Google recently announced that they have agreed to purchase DoubleClick for 3.1B from two private equity firms. Not a bad return for the private equity firms who took DoubleClick private in April of 2005 for just 1.1B.

DoubleClick is the largest provider of online ad technology. They help advertisers to purchase and track online advertising across the Internet and enable publishers with large amounts of traffic to sell their site's ad inventory and track that as well.

In June of 2004 DoubleClick acquired Performics, an affiliate network and management company and search engine marketing agency in an all cash deal totaling between $58M and $65M.

Now, seemingly in an effort to acquire the DART ad technologies and publisher relationships, Google has also acquired an affiliate network and search engine marketing agency that consequently gets paid by their customers to help them perform better in Google.

Google recently dipped their toes into the affiliate business with the launch of their CPA advertisements through the AdSense network, but clearly the ownership of a search marketing agency could be a huge conflict of interest for the search giant.

So what will happen to Performics? That is going to be the hot question floating around the affiliate community. Will Google integrate the affiliate network and search agency into their business or spin them off?

My guess is that Performics will be spun off or acquired. Perhaps AOL will scuttle their Tradedoubler deal when they see a Gem like Performics on the block.

What do you think? Should Search Engines be allowed to own an SEO and SEM company?

Yahoo get's an early jump on Valentines Day with their heart logo:

Nice Job Yahoo!


Update:

Today Google and ASK updated their sites as well, here are their logos:

See Google's Prior Year's Logos

And ASK.com adjusted their search button to the following today to get in the Valentines Day Spriit!

Of Course no spriit from MSN Live. Still as bland as ever...

Happy Valentines Day Everyone!

Wow! When we went to the Affiliate Summit conference in Las Vegas, Karen White, the Affiliate Manager for the Wynn Hotel, was nice enough to get us some complementary tickets to see LeReve at the Wynn. Now I much more of a comedy guy, and when I first read about the show, I was a little skeptical about seeing a show about "Dream Sequences", I thought I might doze off myself, but from the first moment the show opened, I was enthralled with Le Reve and couldn't take my eyes off the action. It's one of those shows that you just have to see to believe. My guess is that's why Karen wanted us to see it for ourselves. Smart move. If you are going to Las Vegas, you just have to see LeReve. It's hard to describe with words, so take a look at the following LeReve preview video if you have a few minutes, you won't be disappointed.

Don't miss LeReve playing at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas!

Thanks Karen!

Microsoft will showcase a good selection of Digital Advertising Breakthroughs at their Third Annual Demo Fest this week, their two-day gathering on Microsoft's Rednond campus.

Microsoft will showcase nearly 60 technologies at various stages of develpment. Their latest digital advertising beta tools are available at http://adlab.msn.com.

“The technologies showcased at Demo Fest will help create unprecedented opportunity for developers and search engine marketers like the Keyword Services Platform,” said Tarek Najm, distinguished engineer and general manager of Microsoft adCenter at Microsoft. “KSP is a service that provides a framework for researchers to plug in advanced algorithms in the form of building blocks to be consumed by developers for building sophisticated advertiser applications.”

Developed by the rapidly growing team of more than 120 Microsoft adCenter Labs researchers and engineers, technologies displayed Wednesday are all designed to help provide the best advertising experiences for users, advertisers and developers. They include the following:

• Keyword Services Platform. The platform provides a set of Web service APIs related to keyword technologies, including keyword recommendation, forecasting, categorization and monetization, enabling developers to build more intelligent applications for online advertising and beyond.

• Commercial intent detection. Advanced keyword analysis helps differentiate consumers who are looking to make an online purchase from those who are searching for information about products or performing other tasks.

• Large display feedback. Vision-based technology creates interactive public displays that can measure the size of the audience, as well as track audience gestures and estimate demographics.

• Social video sharing. This next-generation video sharing solution features a synchronized “commenting” technology. The introduction of novel in-video, synchronized comments enables a new level of interaction between users, opening up the video as a medium for collaboration.

• Content classification: By accurately analyzing and matching the Web pages included in search results, Microsoft adCenter Labs technology helps increase the probability that the ads displayed during Web searches are relevant to consumers.

A complete list and explanations of the technologies showcased at this year’s Demo Fest can be found in the Microsoft adCenter Labs Advanced Tools fact sheet at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/msn/factsheet/adCenterBreakthroughsFS.mspx

The message to competitive search engine companies is clear, innovate or perish!

Has anyone else noticed that Google Adwords slows down to a crawl around lunch time? I am sitting here at about 12:20pm trying to create an ad, and it appears that the entire system is hanging up. I had the same issue yesterday.

Maybe Search Engine Markerters work harder during their lunch breaks?

Adam

Jeremy Palmer, from QuitYourDayJob.com put together a great online tutorial on how to use PHP to cloak your affiliate links. I highly recommend taking the time to watch and learn.

Jeremy does a great job of explaining this in their simplest forms, thanks Jeremy keep up the great work!

Also, if you haven't read his book, be sure to check out High Performance Affiliate Marketing. (Maybe I should have cloaked that one? )

Hitwise reported today that the share of US Internet searches for "gift cards" surged 109% for the week ending December 16th, 2006 vs the previous week as online shoppers looked for last minute gift ideas. Some of the fastest growing Gift card searches include "american express gift cards" up 184%, "itunes gift card" up 69%, and "visa gift cards" up 19%.

“For the second year now, we’ve seen a pattern of increased searches on gift cards as Christmas day approaches,” said Bill Tancer general manager of global research at Hitwise. “This year branded credit and charge gift cards dominated top searches as gift givers opted for the most flexibility for their gift recipients.”

Now that shipping deadlines have mostly passed, online shoppers will probably start looking at digital / email-able gift certificates that can be purchased right up until the last minute.

Happy Holidays!

Ok, I saw it coming, the new chain letter 2.0 has arrived and it's called Blog Tag. It's a little more fun and informative. On December 10th, Jeff Pulver started a little game of Blog Tag. The concept was to tell 5 interesting things about yourself and then "tag" 5 friends and see how fast it can spread. It has quickly spread across the Internet, and I am honored to have been pinged in just 6 days. Thanks Vinny! I'm not sure I can compete with Rock bands and 8-ball and chess championships, but here are 5 things you may or may not know about me.

