Archive for the ‘td Search’ Category

What do Facebook’s new tools mean for affiliates?

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Last week saw the latest installment of F8, the Facebook developer conference in San Francisco. F8 traditionally has been where Facebook unveil its new product launches and this event was the most significant yet with definite wider implications for the affiliate community.

It will also be remembered for the definitive moment when Facebook set coordinates for a direct head-on ‘fight for the future’ between itself and Google (more on this to come…).

The over-arching theme of the conference was that of the effect of social media in moving the Web towards an interlinking series of ‘connections’ between people and their respective interests. On a mass scale, this provides developers (and ultimately affiliates and advertisers) with a powerful tool to target and add value to users.

Mark Zukerberg (CEO) and Bret Taylor (Head of Platform Products and Founder of FriendFeed, which Facebook acquired at the back end of last year) showed off three major launches that are of note to the affiliate marketing industry:

  • Social Plug-ins
  • Open Graph Protocol
  • Graph API

These all go hand-in-hand….

Social Plug-ins

“Instantly engaging social experiences (with just one line of HTML)”

Facebook will have the ability to stretch into each and every content driven website by offering developers and affiliates the opportunity to integrate a number of key Facebook features (or ‘plug-ins’).

The most significant of these is the ‘Like’ button. You’ll recognise this from the Facebook Fan pages and as the option on every status update/picture/event that appears on your Facebook interface.

The Like button currently allows you to quickly and easily inform your friends when you have positively engaged with something they have posted on their pages. This is now being offered to publishers to allow users to see when their friends have ‘Liked’ a piece of content on their site. Importantly, these are external sites not currently in the Facebook universe.

For example, right now you can go to an article on CNN.com and see which of your friends have Liked it. Obviously, this means your users are much more likely to read and engage with content that their friends have recommended. For more information on the Like button, see this post on the td Blog.

Other plug-ins that will be available are a ‘Recommended’ box offering recommendations based on your previous liked/friends-liked objects, an ‘Activities’ feed and also a toolbar which sits at the bottom of a publisher’s page.

The toolbar is interesting as it offers developers (and Facebook) a very strategic and flexible platform to engage with users over a multitude of sites. It includes basic Facebook functions such as Chat and Updates, but also has room for developers to input their own applications.

For affiliates, this is significant for a couple of reasons. We saw with the Google changes (Nov 09-Jan 10) a turning point in our industry’s relationship with Google. The search giant demanded affiliates improve the quality of their sites to ensure they add value to the Google users’ purchase decision via PPC advertising. As many of you in the industry will know, this brought many affiliates solely reliant on search traffic to their knees with some businesses sadly unable to make it through this period; ceasing trading or shifting focus altogether.

Then, through Real-Time Search, Personalised Search and Caffeine, we saw Google asking publishers to integrate a greater level of Social Media for SEO. See the td Blog for more information on how these affected affiliates.

With the plug-ins, affiliates will be able to,  quickly and relatively easily, bring a greater level of social media to their sites, which should translate to Google ranking affiliates higher in natural SERPS due to relevant, fresh and updated content.

One possible drawback of the social plug-ins could be that users are dwelling longer on the sticky content and, subsequently, conversion rates dip. However, it could also be argued that the users that ARE being pushed through to the merchant are of a higher quality as they have had more information in their purchase path). This will undoubtedly be a balancing act for affiliates in 2010.

“A handful of launch partners were announced and, in the UK, those are film site LOVEFiLM, Sky, ESPNCricInfo and MyDeco. The benefit for them is a powerful personal recommendation tool, from a site with a very broad audience base that will help drive traffic.

For LOVEFiLM, it means every film and actor’s page will have a Facebook ‘like’ option, which is likely to increase their traffic as people share their film tastes with their friends, and also gives them data to display the site’s most ‘liked’ content on their homepage.” – Guardian Media

The biggest take-away from this development is that Facebook is offering affiliates an important new set of tools to reduce reliance on Google for traffic levels.

