Author: adam

  • How Amazon lost my holiday shopping business this year

    We are traveling up to Rhode Island this year for the holidays, and Sara and I had discussed the various presents we were going to buy for our children and parents.  I found ALL the items I was looking for at Amazon, and everything was "in stock".  I put all the items in my shopping cart (well over $1,000) and then re-confirmed the list with Sara.  The idea was to pay for gift wrapping and ship everything to our destination to make traveling easier.  We were willing to pay for convenience.

    Great!  So here we were, it wasn’t even Dec 1st yet, and we had 80-90% of our gift list done and ready to order, so I started the checkout process.

    Guess what?  Even though everything was in-stock, Amazon was telling me that 80% of the items wouldn’t be able to be shipped to Rhode Island by Christmas (4 weeks away!).  I thought maybe they were trying to up-sell the more expensive shipping options, but even with 1 & 2 Day shipping only about 50% of the items would make it by Christmas.  I wonder what "in-stock" means to Amazon.

    So much for one-stop shopping and convenience, I spent an extra 2-3 hours of my life, found all the items at other stores and had them gift-wrapped and shipped.

    Sorry Amazon, you blew it! 

    I won’t even start there next year…

  • Happy Thanksgiving 2007

    It’s been a great year, and I want to wish all of our wiseaff readers a very happy thanksgiving and a safe, healthy, and profitable holiday season!!!

    I always like to see the interesting holiday logos that the search engines come up with each year.  This year ASK.com takes the award for the biggest thanksgiving theme, and Microsoft again takes the turkey award for the lack of any holiday cheer.  Take a look:

    You can see some of the past years logos here:

  • Jangro’s CostumeZee site mentioned in Time Magazine!

    I was reading Time magazine this morning, and noticed that Scott Jangro’s CostumeZee site got a nice mention in the Hurricane Hannah article and a nice on-line link as well from Time.com!

    "You can’t even escape Hannah on a dark street; according to CostumZee.com she’s the most popular costume this Halloween."

    It’s great to see one of our own break into the mainstream media!  Congratulations Scott, well done!

  • Google Search Results (Behind the Scenes)

    Affiliates spend a lot of time trying to understand Google’s search results, no matter if you have a site you are trying to build rankings for or if you are a paid search publisher like my self bidding on millions of keywords every day. 

    Today I ran across some internal screen shots originally posted by Zorgblob (English translated page) and further reported by Vallywag.  This is what internal googlers see when they are looking at search results:

    So what do these internal fields mean?  There has been some speculation about the Adv (Yes | No) field.  Vallywag seems to think it might be an internal tool for sales reps to identify and recruit advertisers.  I find that highly unlikely.  There have been some rumors and speculation in the past about if buying advertising helps your internal search rankings.  I have noticed in the past for a friend I was doing search for that before we started his PPC campaign he was showing up as a top local listing for his area hotel, when the PPC started and he got a top PPC listing for his paid ads, these local “on results” listings disappeared.  The only thing we could attribute that to was his paid listings.

    Google has always said that they are very concerned about the quality of their search results, and don’t want one site taking up a majority of the space, my guess is this field helps with that.

    I do find it interesting that they appear to be placing some kind of monetary value on the organic listings with the GG Score.  I wonder if they look at how much each page of SERPs make and try to balance quality results (getting people to the right information) vs profit per page from ads.  I would think that optimizing both would be important for their business.

    I also find it very interesting that they are trying to place each ad into a vertical market, almost directory style.  Maybe that is how they build the Google Directory (http://directory.google.com/).

    People seem to think the PVs field stands for Page Views, I wonder if that is calculating times that listing has been viewed in Google across keyword terms, or times the site has been clicked on?

    I think it’s odd that the lower ad in the screen shot has lower scores across the board, so these don’t appear to be fields that Google is sorting the search results on.

    What do you think of these internal numbers?  Have you heard anything more?

  • Karen White is the Wiseaff of the Month!

    I’d like to make a special shout out to Karen White, one of my favorite affiliate managers.  I first met Karen White when she was the affiliate manager for the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas.  I had gotten wind of their first affiliate Fam tour and blogged about what a great incentive it was.  At the next affiliate summit, Karen introduced herself, invited me to the next fam tour and gave me a Wynn gift card.  I just couldn’t resit working with her.

    We grew a very profitable campaign with her at the Wynn, and had a great time at the Fam tour. Our sales for the Wynn the quarter after the Fam tour were $237k.  So their hospitality really paid off, we had done $20k the quarter before.

    Unfortunately the Wynn let Karen go shortly after the fam tour, with her went the relationship, and after what we consider to be some bad policy decisions, our sales for the Wynn have dropped off significantly. 

    But, we continue to have a great relationship with Karen and we are anxiously awaiting her next program with Partner Fusion.

    I ran into Karen at CJU, and mentioned that my wife and 3 of her high school friends were coming out to Vegas for the weekend, and she totally hooked them up with tickets to the blue man group!  Sara and her friends arrived only to find out they were on the VIP list.  They got the first class treatment and got to go back stage afterwords and meet some of the performers, wow! 

     

    It’s going out of your way to do something so nice like this that totally cements a relationship, we would work with Karen wherever she went.