1. In July of 2001 I was diagnosed with Leukemia, and I have just past a big milestone of being in remission for 5 years this November.
2. When my first son, Addison, was born in 1996 I setup a camera on his crib so his grandfather could check in on the crib over the internet. Addison's Cribcam was the first of it's kind and was covered by tv stations, newspapers, and radio stations around the country. It was even covered by Tom Brokaw!
3. I love to play Poker! I'm not as good as I would like to be, but I'm always up for a game. In fact one time I went to a business meeting where some of the attendees were late flying in, and we stuck up a poker game using a deck of cards from the Hotel and M&M's as the Poker chips!
4. I'm an early Internet entrepreneur. In 1993 I started York Pennsylvania's first for profit dial-up BBS that evolved into York PA's first commercial ISP. After several acquisitions starting in 1998 Cyberia is now part of Earthlink
5. Finally, like Vinny I too have had my likeness manipulated by bored designers! Vinny I really do like your Vinny the Poo:
   
   
   Here are a couple they did of me when I worked at Network Solutions:
   
   The "Viener" Donald
   
   
   Yes, Potse is me!
   
   
   Can you Sing - YMCA!
   
   
   Mini V
   
   
   Busta V
   
   So, Vinny, sorry to say, Vinny the Poo might be only the beginning.

So I guess it's my turn to tag some others to keep the party going. So, David Lewis, Beth Kirsch, Stowe Boyd, Chris Abraham, and Bob Parsons, your it!

Rand Fishkin, the CEO and Co-Founder fo SEOMoz.org, had the opportunity to sit down with Venessa Fox, the Product Manager of Google Webmaster Central,.at the SES show in Chicago. It's always great to hear some questions answered right from the source

Here is the the video:

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! It's been another great year, and as we move into the affiliate marketing busy holiday season, where many eTailers earn 50% of their revenues, it makes sense to take a short pause and remember all the things we have to be thankful for. Here are some of the many things in the Industry that I am thankful for this year:

1. The Affiliate Networks - I am thankful for the affiliate networks who have created platforms that enable affiliate marketers and merchants to quickly and easily start a business partnership at a click of the button, so that we can quickly test new programs and find the ones that are going to work best for our businesses. It would be hard to image the cost in time, legal fees and technology expenses needed create each and every one of these relationships on our own. Thank you Affiliate Networks!
2. Google - I am thankful that Google has created platforms that enable affiliate marketers to make money. From Adwords, and Adsense, to Google Analytics and the now in beta website optimizer product, Google continues to innovate platforms that enable affiliate marketers to earn money for both ourselves and for Google in the process. Thanks Google!
3. Affiliate Managers that "Get it!" - I am thankful for the many affiliate managers who truly take the time to understand the technologies and many different ways that affiliate marketers can promote their services, for the affiliate managers that truly understand that more is more in this industry and that less is less, and for the affiliate managers that understand and embrace the ongoing change that exists in this space. Thank you!
4. Affiliate Marketers - I am thankful to my fellow affiliate marketers who I have gotten to know at industry conferences. It is truly a dynamic and fun group, and having worked in other industries, I can honestly say that the affiliate marketers that I have meet are some of the smartest, brightest, and most entrepreneurial people I have meet in any industry. I am honored to be part of this group. Thank you!
5. Fun Holiday Logos - Finally, I am thankful for fun holiday logos, maybe someday we will actually see one from Microsoft....
   
   
   
   
   
   
   Previous year's logos

I got an email from Pool.com today listing their "Hotlist" of domains for sale, and was interested to see that in today's list there was a domain for Yahoo and a Domain for Ask. Here are the domains and prices.

fuck-yahoo.com - Current Price = $200

askonline.com - Current Price = $11,500

Not sure what to make of the fact that these domains are available for auction or at these prices though... Thoughts?

In March, I write a popular Blog entry entitled "5 Easy Steps for Building a Professional Affiliate Site" where I went through a step by step approach on how I build the site Language-Learning-Software.com to promote Rosetta Stone's Affiliate Program.

Today, Art, left me a great comment asking me how things were going with the site since March of 2006. Sometimes you need a little nudge to go back and really take a look at how the site has progressed and what things you did during that time to promote the site and try to continue to make it successful.

Since I shared the story of the site's creation, I feel it's only fair to share some of the results (good and bad ) and interesting things I did and lessons learned so that you might be able to take some interesting takeaways for your own affiliate sites.

Paid Search:
I created a paid search campaign promoting learning Spanish and learning French and linked those campaigns to the corresponding pages. Unfortunately the costs per click out paced the conversion rates, so I lost some money with the test. I would estimate a loss of a couple hundred dollars. This test showed me that the conversion rates were not very good, and that I will need to re-consider the design of the site, and or the promotional copy to better turn visitors into buyers.

Additionally, with the recent quality score changes, the prices Google wanted was even higher, so I have pretty much stopped paid search for this specific site.

Language Translation:
An article from Joel Comm turned me on to a little language translation script called Translation Gold (Link through Joel Comm in appreciation for his turning me on to it, Thanks Joel!) It was easy to add this script to my site, and with a click of a button it translates my pages into 9 major languages. I thought this would be great for a site basically helping people learn different languages. I added that tool in August, and now most of my top referring sites are from overseas, and my top referring keyword is something my browser doesn't translate, I think it's Chinese! What a wonderful world!

Expiring Domains
Since I was looking for organic traffic, I decided to explore some direct type in traffic as well, I did some research on soon to be expiring domain names that had the names of the languages I was promoting in them and came across the domain "chineseso.com". I ran the domain through Mozzel's Domain Name Pro software and identified that it has a few decent inbound links, so I acquired the domain in October after it expired for $60 through a SnapNames auction and setup a 301 redirect to the learn to speak Chinese page of the site.

Today when I was going back to see how the site was doing, I saw a HUGE discrepancy between the reported page views in Google Analytics vs. my hosting providers analytics program. I ran an error page report and figured out that my 301 redirect wasn't setup perfectly. I was trying to direct all the traffic to a specific page using the following command in the .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 / http://www.language-learning-software.com/learn_to_speak_chinese.html

I had assumed that this command would redirect ALL incoming pages to that specific url, but a closer look at my logs indicated that it was adding on the extra page names at the end creating page like language-learning-software.com/learn_to_speak_chinese.htmldvbbs/. One page had over 202,722 error pages in October alone! So initially I went back in and added a ? to the end of my redirect argument so the page would be chineses.html?dvdbbs and that seemed to work, but then I decided to look a little deeper. If this domain is driving that much traffic, let's take a closer look.

Utilizing Archive.org and Google's translation tools, I discovered that I had acquired a domain that used to be used for the Mainland Undergraduate Association website. Since the site is in Chinese, I decided to link the traffic to the Chinese version of my home page, kindly provided by Translation Gold. Now the traffic should be going the site instead of error pages. I also added the following argument to my .htaccess file to make sure I capture any future error pages:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.language-learning-software.com/chinese.php?u=http://www.language-learning-software.com/index.html?

I will probably watch the traffic and conversions for another month, and if that huge amount of traffic doesn't turn into conversions, I will start exploring other alternatives for the high traffic domain I acquired. Clearly it's worth a lot more than the $60 I paid for it!