Open Graph Protocol

“Any webpage can now easily become part of the social graph”

In the previous CNN.com example we looked at a user ‘Liking’ a review or article; once this is clicked the link to CNN will also be visible on that user’s Facebook page. From a brand point of view it extends reach and, from a product/affiliate point of view, you can see how the promotion of a specific offer/voucher code can spiral out into a user’s friend circle.

“…You gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish to the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics through our revamped Insights product.” – Bret Taylor, Head of Platform Products, Facebook

This is Facebook effectively trying to map out (as they have done on their own platform) each individual on the Web as whole; their habits, their likes, their friends’ likes, and then offering (via the social plug-ins) the ‘correct’ recommendation for that person at that time.

Again, with targeted recommendations, we can work towards both high volume and conversion rates on affiliate traffic.

I believe it is inevitable that we will see privacy issues to begin with, but I don’t think anyone is anticipating this to hold back development.

Graph API

“A drastically simplified way for developers to use the Facebook Platform”

Alongside all of this great new data will be a new API for developers to search the social graph that Facebook’s new tools are enabling. Developers are offered access to the Open Graph API, which they can pull as a live feed of Facebook data (significantly, due to privacy concerns, Facebook had only previously allowed developers to access their own API once every 24 hours. This policy has now been scrapped).

“We’ve enabled a search feature which lets you search over objects like people and events, and over the stream — both public stream updates and personalized ones for your users. In addition, the graph is ever-changing, so we’re launching real-time updates to let you subscribe to updates to user data.” – Bret Taylor, Facebook Product Manager

This is interesting for search affiliates as (as many have been guessing for a while now) Facebook would be incredibly well-placed to deliver a semantic search engine type product. As the keener minded among you may guess, this would put them (due to their massive size!) into a very Google-y space in the market.

“Facebook is trying to add socially intelligent metadata to the entire Web — this is a move that puts Google in its crosshairs. Google can use its gobs and gobs of data to infer what Web pages are about, but it has so far failed to execute on any of its social projects and therefore doesn’t really have a good idea of how these pages matter to real people.” – VentureBeat

Overall, it would mean that potentially search affiliates would be able to deliver targeted campaigns across a 400-million person audience. Having spoken to a fair few affiliates this week, it appears that the ball is already rolling on that front J.

Ultimately, these moves would seem to be a positive step in the affiliate/Facebook relationship and over the coming months we may begin to see a radical change in the traffic generated by affiliates adopting the social graphs of Facebook.

I would advise watching the F8 Conference keynotes on (where else…) Facebook for more information.

By Sanjit Atwal – UK Head of Publisher Services & Development
sanjit.atwal@tradedoubler.com
http://twitter.com/SanjitAtwal

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Posted in News, td Affiliate, td Search | 1 Comment »

‘FanPage’ – out, ‘LikePage’ – in? More Facebook changes afoot

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

A semantic change to the wording of Facebook Pages went live this week, and in typical digital style it got the Web buzzing. Previously, a corporate presence on Facebook could build a following by inviting Facebook users to ‘Become a Fan’. As of today, that wording has officially changed to ‘Like’ throughout Facebook. From now, you don’t ‘become a fan’; instead you ‘like’ your favourite companies on Facebook.

Why the change?  At least three publicly stated reasons:

  1. A Facebook spokesman said at this week’s F8 conference, held in San Francisco, “we are moving from ‘Become a Fan’ to ‘Like’ to improve the experience and promote consistency across the site. We believe this change offers [you] a more lightweight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.”
  2. Facebook wants to expand beyond its core site with a consistent ‘like’ button that Web developers will soon be able to embed in their pages.
  3. It will allow Facebook to keep a record of what a user linked to, providing it with even more data about people’s preferences. Facebook, in turn, plans to share that data with Web publishers, so that a magazine website, for instance, may be able to show users all the articles that their friends like.

