Here is a blurb from Netexponent’s excellent email newsletter:
In a recent study released by Shop.org, paid search, organic search, and affiliate marketing top the list of customer acquisition tactics for online retailers. According to the study, PPC search accounts for 35% of new customers on average, 18% through organic search and affiliate marketing ties with email marketing at 17%.
The study also states that 79% of retailers will make PPC search a priority through 2008. This trend reinforces the importance of integrating online marketing into budgets that include traditional media outlets like TV, radio, and print. This combination creates a perfect ROI storm.
Insurance Daily reports that Virgin Money has closed their affiliate program, or affiliate scheme as they call it in the UK. The article also reports insurance companies have scalled back or closed their programs, such as First Alternative, Click4Group and Lloyds TSB.
"The withdrawal comes on the heels of a shift at the end of last year, which saw a large number of providers in the financial services sector move their affiliate marketing campaign from Tradedoubler to rival providers, especially to OMG and Buy.at."
What’s going on in the UK? I know the UK Mortgage Rates and Housing market have taken a beating recently. But if you are going to scale back your marketing efforts, why cut back on programs that you only pay for on a performance basis? It doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Insurance is a profitable niche for many affiliates, unless the entire industry is going to abandon the affiliate channel, then closing your program just pushes your best affiliates to your competitors.
Google reported better than expected earnings and their stock price jumped 20%, then the analysts started pointing fingers at comScore saying that their numbers predicted lower than expected earnings based on comScore’s PPC trends research that showed a slowing in paid clicks.
Today, comScore released the following press release defending their numbers and pointing out that the analysts used comScore’s numbers wrong which showed domestic Paid clicks slowing to draw conclusions about Google’s worldwide growth.
Here is the release, it’s an interesting read:
When Google announced strong Q1 earnings last week, some financial and media analysts wrote that comScore’s reports of slowing growth in Google’s paid clicks missed the mark. That conclusion is patently false.
Unfortunately, many pundits attempted to draw conclusions about Google’s worldwide revenue performance based on comScore’s domestic paid click data, resulting in an apples-to-oranges comparison. Had they used comScore’s domestic paid click data to better understand Google’s domestic revenue trends, they wouldn’t have missed an important U.S. story and they also likely would have avoided making the wrong call on Google’s worldwide business.
Following several historical quarters of strong sequential domestic revenue growth (including the seasonally equivalent Q1 2007), Google’s Q1 2008 revenue growth was essentially flat, which represented a significant change for Google’s domestic business. Such an important trend was also evident in comScore’s paid click data.
The chart below shows the directional association between comScore’s domestic paid click trends, as compared to Google’s domestic revenue trends.
Of course, this is not a perfect correlation because the comScore data do not include the impact of changes in Google’s price per click and do not include paid clicks from partner sites like AOL, Ask, Washington Post, etc. nor paid clicks from the AdSense network. But the strong relationship of the two trends is undeniable.
There is of course a lesson to be learned here. To extrapolate a single data point across all aspects of a company’s business can lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions.
Finally, to confirm the accuracy of the comScore paid click data, we previously published an apples-to-apples reconciliation on this blog. This analysis reconciles the comScore data with metrics shown in Google’s Q1, 2008 financial report. In short, comScore got it right – both quantitatively and qualitatively. What was wrong were the conclusions that some people drew based on inherently flawed comparisons.
The battle over Yahoo has been heating up! This report from Fortune Magazine indicates that Yahoo is in advanced talks with Time Warner to merge with AOL. In this deal Yahoo would also take on some cash and buy back some of their stock to prevent a Microsoft hostile take over.
The article additionally talks about Yahoo testing running Google ads…
"Yahoo is also looking at a possible advertising deal with Google (GOOG). Just hours before the news leaked of Yahoo’s advanced talks with AOL, the Internet portal announced that it would run a preliminary two-week test to run Google’s search advertising."
Wow, the various ways this deal might go down are mind boggling.
I think this industry would be a lot better if we had a stronger competitor to Google. A Yahoo / Microsoft merger, or even a Yahoo / AOL merger would be ok, but I don’t think the market place looks good of all of Yahoo’s traffic is monetized by Google ads. Sure this might simplify the ad buying process, but Google is a moving target, and I don’t think we all want to be more beholden to one source of traffic and revenues.
Personally, I would like to see Yahoo and AOL merge, and then see Microsoft buy them, that would increase the traffic and make make an interesting ad buying opportunity and alternative to Google ads.
Last November, I posted a story on Revenews about how I was testing a new strategy of taking a few of the domains I had parked on Sedo Pro and testing them on Amazon’s aStore sites.
The results were bad. Not only did the sites not convert, but Amazon’s tracking was horrible. I think Amazon only showed traffic that clicked through from the site ultimately to Amazon’s site, not the traffic on the site.
So I switched these domains back to Sedo Pro parking, one of my favorite parking services. (email me or comment here if you need an endorsement code to try their service).
Today I learned about Chitka’s new Domain Store Parking Service, and decided to move these 3 names over there to give it a shot.
As of this post, the names haven’t propogated yet, but I will let you know how they do there.
Chitka’s new service (Links: Signup | Domain Parking Details), gives you q quick and easy way to create a store, provide keywords to pull products from their catalog of millions of products, and then get paid on a CPC basis (as opposed to aStore’s conversion basis).
I am not sure if you missed some of the back and forth between Larry Adams of Performics and Kris Jones of Pepperjam over the title of Larry Adam’s Blog Post: “Publishers Spoke, We Listened“. Apparently Kris felt the blog title was a little to similar to their “Affiliates have Spoken. Pepperjam Listened” marketing campaign they have been using. Here is a copy of the back of the shirt I got at Affiliate Summit:
In the comments of this Revenews blog post, Kris went as far as to suggest the following:
“Larry – we applied for the trademark “Affiliates Have Spoken. Pepperjam Listened.”
An Larry pointed out the following:
“I was at the Summit, although I can’t say that I remember any of your t-shirts; Vegas can be a distracting place. I’m not saying I never saw it but let’s just say that neither of us are going to get a trademark on the “[You] spoke, [we] listened” motto – http://tinyurl.com/yom86a“
All probably a little silly if you ask me, and when I put my Pepperjam T-shirt on this morning, It did all come back to me, and I thought it was odd, and interesting to note, that their TM mark on the T-shirt isn’t actually on the phrase, it’s on the Pepperjam term only.
I just looked at my AMEX bill, and now when you spend money on Yahoo Search Marketing, or on other Yahoo Small Business services, American Express will give you 5% cash back (up to $500 per card).
Not too bad, I have been putting a bunch of our Yahoo ads on Visa, no longer!
I guess you don’t have to worry about running PPC search ads on ASK.com anymore. CNN is reporting that ASK.com will no longer be a search engine, and will instead focus on women looking for help managing their lives with a focus on finding answers to the basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment and health.
That had to be a hard decision for Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp who bought Ask and its affiliated Web sites for $2.3 billion in 2005. That will be quite the write-off after spending so much on improving the search engine and buying TV ads to promote it.
Farewell ASk.com, farewell Ask Monkeys:
Will this be a trend in the search engine space?
Part of me still feels like this is some kind of hoax story that got picked up by CNN. Tony first told me about this story the other day from this site, and I didn’t believe him. The Ask.com site still looks like a Search engine to me. Stay Tuned…
I just wanted to send a quick shout out to Joel Comm, and say thanks for sending me this great picture of us at Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Vegas. It was nice to finally get the chance to sit down and talk with you!
Yesterday, Kowabunga! released a press release detailing their $20 in new debt funding from Wachovia Bank.
Jody Brown, chief financial officer of Kowabunga!, stated, “The new credit facilities with Wachovia provide us greater financial flexibility at attractive borrowing rates. It will allow us to continue to maintain a strong balance sheet, while providing the company an additional source of capital for general corporate purposes.”
Scott P. Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of Kowabunga!, added, “We are very pleased to continue our long term banking relationship with Wachovia and consider these extended and more flexible credit facilities a strong vote of confidence for what we are building here at Kowabunga!. Access to capital on more flexible terms will enhance our ability to continue on the path of growth, particularly in our Ad Network business, which grew approximately 65% in the fourth quarter of 2007 over the same period 2006.”