I would love to hear your comments and suggestions.

Adam

Chris Carpenter, the write of the ever popular Google Cash eBook, has been working on an update to answer some of his customer's latest questions about the changes going on at Google.

Chris was just about to release his 3rd edition of his book as well as an update entitled "the Landing Page Special Report" when his office caught fire. See the pictures below:

Could this have been a coincidence? Could it have been one of those funky Sony batteries that have been being recalled left and right? Or could be some interesting tidbits in his new book that Google doesn't want you to know about?

Maybe Google is Evil after all. Maybe Matt Cutts has created an undercover hit team? I better stop writing before I get targeted for demolition...

So what can you expect in the 3rd Edition of Google Cash?

• A Google Slap workaround explained with video - (This is totally original and as far as he can tell, he's the only one doing this!)
• "Landing Page Special Report" - a 55 page special report on building high performance landing pages.
• "Adwords Rumors Crushed" - a 43 page special report on systematically improving your Google. Adwords Campaign results.Mp3 audios of both special reports.
• The Google Cash 10 Day Action Guide - A 10 Day Action Guide with daily action steps, checklists, and helpful insights.
• Detailed instructions on how to obtain and use a domain effectively.

If his incites are anything like his original eBook, I will be grabbing a copy as soon is it comes to press!

Enjoy!

Adam

US Sites are seeing more International Traffic. How are your international ad campaigns going?

comScore Networks, a leader in measuring the digital age, today released the results of a study showing that 14 of the top 25 U.S. Web properties attract more traffic from people outside the U.S. than from within. Among them are the Top 5 Web properties in the U.S. -- Yahoo! Sites, Time Warner Network, Microsoft Sites, Google Sites and eBay.

"As Internet usage outside the U.S. has grown rapidly from a small base, the U.S. share of the world’s online population has fallen from 65 percent to less than 25 percent in the last 10 years," said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. "The fact that more than three-quarters of the traffic to Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft is now coming from outside of the U.S. is indicative of what a truly global medium the Internet has become."

With all the hubub about Google setting up the political action commitees, you would think they would have some time to come up with a cute election day logo. Heck, the do one for every other special day they can think of! Well, I guess Yahoo get's the kudoos this year!

Ok, so I procrastinated on deciding who to vote for today, I have been busy with my affiliate business. So I thought, hey, wouldn't it be nice to find out of there are some local politicians who get search, maybe they would be the ones to vote for.

So I said to myself, "Self, if there is a local politician doing local PPC advertising, they got my vote!"

It wasn't to be this year. Other than the term "vote" which came up with an ad to join the libertarian party, there were no candidates to be found. I typed in "who to vote for", "Virginia senator", "Virginia senate", and finally I thought I had stuck gold, I typed in "Virginia Candidates" and was presented with an Ad!

Alas, the ad was from FabulousDomains letting me know that VirginiaCandidates.com was for sale. I clicked through and it's selling for $1,100. I hope the sell it!

So to the Candidates in the next race, looks like all the terms are up for grabs on Google for $0.05 per click. Might be a lot more cost effective than some of those TV Ads!

So I'll have to ask my wife who to vote for again this year. Darn!

MTV Takes a Step into Economy 2.0

In January of this year, I wrote about Economy 2.0 on ReveNews, the new virtual economies being created in online games like Second Life and World of War Craft. Now MTV has teamed up with There.com to launch a new multiplayer universe, Virtual Laguna Beach, based on the hit MTV reality show Laguna Beach.

Users of VLB and There.com can create and sell avatar clothing items, vehicles, home furnishings, and buildings through There auctions where they can earn "Therebucks". Several third party sites, like tbux.com, have setup exchanges where you can convert Therebucks into US Dollars.

Are you spinning your virtual gold into dollars? I would love to hear your story!

The Halloween season is looking pretty good for retailers. The Washington post has released a story about a recent study from the National Retail Federation indicating, among other things, that nearly 2/3 of American’s plan to celebrate Halloween this year, up from 1/2 last year!

The average person plans on increase spending by over 21% this year with an average spend of $59.06 on Halloween, weather on Halloween candy, Halloween costumes, or Halloween Decorations according to the NEF, this is up from $48.48 last year.

As far as decorations go, Halloween is the 2nd largest decorating day after Christmas. 67% of American's plan to purchase Halloween Decorations this year. 60^ plan to buy costumes this year, up from 53% last year.

Look forward to a good Halloween Season!

Trick or Treat!

At Commission Junction University (CJU) in Santa Barbara today, CJ announced the launch of their new web services initiative. Web Services is CJ's availability of APIs that will enable publishers and advertisers to access product catalog information and create web applications. As part of the rollout they have announced a contest for the best application developed with Adobe Dreamweaver, the winner will get Adobe Studio 8. Also with the launch comes a developers forum where the community can interact and discuss applications.

The API availability is a great step in the right direction, but falls short by stopping at product catalog and link searching. Publishers looking to automate their businesses will be disappointed in the lack of access to financial and sales data. Hopefully this will come in 2007.

For more information about CJ Webservices, visit http://webservices.cj.com

Vinny's company, Clicks2Customers, sponsored Ben Edleman to research the effects of anti-spam and anti-virus protection software on affiliate network cookies that are used to track customers who return and buy from the merchants after the initial click.

As you may know, many merchants offer 30, 60, 180, or more return days in their programs so that affiliates who generate the click to the merchant can still be compensated when that customer returns at a later date and completes a transaction.

Vinny wanted some independent research to determine just how many commissions his company was potentially losing out on by these programs who automatically delete cookies. The answer is a shocking 30%!

Ben Edleman has put up a web calculator program that can help companies determine the payouts the intend to pay their affiliates and show them exactly how much more they should pay to take into consideration these non-tracked sales.

Beyond merchants paying more to compensate for the evitable washing of these network cookies what else can be done? Vinny suggests allowing affiliates to use their own sub domains and CNAME them to the networks rather than the generic network domains that are being employed today. I have heard other potential solutions about having the merchants actually deliver 1st party cookies. I believe linkconnector does this today. The report actually points out this kind of private labeling could be a good solution:

"Private labeling offers another alternative tracking model. Suppose a merchant allocated a third-level host name to its ad system, e.g. linkshare.dell.com. Then the ad system could set cookies within the merchant's second-level domain name, and the merchant could retrieve such cookies later, as needed. This approach is used by DirectTrack (among others). "

Clearly this is a big issue that the networks and merchants should look at closely. The report clearly shows that the larger the network the bigger the issue, with Linkshare being in the worst position. (see chart below)

Where will all this lead? Personally, I might take a harder look at DirectTrack merchants and the Kolimbo network and maybe Linkconnector as well. Perhaps merchants who are not legally bound to stay with one network (linkshare often ads this to their contract) should consider setting up a directtrack solution as well to test the differences and offer affilaites who are conserned about the 3rd party cookie washing issue an alternative.