All true to a degree. Yes, Facebook could use more consistency across the platform.  And it’s a clear move towards ‘social plugins’, à la Digg, that make it easier for websites to integrate elements of Facebook functionality. Above all, the more information Facebook gathers from its users, the stronger hand it has over publishers for ad rates.

Will softer wording equate to higher social uptake for brands?  On that score, we’re not sure of the impact. Functionally, it may not have much impact at all. ‘Like’ isn’t exactly the strongest call to action. If the watering down of the fan acquisition process in this manner leads to more overall numbers to the page, with less perceived commitment from fans it may turn out to be more a fickle, transient and ultimately less productive community than before. On the other hand having a more laissez faire option for showing your approval of a brand may increase the uptake. Am I a fan? No. Do I like some of what you do though? Yes.

While social media can lead people to water, only the wow factor and content available there will make them drink. In that respect, first impressions on Facebook pages will matter more than ever. To see any benefit to this change, ensure your brand has something to ‘like’.

By Curtis MacPherson – Social Media Strategist
curtis.macpherson@tradedoubler.com

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Posted in News, td Search | No Comments »

Will early birds get the worm? A Promoted Tweets overview

Friday, April 16th, 2010

It’s not every day a gravy train comes along.

All aboard Promoted Tweets, Twitter’s long awaited foray into the online advertising world.

‘Promoted Tweets’, Twitter’s response to Google AdWords and Microsoft’s adCentre for a piece of the estimated $190 billion 2010 online advertising spend, went live this week to the predictable amount of hype, confusion and curiosity that goes hand in hand with much of what Twitter does. The four-year old company is banking that this new ad platform delivers the revenue model that will turn it into a financial viability and advertising cash machine.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.  If Twitter is right, they would create a real-time search advertising model that puts the micro-blogging platform right there with the big players and funds all future endeavours as the leader of real-time search, potentially worth billions.  If it doesn’t, and without an alternative revenue source, Twitter’s ‘potential balloon’ gets popped.  What does that mean? A perceived value of near to $1 Billion is bound to pop with it. No pressure.

Twitter could never be accused of leaving the station too soon.  Over the years, Twitter publically stated time and time again that they were resistant to introducing a traditional Web advertising model because they ‘wanted to optimise for value before profit’.  Most industry insiders read that to mean they couldn’t decide what to do for the best, and probably meant that there were internal concerns that any model that relied on its users interacting with the service could (and would) disappoint the pundits. In launching the ‘Promoted Tweets’ service softly softly out of the box, Twitter has clearly decided that keeping the model straightforward and workable early was a priority. Functionality and reach will be extended over time. Let’s get a few advertisers on board first.

Today, Promoted Tweets looks like this. Twitter will start serving Promoted Tweets on Twitter.com searches only. Featured ads (at this point) will not show on any of the popular third-party services like TweetDeck and the like.  Rolling out in phases, the first phase sees ‘Promoted Tweets’ service allow advertisers to buy ad space on Twitter.com searches on a CPM basis. Marketers buy individual keywords (specific searches) on the tried and true ‘per 1000 impressions’ model.  If you or I type a sponsored search into Twitter.com, a ‘Promoted Tweet’ (read: sponsored ad) heads to the highest possible real estate of the displayed search result page. 140 character ads include hypertext that goes direct to whatever landing page.

Not much that’s ground breaking there. And that was the point, a relatively risk-free approach.

Visually, Promoted Tweets look and act like regular tweets, except that they are labelled as promotions that stay at the top of the Twitterstream. Predictably, sponsored ads can be ‘retweeted’, free of charge, which vastly extends their reach and makes highly sought after influencers, brand advocates and evangelisers on Twitter even more vital.

Importantly, with Twitter allowing only one sponsored listing per search, for now, demand for many high value terms should outstrip supply as marketers jump on the new platform. In the real world of advertising this supply/demand conundrum of ‘top dog takes all’ will make for some interesting brand posturing. It’s a strong bet that (even) on Twitter, many terms will command premium CPMs. The scramble for potentially high value search terms is bound to get rather disorderly if only one advertising spot is available.

