 2008

Many companies are slashing their marketing budgets and evaluating how marketing dollars are spent due to the tough economic times. Slashing budgets is a clear sign that “Lean and Mean” is the current theme for many businesses. On average most research suggests that (while growing) online advertising still only represents less than 10% of where marketing dollars are spent. Yet even online advertising budgets are getting scrutinized.

For advertisers who wish to get the best ROI (Return On Investment) for their online marketing dollar the focus tends to shift to display advertising and whether or not they should keep spending in that category. We all know that display advertising (eg banner ads on websites bought on CPM or cost per thousand impressions) is typically the hardest online advertising initiative to measure. Comparatively, CPA (cost per acquisition) campaigns can be directly tied to ROI.

Therefore, when under pressure to justify every marketing dollar spent the inclination is to slash display advertising budgets and increase more accountable marketing channels such as affiliate marketing. At the surface this seems to make sense. However, if you take a holistic approach to looking at this situation you may find that display advertising plays an important role.

At NETexponent we have seen how display advertising can boost other online marketing efforts such as paid search and affiliate programs. We evaluate all marketing channels in order to get a holistic view of our clients’ online marketing effort. This outlook has shown us time and time again that spikes and dips in performance driven marketing channels such as search and affiliate can sometimes be directly related to display advertising efforts. When significant display advertising campaigns are running for clients we usually see a boost in traffic and conversions in other online marketing channels. Therefore, display advertising can play an important role even in ROI focused advertising efforts.

Measuring the impact of display advertising on other media channels and choosing the right allocation of marketing dollars is where the tricky part comes in to play. I am not advocating that all advertisers go out and boost display ad spending because it may not have the impact they want. It is true that even boosts in performance related to display could come at a price that is too high for advertisers. My main point is that companies should evaluate the impact display advertising has on other online campaigns and use that data to determine exactly how much spend to allocate to this channel in order to maximize online marketing ROI.

Posted in Display Advertising, Meet Us, NETexponent Clients, Online Marketing, Research by Peter Figueredo | | 3 Comments

NETexponent Launches New Research Division AffiliateBenchmarks

November 12th, 2008

It gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of the newest division of NETexponent

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing, Research by Erica M. | | 1 Comments

Yahoo Still Has Big Audience

August 14th, 2008

Based on the Nielsen numbers below Yahoo is still able to capture lots of eyeballs. Yahoo is beating out NBC in Olympic related traffic. Just a reminder that while Google may dominate search, Yahoo still has some highly trafficked content areas. So keep that in mind when structuring your search marketing strategy.

Posted in Research, Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 1 Comments

Affiliate Survey Completed

August 9th, 2008

We are pleased to announce that our Affiliate Survey effort was a huge success. NETexponent created and distributed a 23-question survey designed to collect information about affiliates’ wants, needs, and experiences in the affiliate marketing space. We received over 500 responses from a diverse mix of affiliates across different affiliate networks such as CJ, Performics, LinkShare, ShareASale, and others. The questions these affiliates answered are listed below. Special thanks to all of the great affiliates who participated. Survey results are being compiled and will be sent out soon.

To request a copy of the results please email: GetResults (at) NETexponent (dot) com.

1. How many affiliate programs have you joined?
2. How many affiliate programs are promoted on your site (or sites) in an average month?
3. Out of all of the merchants that you promote on your site, approximately what percentage of them generated at least one order for you last month?
4. How many employees does your company have?
5. When evaluating an affiliate program, does the affiliate technology play a role in deciding whether or not to apply?
6. Please choose your Top Three Affiliate Technologies from the list below.
7. From the list below, please pick three items that you find to be the most valuable when promoting an affiliate program.
8. What are the three most important items you look at when deciding if you want to join an affiliate program?
9. With regards to communication, how many newsletters do you receive in a week?
10. How often do you like to receive newsletters?
11. Please select your preferred method of messaging for each type of communication. Please choose one method of contact for each.
12. With regards to banners, do you prefer to host the images yourself or do you allow the network technologies to host?
13. How do video advertisements perform on your website?
14. If you run flash ad units, please tell us how they perform.
15. Which of the following methods do you use to drive traffic to your site?
16. Do you currently charge a fee to list advertisers on your site?
17. Do you currently provide advertisers the opportunity to buy paid placements or sponsorships on your site(s)?
18. If you are currently running Google Adsense on your site, please tell us what drives more revenue for your site.
19. Please check any advertiser types that generate strong revenue.
20. What is the average conversion rate you see for the categories you selected above?
21. What is the average age of your visitors?
22. Please provide us with the percentage of male and female users on your site.
23. What is the average household income of your users?