    This is why we are announcing Karen White as our first Wiseaff of the Month!

    Congratulations Karen, and thanks for making my wife’s Vegas weekend so special.  What happens in Vegas, gets blogged here baby!  You rock!

  • Performics Updates their Links UI

    It’s been a little frustrating to have to create a unique link in Performics before being able to utilize the link, this has often made creating large number of links very difficult.

    Performics recently announced an upgrade to their link UI.

    "I’m happy to announce that we’ve released a major redesign to our links interface for affiliate publishers.  This UI is being made available concurrently with our legacy links interface in order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season" says Larry Adams, Affiliate Product Manager for Performics.

    Performics has done a lot of user testing on the links and expects the new interface to save affiliates a lot of time.

    Performics is offering this in Beta now, and want affiliates to "kick the tires" and provide feedback.  You can post comments on their blog @ http://blog.performics.com/affiliate/2007/10/new-links-ui-be.html or email them.

  • My 30 Minutes @ EcomXpo Fall 2007

    I really hate to write this post because I love the folks at EcomXpo and I feel they are providing a unique and fun experience for the affiliate community as well as valuable educational content.

    That being said, here was my 30 minute experience this year.  I missed the first day because I had some meetings and was traveling to our office in York, PA.

    On the 2nd day, I logged on in the morning, went through each booth and joined all the prize drawings I could.  Left 2 emails, one to say hey to a partner of mine who was actually online in her both, and one to someone I wanted to follow up with from a conversation we had at CJU.  He changed companies and I didn’t have his new contact info. (He wasn’t actually online, I hope he get’s it).

    A brief stop in the education area to see if there was anything new and interesting I wanted to catch in today’s sessions and in the on demand section.  Unfortunately I didn’t see anything that I could say would be more valuable then continuing to work on other 4th quarter projects I have going on.

    And that was it.  I feel sad, because I love EcomXpo, and don’t want to see it go away.  I especially love the prizes I get every once in a while.  In the past I have won Ipods, PSPs, Luggage, and more!

    My advice to exhibitors, is to find something that is easy to mail and give away a lot of prizes so more people feel like winners, and you can actually get some information into the hands of the drive by prize folks like myself.

    I don’t know of any other conference where you can visit each booth, register for all the prizes, and not even have to hand out business cards!  Fantastic!

    I’m sure that’s now what everyone wants to hear, but it was my experience this year.  In past years, I have spent more time watching the presentations, and have also presented a couple of times.  But, I always do the drive by prize registrations!

  • Insider Affiliate Stock Trading

    Affiliates aren’t considered “insiders” as far as the SEC is concerned for the companies that they market, but a lot of time as affiliate marketers we get some visibility into the health of a company that others just don’t see.  Is a company’s website converting really well?  Better than their competitors?   Has a company’s site conversion rate dropped significantly?  Has a company made some communications to their affiliate partners that might indicate future trouble for the company?  We see this information all the time!

    Here is an example.  Like a lot of affiliates we have a relationship with Walmart.  In June of 2007 we got a notice that Walmart was cutting their commission rates due to budget issues and that all departments across the board were being asked to make cuts.  Take a look at Walmart’s stock chart from June of 2007 until today:

    That’s almost a 10 point slide!  Predictable?   Probably.   Shortly after that email came out they totally missed their quarterly numbers.

    Here is a stock chart for a company we started marketing back in October of 2006.  The campaign shot through the roof from day one.  I didn’t know much about the company, but had I purchased their stock based on the strong site conversions I was seeing, I could have made a pretty penny:

    Maybe there is a business around using affiliate conversion data to predict stock market behavior?

    What do you think?

  • Jason Calacanis to Keynote Affiliate Summit West

    Jason Calacanis, has been confirmed as the keynote for this winter’s Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, NV (Feb 24-26 at the Rio).

    I have never met Jason, but I do like him.  I think he is very smart, and also calculating.  I have followed his comments on the SEO community, and he likes to stir things up by creating controversy, which ultimately gets people talking about him and linking to him.  When he commented that "SEO isn’t rocket science" and put down the entire SEO community, the blogosphere went crazy.

    I think Jason will be an "interesting" keynote speaker.  It will be fun to hear his take on the market and where he sees things going.  I am sure there will be something in there that will rile up the audience and get people linking to him as well.  Wait and see!

    See you in Vegas!

  • The Affiliate Fit Club, are you a Fataff?

    I think as an affiliate many of us tend to spend way to much time sitting at our computers.  I know I could stand to lose a few pounds.  So I was intrigued when I came across Shawn Collin’s kick off post for his Affiliate Fit Club Website at http://www.affiliatefitclub.com. 

    I registered, but I’m not sure I will actually post and fully participate, I’m not one for posting my poundage, but I sure could stand to lose a few.

    I think it’s great that the affiliate marketing community can come up with an idea, launch it, and market it in short order.  Fantastic!

    The site itself is kind of designed with a “big fat loser” kind of look and feel.  It should be interesting to watch.

    I’m not sure if I am routing for the red team or blue team.  It’s really a tough call.

    I’m sure for the ones that really stick too it, they will all be winners! 

    Go Red, I mean Blue!!!  Go Purple!!!!

    Good Luck!