Word has it that both Google and Yahoo will deliver Promoted Tweets in their real-time stream by incorporating them into their results pages shortly. If this proves true then the real marketing value of Promoted Tweets will scale exponentially as well. Whether the relationship will continue as Twitter revenue grows to be a real competitor to other search players, remains to be seen.

Game changer? Twitter was wise to choose CPM because trying to get users to re-tweet ads will be difficult, at least at first. CPM will build the numbers and revenue without having to produce the clicks. Having big name early adopters such as Coca Cola and Virgin America heavily jumping into this brave new world doesn’t hurt the cause. Twitter’s Promoted Tweets CPM model was the quickest and cleanest ad display system to roll out with enough potential to bring revenue without putting their neck on the line in the process.

Has the Twitter gravy train finally arrived? Is this the long sought after revenue model that will save the day for both Twitter and real-time search as a whole?  In week one, it’s too early to tell. One thing is certain, the next few months will definitely show whether the much talked about revenue potential of Twitter is digital hype, or bankable reality.

By Curtis MacPherson – Social Media Strategist
curtis.macpherson@tradedoubler.com

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Posted in News, td Search | 1 Comment »

The Effects of Google Updates on Affiliate Marketing Part III | Personalised Search

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Hi All,

Welcome to the third part of our three-segment series on Google updates and the effect on Affiliate marketing.

Personalised search has actually been around for a good few years now but only been active to Google account members. It will now be a default for all Google users.

This functionality allows Google to display results to users that will be influenced by and scored against their previous search habits and preferences. Google will then use that data to serve similar sites to the user with a view to increasing the relevancy of the user’s searches.

As Google say “When possible, Google will customise your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you’re signed into your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.”

Importantly, Google do give you the option to opt-out of personalised search but the prevailing winds would suggest a vast majority of users will simply continue using the search engine without changing their preset setting.

So, how will this affect affiliates? It’s difficult to say….

On one hand an affiliate site will potentially raise profile in a personalised search especially if Google serves the affiliate site as a site that ‘is of similar interest’ to the users habits. You can see optimised affiliate sites crossing over well in verticals such as retail or travel.

However, it may become more difficult for a new affiliate site to gain a share of voice in Google.

Our advice would be to ensure your affiliate links are fully optimised to match your content. If you have a site dedicated to the Rolling Stones then you’ll probably deeplink to a Rolling Stones box set through the HMV affiliate programme. However, to optimise the traffic you have (and in the interests of updated content and relevancy) also deeplink to a biography of Mick Jagger through the Waterstones affiliate programme. Once you start feeding in user generated content to build up the stickiness of your site, Google will hopefully start to display your site against ‘similar types’ of site.

Sanjit Atwal

Publisher Development Manager | TradeDoubler UK |

Twitter.com/TradeDoubler_UK |

Sanjit.Atwal@TradeDoubler.com | Twitter.com/SanjitAtwal |

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This post forms part three of a three-part series of blog posts on Google changes. Please also see:

Part I ) Google Introduces Real-Time Search

Part II ) Google Caffeine
The affiliate reaction to all three Google updates can be summarised in one sentence: Make every attempt to add value to the users original search whilst balancing the need to monetise your inventory.

For a more in-depth discussion on how our SEO team can help you over the coming months, please email Sales.UK@TradeDoubler.com.

 

Happy New Year from all at td Affiliate and td Search!

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Posted in td Affiliate, td Search | 1 Comment »

Google Caffeine & Affiliate SEO Perculations

Thursday, December 31st, 2009

Hi All,

Welcome to the second part of our three-segment series on Google updates and the effect on Affiliate marketing.

In Part II we will be taking a brief look at Google Caffeine.

Caffeine is the name of Google’s latest algorithm updates and, like all things Google, Caffeine is somewhat of an unknown quantity. Until it has been fully launched the affiliate world will be waiting with baited breath to fully comprehend the changes…however, td Search has made the following observations:

Google Caffeine is, like Real-Time Search, aimed at giving users the best possible experience in terms of relevance. This makes all of the age-old truths of SEO even more important. For example, if you are currently appearing in third position in the natural results, however, you are not utilising any social media tools or uploading any fresh content, then you are running the gauntlet of the Google ‘slap’ and risk being dislodged by a competitor that is following basic, but necessary, SEO practices:

• Present original content
• Ensure you have clean meta-tags and optimised titles for your landing pages
• Do not over load your site with content that will slow the load time
• Add quality in-bound links
• Minimise the duplication of content
• Utilise social & and rich media to enhance your site’s brand presence
• Timely maintenance of broken links

What we are seeing from Caffeine (in the affiliate sense) is a demand from Google to significantly improve the quality and relevance of the sites we, as an industry, build. So, does this mean affiliate sites will get knocked out of the park by the changes Caffeine will bring on?

Not necessarily.

Most affiliates cannot sell effectively without an understanding of the products and brand they is are selling. This is where affiliates have always, and will always, excel. By building deep, content-based sites using the knowledge affiliates have on what sells for a merchant (displayed on a page that adds true value to the merchant’s proposition) and educates the user’s purchase decision, we can work to ensure affiliate sites are sufficiently ranked over and beyond the algorithm change.

Speak to your TradeDoubler account managers and ensure you are receiving as much product information as possible on the affiliate programmes you are promoting. Make sure you are signed up to the newsletters and are aware of all the latest news regarding the merchant with a view to creating unique content that will aid the user’s buying cycle.

Part III: Google Personalised Search will be posted on the 4th January.

Sanjit Atwal

Publisher Development Manager | TradeDoubler UK |

Twitter.com/TradeDoubler_UK |

Sanjit.Atwal@TradeDoubler.com | Twitter.com/SanjitAtwal |

————————————-

This post forms part two of a three-part series of blog posts on Google changes. Please also see:

Part I :  Google Introduces Real-Time Search

The affiliate reaction to all three Google updates can be summarised in one sentence: Make every attempt to add value to the users original search whilst balancing the need to monetise your inventory.

For a more in-depth discussion on how our SEO team can help you over the coming months, please email Sales.UK@TradeDoubler.com.

Happy New Year from all at td Affiliate and td Search!

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Posted in td Affiliate, td Search | 2 Comments »

The Effect of Google Updates on Affiliate Marketing

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Hi All,

As I’m sure you are aware Google has been hard at work to improve their indexing of sites and is rolling out three key changes to the engine over December and early January. As the overwhelming market leader in UK search engine traffic this will, of course, have an impact on the affiliate space.

In response, the TradeDoubler Affiliate and Search teams have joined forces to bring you the following series of blog posts documenting the changes and subsequent knock-on effects the affiliate industry can expect from a publisher point of view.

Part I: Google introduces real-time search

Part II: Google Caffeine

Part III: Google personalised search

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Part I: Google introduces Real-Time Search….How to get a grip on SEO and social media

Twitter, MySpace and Facebook status updates….for years social media has been at the forefront of pioneering the application of ‘micro-blogging’. This (alongside significantly increased uptake of Instant Messenger/Microsoft Communicator-like tools) has led to users becoming addicted to instant communication. Twitter is obviously a great example of this. Forecasted to have over 18 million users by the end of 2009, Twitter has proven that short, sharp, lightspeed like updates are the way of the future.

Twitter will have one massive asset in 2010 and that is size. These days it’s getting increasingly more difficult to go to your favourite sites without seeing a small blue bird asking you to follow it. This trend of ‘eOrnotholgy’ will continue and a by-product of its tremendous size is a vast reservoir of (constantly updated) content. From AA Gill tweeting about shooting a baboon to Stephen Fry tweeting about, well….everything, Twitter (and Twitter-like applications) will become a major source of new content.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by the powers that be at Google…

Google has already begun the process importing real-time updates from blogs, news feeds and services such as Twitter. For example, if I were to search for my own name in Google we can see inclusion from my tweets mixed within the organic results (see below for example).

Real-time search will go further than this to give the user live data and information from a variety of sources. Considering the above points on the amount of content diversity, it could provide massive enhancements to the user’s experience. We can see the new placements appear below the top ranked natural results as a new content box (example below) that complement the rest of the natural results.

So what does this mean for affiliates?

Well, apart from being able to read my opinion on next season’s Formula One line-up, potentially a problem… If you are used to appearing positions 4-10 on the first page of results then the real-time search content box may push your site far below the fold.

In the below example you can see that is exactly what has happened to the QI website, which has been pushed to the bottom of the page below the real-time search box:

Continued SEO optimisation is certainly recommended to rank highly – however, these new changes also present an opportunity to contribute to Google’s real-time results. By using social tools such as news feeds and Twitter alongside fresh content, you can potentially appear in the real-time results as an authoritative part of Google’s user experience.

If you have a site selling laptops, then ensure that you are not only uploading the latest Dell Netbook but also securing news and reviews from your users. This will improve your relevancy to the Google user’s original search for ‘Dell Netbooks’. This method also has the added benefit of increasing your likelihood to convert your traffic as users are actively seeking information to aid their purchase decisions.

Part II:   Google Caffeine & Affiliates will be posted on the 31st December.

Sanjit Atwal

Publisher Development Manager | TradeDoubler UK |

Twitter.com/TradeDoubler_UK |

Sanjit.Atwal@TradeDoubler.com | Twitter.com/SanjitAtwal |

————————————————————————

This post forms part one of a three-part series of blog posts on the Effect of Google Updates on Affiliate Marketing. Coming soon are:

Part II:   Google Caffeine

Part III:  Google personalised search

The affiliate reaction to all three Google updates can be summarised in one sentence: Make every attempt to add value to the users original search whilst balancing the need to monetise your inventory.

For a more in-depth discussion on how our SEO team can help you over the coming months, please email Sales.UK@TradeDoubler.com.

Happy New Year from all at td Affiliate and td Search!

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Posted in td Affiliate, td Search | 7 Comments »

Not quite the Oscars, but we’re still happy

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

I have to concede Christmas is upon us and the celebrating (and fattening) has already begun even if the Christmas shopping hasn’t. Here at TD Towers we have extra reason to celebrate with our shortlisting in two industry award categories:

TradeDoubler nominated for Best igaming affiliate network  – PLEASE VOTE FOR US!
http://www.igbaffiliateawards.com/content/vote

TradeDoubler shortlisted for econsultancy’s Innovation in PPP/Paid Search award category
http://econsultancy.com/blog/5051-econsultancy-announces-innovation-awards-shortlist

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Posted in News, td Affiliate, td Search | 1 Comment »

Best Practices for Running Ads on the Google Content Network

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

The Google search network is made up of it’s own web properties (i.e. google.com, google.co.uk) and various search partners such as sky.com and aol.  Whilst this is a network, it is still based around the keyword search model.  However, Google has another network that you can advertise on which they refer to as the Content Network.  This is far more like a traditional display network, but you choose which sites you appear on by using a set of keywords that has similar content to the publishing page.  As a consequence there are a number of different best practices that should be adhered that mark this out as a separate practice to running keyword search campaigns.

Below are 5 points that will help you achieve better results from your Content Network campaigns.

1.    Keep Search and Content apart – Create separate engine campaigns and opt in to only display on the content network.  This helps you to manage the two channels separately and to take better control over your campaigns.
2.    Create a tightly themed group of keywords – When choosing keywords you wish to display against, keep to a very narrow and well defined theme.  It also pays to keep the keywords to below 20 to help with this.
3.    Do not use misspellings –  In search it is common to use misspellings to take advantage of cheap traffic, but on the content network this would result in your ad appearing on websites with incorrectly spelt body copy which could indicate a poor quality site, and less conversions for you.
4.    Use negative keywords – Just like in a search campaign, remember to use negative keywords to filter out sites and articles you do not want to appear on.  E.g. ‘lawsuit’, ‘poor’, ‘problems’ etc etc.  This is doubly as important as all content keywords are taken at the broad match level.
5.    Think beyond the direct offer – If you are a hotel aggregator, think about using keywords themes such as ‘shopping breaks’, ‘weekend deals’ and not just terms like ‘hotels’ ‘cheap hotels’ and ‘hotels in Stockholm’.  Remember to appear on pages that are complementary products, where the user may need to book a hotel in the future.

When using td Searchware to manage your content campaigns there is no need to create tracking URLs for each keyword, as the Content Network only works at an Adgroup level.  Therefore it is better to create a tracking URL at the default URL level, which then allows you to track each ad text separately if you wanted to.
If you would like more information about the Content Network, and how td Searchware can be used to manage it, please contact simon.cooper@tradedoubler.com.

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Posted in td Search | 1 Comment »

Organizing Your PPC Account For Maximum Success

Monday, September 14th, 2009

I recently read an article on Search Engine Land about ‘Organising Your PPC Account For Maximum Success’. The article goes through all the good basics for good account set up e.g. grouping ad groups by product type, separating out brand terms, using specific campaigns for content match and site targeting etc etc. What did interest me however was one of the comments. They have suggested that you could perhaps arrange campaigns and ad groups by grouping products based on their target metrics of performance. This can be a very good idea, as it allows you to focus your time on the parts of the campaign that deliver most volume for you or most sales, so whilst this is not too bad an idea as a one off, if the targets change frequently, or as the performance changes (which it definitely will), it is not efficient to keep moving all of these keywords around – not least due to the fact you will lose the Quality Score each time you change the structure.

This is something we identified at TradeDoubler, and through the Strategy Groups feature, we allow you to create custom optimization groups which enable you to apply automated bid strategies that can have separate targets and objectives set. All of this happens in td Searchware so the account structure you have on the engine is not touched, which also means you maintain your Quality Score.

Essentially you can now create groups for your top sales terms, or your long tail terms, and set a strategy for them, and td Searchware will automatically update the bids for the respective keywords no matter where they are located on your engine account.

We get very good feedback from clients on this feature as it helps them achieve their objectives of delivering a set number of sales and revenue whilst working to a specific profit.

If you would like to hear more about this feature, and how to use it, please feel free to contact simon.cooper@tradedoubler.com

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Posted in td Search | 3 Comments »

Cross-Media Tracking

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

The days of managing different marketing channels in complete silo from each other are possibly short lived, as increasingly more and more advertisers are interested in understanding the impact of each channel on the other. What the effect of a banner campaign is on search, and what uplift, if any, is there in traffic and sales. You can also add to this the need to dedupe sales across different media, particularly affiliate, as most advertisers do not want to pay out a bounty to their affiliates if they were not responsible for generating the sale based on the last click wins model. The potential overlap/duplication can be worked out, but mostly by manual and time consuming methods, whereas a technology specifically designed for this purpose can automate this process and provide time efficiency. Furthermore, some technology products can also provide insight into the touchpoints involved in a user journey cycle, and where each channel is involved in the purchase cycle.

It has long been suspected that search traffic will increase, (particularly brand searches) when another channel is also used. If you think of some of the traditional marketing models such as AIDA, a number of marketing channels can be placed at the beginning of this process, Awareness, Interest and Desire. Once those levels of desire have gone past a tipping point, some action will occur and this could be a brand search on a search engine, or a search of merchants on a cashback loyalty site, ultimately resulting in a sale.

For the modern day digital marketer, the path the consumer takes across these different channels is high value information, and being able to understand how the different channels fit together and ultimately combine to drive a consumer through AIDA should result in higher, but cheaper sales for the advertiser.

 

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Posted in News, td Affiliate, td Campaigns, td Integral, td Search | 3 Comments »