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Research by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Search Insights Provided By Google

August 6th, 2008

Google just added some great info to its Google Trends tool. Primarily geared towards marketers, this new data can tell companies more about what their competitors are doing online. A quick search on one of our clients and their top two competitors yielded some very interesting results. Looking at this info alone it may not seem incredibly valuable…but the trained eye of a search and affiliate expert will now see that this data could provide:

• prospective affiliates to recruit (sites also visited by users on competitor websites) NOTE: this list can be expanded further by clicking on the sites listed and see their “also visited” sites. (I would not go farther than 2 levels down here)
• affiliates allowed to bid on key search terms
• prospective keywords that could be successful based on competitive activity
• areas for geotargeting based on competitor traffic

just to name a few

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Research, Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Google Assigns Branding Value To Search

July 21st, 2008

MediaPost has a short piece on Google’s recent study that shows the branding effect of paid search and SEO. Of course Google benefits from this data since it leads advertisers to believe they can afford to pay more for PPC search in order to capitalize on the “branding” value. The article seems to think that most advertisers do not take the “free branding” aspect into consideration when buying PPC search terms.

I don’t know about other advertisers but I can certainly say that NETexponent clients are ahead of the game in this area. Most of the clients using our search marketing services have already placed a branding value on key search terms. To this extent we even manage these terms differently than the rest of their efficiency driven search campaigns. Terms that are important to building our clients’ brand are typically placed in a bucket we call “brand critical” and optimized to different metrics and goals. The performance of brand critical keywords is evaluated on a revenue basis as well as their impact on brand building efforts.

The tolerance for CPCs related to branding vs. acquisition will always differ depending on the advertiser’s specific goals so our team uses a custom approach in every case. However, I thought it was important to note that NETexponent clients seem to be ahead of the curve according to how Google sees the PPC search marketplace.

This is yet another reason we love working with smart clients.

Posted in NETexponent Clients, Research, Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Google Launches Media Planning Platform

June 24th, 2008

Google has moved one step closer to integrating full display media buying capabilities with yesterday’s announcement of Google Ad Planner. Right now this is a bare bones research tool that you have to export into a more robust tool like Doubleclick MediaVisor in order to do a complete media buy but one has to believe this is only the first step in what will be a much bigger piece of Google’s business moving forward.

Google invested $3.1 billion dollars in the acquisition of DoubleClick and while I don’t normally make predictions for this sort of thing I think there are some interesting things we might expect to see in the next 12 months as a results of this deal:

• Free ad serving - just like they bought Urchin and gave away the analytics, one can easily see the value in giving away ad serving in order to get the advertiser adoption and data that Google wants.
• Free media planning and buying tools - Ad Planner is the first step, but real agency media buyers need a complete end to end solution. I expect Google will give this away as well in order to drive more online ad buying through their network.
• Integrated data / order attribution - Right now customers are hitting multiple advertising touch points such as display, search, affiliate, etc and marketers have the challenge of properly crediting each channel with their “share” of the order. DoubleClick already has this technology and I would expect this to be integrated into Google Analytics at some point soon.
• Behavioral targeting capabilities - This will be a tricky one. Google now sits in the middle of a massive amount of data and would have the ability to serve ads based on past search and browsing habits. There will definitely be privacy concerns and although the value to advertisers would be great, the consumer backlash could be a big problem.

Posted in Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Research by Chris Kramer | | 0 Comments

Google Research Proves Value Of Search And Affiliate

June 16th, 2008

Search marketing behemoth, Google, released a study today that demonstrates how newspaper ads help drive users to the web. They also note (not surprisingly) that 69% of users who conducted research online used Google while only 19% used Yahoo. Here is a nice graphic of their findings.

This research points out another way that different marketing mediums support one another. Users are doing more and more of their research online everyday. Consumers are now more educated than ever because they have tons of data available at their fingertips. Different advertising mediums reach different consumers in different ways but the trend certainly seems to be that many consumers end up researching their purchase online before buying. This further strengthens the need for companies to run effective organic and paid search marketing campaign.

Whether intentional or not, this study could also show the importance of advertising on affiliate sites and shopping comparison websites. As you can see from the study, the highest % of consumers who purchased came from shopping related sites. I have not been able to find how this category is defined but based on its description you can assume it is referencing shopping comparison websites and shopping related websites. Shopping comparison websites such as bizrate.com and pricegrabber.com have grown in importance over the last few years so it’s no surprise to see this data. However, many top affiliate websites are also shopping related such as those focused on coupons and incentives. For example, flamingoworld.com, couponcabin.com, upromise.com, cashbaq.com, and others.

Perhaps this second bit of learning is why Google decided to retain the affiliate marketing component of Performics and sell off its search side only.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Research, Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments