comScore reports that Year over Year increases in e-commerce spending is still growing but the high growth rates of from last year have slowed a bit. Here is the data:
April’s e-commerce growth rate was only off 3% from the prior year, and I think this indicates that online spending will be where people go to look for deals as the economy falters.
Our affiliate business, imwave, continues to grow, and the days of being a one man shop are long over. Now I find myself looking at solutions to help manage a growing team.
Having read many great reviews of Basecamp, I have started testing the tool as a way to help keep track of what people are working on and to make sure important pieces of projects don’t fall through the cracks.
There are a lot of project management tools out there, but this one seems to be getting a lot of traction. It allows you to easily manage the communications and tasks involved in just about any kind of project. You can have multiple teams of people both internal and external with access to the projects they are working on.
Pretty cool.
Has anyone out there used Basecamp? I would love to hear your thoughts? Are there other tools you like better?
Affiliate marketing businesses are great because you have lots of flexibility and if you work hard you can make quite a bit of money, but running your business out of our home can be challenging, especially when you have computer problems.
Now, I am fairly technical and can fix most software issues that arise, but lately I have been having some hardware issues with several computers at home.
I have had two laptops with broken powerjack issues (no way to charge them up), and another where the USB ports have decided to quit on me.
So I went to the number 1 organic listing in Google for "Laptop Powerjack Repair in Reston Virginia" (onCall258.com), gave them a call, and they came out to my home, picked up the laptops and fixed them up for me (actually the USB problem ended up being larger than I wanted to fix, so I kept that one with the broken USBs).
Score one, for local search engine marketing and search engine optimization efforts for onCall258!
Now I have my own local tech support team, cool!
If you can’t find a local computer repair shop in Google, check out Angie’s List, they have been life savers for me as well. Found someone to help me out with my Squirrel issue there.
According to Overstock.com’s Press Release yesterday, the company has terminated more than 3,400 affiliates residing in New York:
Overstock.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: OSTK) announced today that it has notified its more than 3,400 New York-based affiliate advertisers that as of June 1, 2008 they can no longer provide advertising for Overstock.com until either New York changes its controversial new internet consumer tax law or the courts say the law is unenforceable. On June 1, the controversial new law will require internet retailers to turn off their New York-based ad partners or collect an up to 9.5% sales tax from all New York internet customers.
But wait, Overstock’s entire affiliate program is with Linkshare, a New York based company, and Linkshare earns a percentage of EVERY OVERSTOCK AFFILIATE TRANSACTION!!!
So based on this, it would appear that Overstock would still be liable for the 9.5% sales tax from, as would every Linkshare merchant.
Perhaps pissing off your 3,400 new york based affiliates in a knee jerk reaction wasn’t that best idea since it doesn’t really solve the problem?
So ASK as finally settled their click fraud case, and we got a whopping $12.13 back as a coupon code, the only catch is you have to apply the coupon as a credit against the purchase of at least 2 times that amount in advertising.
"Your advertising coupon may be applied to up to 50% of the cost of online advertising purchased from Ask."
With no plans to advertise on ASK again in the near future, I have a $12.13 coupon code up for grabs. Anyone still advertising on ASK????
Leave a comment below requesting the coupon code and it’s yours.
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).