What do you think?

Additional Links:

The Full Report

Vinny's Comments and Findings

Revenue Magazine's Article

David Lewis' Article on Revenews

Affiliate Networks Most affected:

Last week I posted an article on ReveNews that sparked quite a bit of discussion. I pointed out Yahoo's new Coupon shortcut where they are pulling coupons and posting affiliate links to the stores offering the coupons at the top of some of their organic search results. I further hypnotized that this could be the beginning of Yahoo and other search engines getting a taste for commission revenues and indicated that I thought it could lead to them looking for more ways to turn the organic listings into commissionable links. The basic theory goes that since the search engines are just large publishers with lots of traffic, and since their goal is to make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for, and since they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize revenues, then it isn't too far fetched of a concept to think that search engines could identify which companies had affiliate programs available, and turn the standard "free" links that currently point to these sites into "commissionable" links. Why not get paid for the traffic.

Well as you can imagine this sparked a lot of discussion. At last count there were over 56 comments and growing daily.

Then today, I friend of mine pointed out a posting on Search Engine Watch's Blog saying they had discussed the coupon links with Yahoo and that Yahoo was aggregating coupons and rebates from multiple sources for these links. Additionally Yahoo let them know about a new shortcut that links to their internal shopping engine for search terms that include the word cheap, like "cheap plasma tv":

This is one more indication that search engines are starting to test using their search results to push traffic to revenue generating sites "and / or" internal monetized properties. This is what Google Base is all about as well.

Clearly the free lunch for merchant traffic via search engines will get harder and harder to come by, and search engines will continue to look for ways to enhance the user experience by manipulating the results to get customers what they want faster, as well as through sites and properties that will earn the search engines more money.

As much as people might like to argue about it, this is clearly the natural evolution of search engine results.

Is it the end of affiliate marketing, NO! Is it an opportunity for savvy affiliates and affiliate managers to cut specialized deals with search engines, ABSOLUTLY!

Ever since Google changed their policy to only showing one ad per display URL there have been A LOT of affiliate programs issuing new policies forbidding affiliates for direct linking their search engine ads to their affiliate program. Honestly I think this has been a BIG mistake by affiliate managers, and has hurt many programs.

Vinny did a great write up outlining some of the issues in his Revenews article, "Search Agencies vs. Search Affiliates". If you haven't had a chance to read his article, I suggest you do so, I would consider this one a must read for any serious affiliate manager.

I have been communicating with an affiliate manager about this very issue, where the company has decided to not allow people to link directly to their url in search ads, and his comments were as follows:

For now, the company had decided to take this stand. I was told that our affiliates that do search marketing are not targeting the tail end but the head. If they were targeting the tail end, I was told that we would be more than happy but that’s not what’s happening.

My response was as follows:

I think what happens is that affiliates start by testing the head to see if it can be profitable, especially on brand and misspellings, once profitability is proven than and only then are these top affiliates willing to expend resources to building out a full scale campaign that targets the tail.

Even so, if you are paying for search marketing and are paying for affiliates, if they both bring in sales they should be able to compete to see who can bring them in most efficiently for the company. All things being equal if the company and the affiliate are bidding on the same terms and driving traffic to the companies site, ie same display url, the company should have the advantage since they are earning more for the sale then the affiliate is. In this scenario the affiliate’s ad will only typically show up either on terms where the company isn’t bidding, or where the affiliate’s ads are better performing.

Once you take the ego’s of the internal search teams and the profit goals of the outsourced search marketing agencies off the table and look at things from a maximization of the company’s total sales and earnings basis, this should really be a no brainer.

Google's latest update to their quality scores also provides an additional reason why companies should consider allowing affiliate to directly link to their sites. Since Google is looking at the ads and giving a quality score rating to the landing pages, the typical content links and quick landing pages that used to work well in Google are getting much harder. Affiliates need to build out more substantial sites with higher Google PR values if they want to have sites that are considered "Good Quality" by Google. When an affiliate is linking directly to the merchant's site through the affiliate links, Google is looking at the Quality and relevance of the Company site. In most cases, this should be a higher value than the typical affiliate search arbitrager will be able to achieve on their own. So by allowing direct linking, you could be reducing the cost per click for your affiliates, thereby giving them more room to promote your company on more terms or bid higher on terms they have found to produce.

Clearly allowing direct linking in your affiliate program combines with the right search affiliates should equate to more sales for your company.

Food for thought... I would love to hear your comments!

comScore released their monthly qSearch analysis of the major search engine activity with the heading that Yahoo registers a moderate share gain for the 2nd consecutive month. When you look at the numbers, you see that from June of 2006 to July of 2006, Yahoo went from 28.5% market share to 28.8% market share. Yet a further look at the numbers shows that Yahoo is of 1.7% from July of 2005, dropping from 30.5% market share to 28.8%. I guess it's good to celebrate small gains, but let's not lose site of the big picture.

comScore also notes that Google's share declined 1% from the previous month dropping from 44.7% to 43.7% market share, however on a year over year basis they are up a whopping 7.2% from 36.5% in July of 2005, to a commanding 43.7% in 2006.

Clearly there may be some small monthly shifts in market share which "COULD" single a possible change in where the market is headed, but the year over year figures clearly show that the Google juggernaut is still rolling over the competition.

Today we have a returning Guest Blogger, Lee Gientke:

Regular readers of the blog will know me from my posts about migrating from CJ to LinkShare and my subsequent love of LinkShare. Well I’ve done some migrating of my own to a company called LeadPoint. One of the reasons for my move was an immediate fascination with LeadPoint’s business model and my belief that lead generation is the next frontier for affiliate marketing.

So you are thinking, well here we go, Lee’s just going to push LeadPoint like a spammer pushing Viagra and Rolex watches. All I have to say is hold on a sec and hear me out.

Traditional lead-gen programs work by taking a lead and reselling it a number of times. Take for example, LendingTree, i.e. “When banks compete, you win.” If you are a lead-gen affiliate, take a step back and think about this tagline and ultimately your commissions. LendingTree makes their money by taking your lead and reselling it five times. Some lenders and brokers are willing to pay in excess of $50 for a refinance lead. So quick math says 50 times five is 250 less your commission of X leaves them with a big piece of the pie and you the affiliate a crumb to nibble on.

Now imagine that equation turned around with you the affiliate getting LendingTree’s share of the pie. If you are a smaller affiliate who generates one lead per day, you are thinking that’s impossible, no one will buy my leads other than LendingTree. If you are the affiliate who generates 500 leads a day, you are thinking I have enough leads to sell to a Wells Fargo or a loan broker but then I need to hire a sales staff to chase those guys but I don’t want the overhead to crimp my margins.

Enter LeadPoint. LeadPoint works very much like the NASDAQ or eBay in that we are a real-time trading floor where buyers and sellers – irregardless of size – can meet to trade their wares 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on a real time basis. This means that the small, one lead a day affiliate has access to major lead buyers like Ameriquest and Priority Student Loans and the big affiliate is able to offload as much volume as they can produce without the overhead and hassle of a sales force. LeadPoint maximizes and monetizes each transaction by selling the lead up to four times and charging a small trading fee off the gross revenues. In real terms, this means sellers net 30-50% more than any other lead generation programs. And as a marketplace, you will never be competing against us for ad space.

To help the seller, LeadPoint has come up with some really cool innovations to further monetize your marketing efforts. One of these is a toll-free phone number that will transfer your mortgage lead to a loan officer after the lead is qualified via a series of computerized prompts. Major media conglomerates like the New York Times are leveraging this technology to monetize space in both online and offline channels. But it gets better in that you don’t need to be the New York Times to do this. Can you say cable TV commercials with your phone number and URL advertising your new mortgage company? Or how about direct mail or print advertising? With LeadPoint at your side you can have a home-finance company and never talk to a single customer. The same applies for our other verticals.

By meeting at an exchange like LeadPoint, both the buyers and sellers interests are protected and maximized. The sellers benefit because LeadPoint is able to guarantee payment and maximize their revenue by selling the lead multiple times. The buyers benefit because they are buying leads that have been quality verified and the number of times a lead was sold is controlled. Lastly, everyone benefits because the cost to facilitate this exchange is low. In short, both sides get all the benefits of selling direct with none of the hassles.

So if you have dreams of a new Bentley and a house in the Hamptons swirling in your head, give me a call and I’ll get you going. We are now actively trading leads in home finance (English and Spanish language), debt management, student loan consolidation and some other B2B verticals with payday loans, automotive, and a dozen other service verticals coming by the end of the year.

Lee Gientke
Business Development Manager
www.LeadPoint.com
310/209-8662
lee.gientke AT leadpoint.com

Has Google finally gone off the deep end? Now that Google has been accepted as a Verb the company has started looking at ways to protect their brand to make sure it doesn't become as generic as Xerox.

Apparently Google doesn't want to go the way of Xerox and have people saying things like "I Googled that hottie", instead they would rather say that "I ran a Google search on that hottie".

Hmm.... I think that the term "to Goggle" someone has pretty much been engrained in society at this point, and it's kind of like trying to stuff toothpaste back into the tube once it has left.

Maybe Google will sue Merriam-Webster for including the term in the dictionary.

Perhaps Google just want's to be on record as having put people on notice that they don't want to become the generic term that culture has already made them.

I'm going to go Google the term "Genericide", oops; I mean perform a Google search on the word "Genericide". Oh crap, I'll just Yahoo it.

James Martell has recelntly announced he will be offeting his Affiliate Bootcamp training via the Internet. In typical James Martell fashion he has provided one of his professionaly written articles to explain the program and provide links back to his site:

By Kellie Fowler

James Martell to Kick-Off First Ever Online “BootCamp” Training Via The Internet: Students Build Sites from Comfort of Their Own Home in Engaging, -- One Evening Per Week, -- For Eight Weekly Sessions

The 8-week curriculum will be delivered one evening per week for eight weeks, with each "night-school" style class dedicated to one of the eight steps outlined in Martell’s top-selling downloadable Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook

More and more families are struggling with debt – be it escalating mortgages, credit card debt, or trying to save for a child’s education or retirement. The truth is that day-to-day living has become more expensive and keeping up is a battle, and most people have all but given up their dreams of finally getting ahead.

But this just doesn’t have to be the case.

In fact, there is a legitimate, proven way to make money – whether to simply supplement your current income or to provide a full-time income for you and your family, and it’s called affiliate marketing.

And perhaps one of the Net's longest running affiliate marketers, James Martell, who has been teaching his tried-and-true moneymaking techniques to people just like you for well over seven years, is now making his infamous live BootCamp training available via the Internet.

This means anyone can take advantage of this eight-week course to ensure they achieve financial freedom once and for all.

The first-ever Affiliate Marketers BootCamp Online "Night School" Edition will begin Thursday, September 7th, with Martell coming into your home “live” through an engaging, real-time online conference room. The 8-week curriculum will be delivered every Thursday evening for eight weeks, with each night-school style course dedicated to one of the eight steps outlined in Martell’s top-selling downloadable Affiliate Marketer’s Handbook.

Normally delivered in three consecutive days in Martell’s hometown of Surrey, BC (Canada), the BootCamp materials and live instruction have been further broken down to ensure online BootCamp attendees fully grasp each of the eight steps, and can have the time to apply these and ask Martell questions in the live question and answer sessions held at the conclusion of each evening course.

When asked about her experience at Martell’s most recent BootCamp, attendee Julia Mahler said this: “The past 3 days were truly amazing. I learned SO much, became re-motivated and re-inspired to continue my publishing business, I've lost sight of my dreams over the last couple of years - I can see them again now. Thank you!”

Martell, who, until recently, was not convinced that online classroom technology would allow him to effectively and efficiently deliver his instruction via the Internet, has earned quite a reputation as a teacher. His students fly from across the world to attend his three-day BootCamps and regularly report significant increases in their sales (and their paychecks) after jump-starting their online efforts with Martell’s eight-step methodology.

For Martell student Roman Gill, a true paid search expert, the difference can be seen in the development of his websites. “I received significant value in walking through your methodology to develop quality websites that rank high in the search engines naturally. Many things to absorb and try to implement our web strategy,” said Gill.

Martell student Laurie Watkins found Martell’s information top-shelf and his delivery to be exactly what she needed to get her online business on track and keep it there. “First class! Great presentation, excellent stage presence, (and) good use of time. Well done! Keep up the good work,” Watkins said!

And online BootCamp attendees are sure to concur, for Martell’s new online conference room will showcase Martell as he walks through the same videos he uses in the off-line BootCamp, with real-time audio and more.

Much like the original BootCamp, which started in Oct. 2005, the online BootCamp is targeted to new and experienced affiliate marketers alike, to those who already have Martell’s newly released Affiliate Marketing Handbook - "2006" (THIRD EDITION), and are looking for the extra push they need to get up and running, and to “newbies” looking to break-into this exciting and profitable career.

In fact, these are the very reasons the original BootCamp was started and why it continues to boast sell out crowds.

It all began when Martell’s students asked for something more. They wanted to spend time one-on-one with the successful affiliate marketer. But the demand far exceeded anything one person could handle and so Martell set out to teach to his infamous eight-step approach to a number of people at once, all the while maintaining the personal, one-on-one experience his loyal students requested.

And the BootCamps were a hit from the get-go.

But Martell continued to hear from students who were unable to travel the distance to his hometown or unable to take time away from family and other obligations, or who simply could not afford the trip and accommodations and therefore could not take advantage of the very offer they asked for.

So, back to the drawing board he went. And, once introduced to an online conference room that could be used to deliver his training in the same one-on-one atmosphere, while allowing people to attend from their homes (foregoing travel and expenses), he knew he had another BootCamp winner.

And, as expected, the response from students has been overwhelmingly positive, not only because of the convenience and affordable costs it allows, but because Martell’s online BootCamp packs years of his personal research, development, and experiences into eight evening sessions, making it a truly invaluable investment.

Attendees can expect Martell, who has tapped into more than 60 different industries and boats nearly 100 specialty shopping sites via the Web, to use his robust online conference room to show exactly how to:

• Get And Stay On Track
• Research Topics
• Work with Web Publishing Software
• Choose Templates
• Plan Site Maps
• Develop Keyword Lists
• Use His Keyword Density Formula
• Choose Merchants
• Arrange Hosting
• FTP to your Server
• Submit to Search Engines
• Work with Authors on Elance
• Arrange Quality Inbound Links
• Monitor Traffic
• Manage Site(s)
• Adjust to Online Change
• And much more...

“Martell’s BootCamps are excellent, in depth and informative", explains BootCamp attendee Howard Hood. “Martell clarifies content in the manual and proves we all have the knowledge and abilities to succeed in affiliate marketing.”

For more information, and for class schedules, visit: http://www.affiliate-marketers-bootcamp.com/.

About The Author

Bill Schnarr is a successful freelance writer and a seasoned professional providing valuable insight and advice to those looking to work from home based business. His numerous articles offer real-life tips and techniques to those looking for a way out of the rat race.

As much as Microsoft would like to keep their customers using Internet Explorer, they have succumbed to the pressure to support Firefox, a browser owned by competitor Google, that is growing in popularity due to its speed and plug-in support. This could be a new trend for Microsoft, perhaps in their struggle to win the search war, they will neglect the browser war and assume they have already won.

On that note, I heard that Microsoft was thinking about force pushing an upgrade that would upgrade IE users to the latest version 7 along with their standard "Critical Updates" that some people have their computers set to install automatically.

Interesting times...

Second Life has been on for forefront of what I call Economy 2.0, where people are making real world cash buying and selling goods and services in the virtual worlds of massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Today I received an email from Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life, indicating that they have moved to a totally virtual affiliate model. Here is how it works:

1. You have to have a Second Life account to be an affiliate of theirs.
2. Your new affiliate URLs will be tied to your Second Life Accounts
3. You will receive 1,000 Linden Dollars for each Premium account referred.

So no more US Dollar Payments for affiliates, you will have to play to be paid....

Interesting... Thoughts?

I wrote an article on ReveNews about Joel Comm's 500Words.com site. I think Joel came up with an interesting concept and he did a great job of monetizing it and then farming out the code for a fee so others could duplicate the effort.

But one Good idea does lead to the knockoffs, and this little press release caught my eye today as the mother of all knockoffs. I especially like the headline "World's Biggest Internet Discovery Since the Internet Itself". Oh Brother... Top500Wordz.com isn't anything special... new or any kind of major discovery, it's just another implementation of Joel's code, and I hope Joel made some bucks off of it...

Just a quick reminder to those of you who haven't submitted your claim forms for Google's click fraud class action case. The deadline is Aug 4th, 2006. You only have a few days left!

Submit your claims at www.clicksettlement.com

I would like to Welcome Vinny Lingham to the GoYaMi team. Since Todd has decided to pursue other opportunities outside the affiliate and search marketing space, we agreed that Vinny would be a great choice as a replacement. Vinny is a legend in the affiliate marketing space. Based in South Africa, incuBeta was awarded the 2005 Business Day Technology Top 100 Most Promising Emerging Enterprise Award. Additionally, his US subsidiary, Clicks2Customers has been awarded the Commission Junction Horizon award twice! Once in 2004 for his U.S efforts, and just recently the 2006 UK Horizon award for outstanding performance abroad.

Vinny has a lot of experience and has a lot to share, I am sure we will all get a lot out of the wisdom he shares at GoYaMi.

Please join me in welcoming Vinny to the team!

Adam

zanox has asked me to invite you to their free zanox Academy event in Chicago on July 25th, 2006. To Register, use the following link. Here are the 5 W's / additional details:

Who:
Power Affiliates & Affiliate Networks looking to Go Global

What:
zanox Academy sponsored by Date.com, Matchmaker.com, DADAmobile and Encyclopedia Britannica.

zanox Academy will start with an overview of the company, special features & tools, and give a preview of what's to come, then they will turn the mic over to their merchant sponsors to hear about what's new in their company and to discuss how you can earn commission with their offers. Last but not least, Shawn Collins will talk about the industry of affiliate marketing and the importance of going global (via telco or web conference). After the academy everyone is invited to head over to a boat cruise where there will be lots of food and enough beverages to chill the moment, while taking in the view of the city from Lake Michigan. The night will end with a party at the Victor Hotel.

Where:
Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers
301 East North Water Street
Erie Room, 2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60611

When:
July 25th, 2006
1:00 p.m. - ???

Why:
Because zanox, Inc. has over 900 international merchants who want to partner up with power affiliates and affiliate networks just like you! Did you know that all of zanox’s merchants prepay so there is no need to wait 90 or even 120 days for payment on the sales/click/leads earned? Did you also know that zanox provides free tools to manage SEM campaigns, real-time reporting, multi-domain management with one log-in, payments in 37 currencies and 24/5 technical support? If you are looking to go global, we encourage you to learn more (and sign-up for free) at http://www.zanox.com , here is a sample of some of the global merchant offers you will find: Staples, Expedia, Amazon, Lycos, CD-WOW, DADAmobile, Jamster, University of Phoenix, TheCuteKid, Procter&Gamble, Time Life, AOL, QVC.

Learn More & Register for this Free Event Today!
www.zanox.com/us/academy_chicago/
Seating is limited.

If you are new to zanox, setup an account today!

For more information, please contact:

Theresa Hartwig Duerr
Affiliate Manager, zanox US
Phone – 1-877-zanox-US
Email – tha@zanox.com
MSN IM – tah0708@hotmail.com

Google's recent announcement to offer CPA advertising has gotten a lot of attention. On my last entry on this topic. I got an interesting comment asking about accurate tracking and click fraud possibilities.

Tracking:
It will be interesting to see how they offer these types of CPA offers for sale to advertisers. My guess for tracking results is that they will use the conversion tracking technology that they provide as part of AdWords now, where the publisher will be required to place some sort of conversion code on their thank you for ordering page.

Assuming the initial deals are cost per lead, the advertiser would supposedly set an amount they are willing to pay for a lead, and when that confirmation page loads, Google will track this as a lead.

Here are some potential fraud scenarios:

Fake Leads / CPA Fraud:
Obviously there could be a scenario similar to click fraud, where instead of people around the world being paid to click on ads, they would be paid to generate fake leads, thereby generating revenues for Google and the sites hosting these CPA offer ads. I am sure this is a scenario that Google has thought of, and has looked at ways to track and prevent this, it will be much easier for the advertisers to identify fraudulent leads than fraudulent clicks. Google will need to come up with a way for advertisers to report these fraudulent leads. If they are simply using the conversion tracking codes, they will also need to deal with duplicate leads and page reloads the conversion pages.

Broken Site / Leakage Issues
The second type of "fraud" could come from the publisher's end where they don't always present the Google conversion code for all transactions, and thereby get clicks for free to their site without paying for "conversions".

Imagine this scenario. Someone creates a page to capture mortgage leads, and throws a lot of AdSense pay per click ads on their page, and due to some "technical glitch" the customer have difficulties completing the lead form, all they can do is click on the AdSense ads or leave the site. The site owner would then be able to get clicks for free because they would have little to no conversion rates. An advertiser might be willing to pay a lot per conversion if only 1-2% of the clicks actually convert on the page, but the non-converters drive revenues.

This might not be done intentional; there are a lot of sites out there with horrible shopping cards and conversion flows. Additionally many site have multiple revenue sources, and there will be a lot of scenarios that the CPA deal that is tracked is just one of the ways the site is making money, Google and their publishers might not share in a lot of the revenues, and thus allow advertisers to pay less per click for their traffic.

By moving into the CPA deals, Google will be taking on more risk in the transactions. There PPC model is a lot simpler to operate and administer from Google's end, because there is no transaction risk. In this type of free market, advertisers are willing to pay to the point of not being profitable, and in a perfect world, Google should be maximizing the return in the PPC model.

I guess my point for Google is, if it isn’t broken, don't fix it. This transaction risk is what the advertisers and affiliates have been arbitraging on Google for some time using their PPC advertising model. When ads don't work, we bid less or turn them off, as more and more bidders come into the market, Google's PPC model seems like the best and simplest way for them to make money.

My guess is that Google will find the CPA world offers more headaches than it's worth.

But you never know, if they ad a lot of intelligence behind the CPA model like they did with the PPC model, then only the best converting and most money generating ads (for Google) will display throughout the network, and the could open up a whole lot of new revenue sources and put some of these fly by night “CPA networks” out of business.

Chad Darling
Missing in Action
Last Seen at Affiliate Summit 2005
Previous Job: CJ Publisher Acocunt Manager
May be in hiding from Triple Jangro incident.
Whereabouts Unknown
Please comment below if there have been any sightings...

Google's latest announcement that they will start testing cost per acquisition (CPA) advertisements has perked up the ears of the affiliate community. David Jackson appears to be the first to layout the Google CPA plan by which Google will start testing some CPA ads on publisher's sites, thereby paying the publisher not for the click, but only if the desired action takes place once the ad is clicked. This could be a sale or a lead form fill in. David Jackson has labeled this as a ValueWeb killer.

Sam Harrelson on ReveNews doubts this will mean the end of ValueWeb's CJ unit. He thinks this is just another indicator that the lead generation business is "red hot".

Jeff Doak, also on ReveNews concurs with Mr. Harrelson, and thinks this is far from the beginning of the end for CJ. "Affiliate marketing isn't about dynamically generated text links on content sites, it's about clever publishers who figure out new ways to drive converting traffic." says Mr. Doak. "Affiliate marketing is about relationships, and there is simply no relationship here." He thinks Google makes too much on PPC to risk it on CPA deals.

Scott Jangro writes, "The smaller CPA networks also have to be concerned, though they can surely compete on price. Google, like any large company, will be bogged down in policies and accounting that will probably make it difficult for them to compete with the creative and nimble CPA networks at a pricing and service level."

Personally, I see it as an interesting development in the ever changing landscape of search marketing. Google has constantly gone after new ways to make more revenues. Surely that see their PPC ads being used to generate large volumes of CPA deals, and they have raised the advertising rates under the guise of "page value rankings". This is just one more step in the direction of opening up the lucrative CPA money to Google.

Another thing to note is that Google has probably woken up to the fact that their contextual advertising model is a little broken. By opting advertisers into contextual advertising as a default option, they have exposed their advertisers to click fraud, and non performing traffic. In this industry Google only wins if the publishers who host their ads and the advertisers who pay for those ads make money. For some time we have seen publishers happy with AdSense ads that pay them for each click, but more and more advertisers are waking up and seeing that these ads just don't convert and are not worth the money they are paying for them. Perhaps a move towards CPA is a move towards helping to make these advertisers a bit more open to considering these networks since it would reduce the risk of paying for non-converting traffic or worse, fraud.

Right now it is a limited test, I think the interesting part will come when they start showing how they will be allowing advertisers to purchase these ads and how they will track those conversions. That might open up some interesting opportunities for smart affiliates who are able to create deals with their merchants to host the Google tracking codes on their conversion pages or allow their affiliates to capture the leads on the affiliate sites and then pass the leads.

Additionally, publishers may now have another revenue making option to test on their sites. AdSense has proven to be a money maker for many sites, and these CPA deals from Google might make sense too if they are simple to implement and auto-optimizing to maximize your revenues.

Keeping up with the changes is part of the challenge, and part of the fun!

Google has launched ad scheduling features for Adwords. Advertisers can now schedule when they want the ads in their campaigns to run, and apply bid multipliers during certain times of the day.

Clearly this new feature is in response to similar features launched by MSN AdCenter. Yahoo is also set to roll out advanced features in their new ad bidding platform later this year.

Competition on the PPC ad space is quickly turning into new features for advertisers. Let the PPC Adwars begin!

I came across the following picture and it made me laugh. I thought I would share it with you with a message to get out from behind your desk and enjoy the summer!

CJs announcement about moving to JavaScript links has caused quite a stir. Scott Jangro, an x-CJ emplpyee turned super affiliate, has created a petition that he plans to present in person to the CJ office. By the time you read this message, the petition should have more than 100 signers. If you want to encourage CJ to re-consider their forced change to JavaScript, I encourage you to electronically sign the petition and add your own comments.

The general feeling from the comments is that JavaScript links are ok, so long as they are presented as a CHOICE, and not forced. As I pointed out in an earlier message, JavaScript just won't work in many cases.

Commission Junction's recent announcement about the upcoming change from standard text links to JavaScript links for all of their affiliate links has caused quite a bit of uproar in the affiliate community. For those of you who haven't heard here are the basics, as I understand them:

1. Starting June 23, 2006, new advertisers will only deliver JavaScript links. Older advertisers will start offering JavaScript links but legacy links will work for some time.
2. Advertisers who wish to support email and search publishers will need to provide email and keyword links for these publishers, which will use the old HTML style. If these links don't exist the advertiser doesn't allow that type of affiliate marketing. Email and Search marketers must use these links going forward.
3. Old "legacy" html links that exist on sites today will be fazed out sometime in the future, but publishers will be given at least 6-month's notice before these links will stop working. (This notice has not been given at this time).

Commission Junction has provided FAQs (cj login required) to help advertisers and publishers better understand the upcoming change.

Personally, I like the idea of having the option of using JavaScript links for certain links of my sites, and understand that these links can provide enhanced functionality like rotating offers, keeping the latest offers up to date, etc... I have used these types of links on occasion successfully with other advertisers on other networks.

I have also run into some problems with JavaScript links. Here are just a few of them:

Search Engines
The content in JavaScript links are invisible to most search engines. This means for text links your content is only partially visible. CJ's current argument is that since search engines appear to be looking to provide negative values to sites with affiliate links and by switching to JavaScript the search engines won't know you have affiliate links.

This argument is really short sited. When the largest affiliate network switches link types, you can bet that the search engines will recognize them in the near future. This isn't going to help publishers search rankings.

Blogs and Web Builder Tools
I have been using TypePad for a while to build blog sites. Initially posting JavaScript in your message will work if you select HTML mode first, but if you subsequently have to make any change to your post, the JavaScript is stripped out and will need to be re-built from scratch. This is a major hurdle. Additionally, many website building tools provided with your hosting packages don't support full html or JavaScript entries. These template web building products often just have a hyperlink button where you can enter the URL you want to link your text or image to.

Form Links
Often with a website you might want to create an html form style link to your site. Maybe it's a radio button, drop down list, or Click Box. (Examples: 10BestSelling Drop Down at the Top, Viener Shop - List of Merchants in the Middle). Converting these over may be difficult.

Redirect Links
Many affiliates utilize tools on their site to capture additional click data and these tools often take the form of a redirection. These could be home grown tools, ad-running software, or content management software. Integrating JavaScript links into these tools would be very problematic.

I personally manage the affiliate relationships for a consulting client, where they have a lot of content and I have taken on the role of monetizing their site. In order to avoid having to go through all their content over and over again when a merchant switches programs, I registered a new domain and have setup 301 redirects in the htaccess file for each vendor's link. This way I can just reference www.domain.com/afflink.html and automatically redirect to the url of the site. This setup simply won't support JavaScript.

AdBlocking
Commission Junction has touted that using JavaScript may avoid the recent rise in cookie blocking and ad blocking tools, but in their argument they fail to point out that JavaScript is also heavily blocked by these same tools!

Yes, it's true that many other affiliate networks offer JavaScript links and that there are some advantages to these links in certain situations. But there is no other network out there, that i know of, that is forcing JavaScript links as the only option. Even when it is the default option, html, iframe, and other types of links are provided.

Conclusion
Based on my conversations with my contacts at CJ, I think they are in Phase I of this role out, and haven't really thought through all of the issues clearly enough. I personally consider this June 23rd role-out a wide spread beta, and think they will learn a lot and doubt that we will see the HTML links going away for a long time.

Having recently purchased a set of established websites from Todd, my Goyami cohort, I decided to explore the sites online where you can buy and sell established websites. I would caution you, that if you plan on buying an established website, be sure to do some research on the site. There are a lot of people selling "turnkey" sites that they quickly build, sell and build again. You can actually buy turnkey sites from companies like DotComBuilder, you wouldn't want to pay for one of those from an online auction when you can build it yourself cheaply.

Business 2.0 recently had an article entitled "Flipping Web Fixer-Uppers - The latest rage: Buying cheap Internet sites, building tem out, and reselling them". In this article they highlighted SitePoint's Marketplace as a good place to buy and sell established sites.

SitePoint charges $9.95 to list a website for sale in their forums. I actually decided to list one of the sites that I had acquired from Todd in their forums as a test. Check out my listing for Save-on-Guitars-Drums-and-Music-Gear.com. Even though the site is profitable, I decided to list it for sale because it uses a datafeed from Befree which will need to be updated and I don't see myself having the time to get to this one quick enough. Also, I thought it would be good experience testing out selling a site this way. I might sell more. I also have bid on a few; there are some interesting finds in these forums.

Here is a good list of sites where you can buy and sell established web-sites:

• SitePoint's Marketplace
• GoDaddy's Aftermarket - Use Advanced Search to find domains with sites.
• Sedo - Use advanced search for websites.
• WebMasterTrades.com
• WebSiteBroker.com
• UKWebsiteForSale.co.uk
• eBay's Internet Business / Website Category - also check the following sub-categories: Dating Sites, eCommerce Sites, Entertainment Sites, Hosting Sites, Portals and Search Sites, and Other sites.

Finding a good site to acquire in these forums is like looking for a needle in the haystack, but every once in a while you can find a good one and pick it up at a decent price. With a little bid of updating, monetization work, and some paid and organic search work, you could turn a fair site into a great site and either continue earning money from it, or turn around and sell it for a profit.

Microsoft has released their adCenter Labs Beta with a few interesting tools. One of the interesting tools is their Search Funnel program that will allow you to see what keywords people searched prior to or after any search term you are interested. Here are some examples using the term "ipod nano":

I played around with the tool and it appears only go grab the most popular terms with significant traffic, so it won't be much use for true "tail" SEMs, but it can still come up with some interesting ideas and keyword nuggets you may not have thought of before.

Now that I am driving more and more traffic to landing pages, blogs, and sites, I decided to take a look and my analytics reports, I use IndexTools, to see what percentage of the people visiting my sites have cookies disabled. For the first quarter of 2006, 13.33% of the visitors to my sites had cookies disabled.

Assuming that the people with cookies enabled and disabled convert at the same rate, that means that 13% of the sales I am generating are probably not being tracked.

A recent report in Web Services Magazine indicates that of the 25 percent of searchers that purchased an item directly related to their search query, of these buyers only 37% completed their purchase online, the remaining 63% of the sales happened offline.

Clearly there is a large portion of revenues being created by affiliates that are benefiting the merchant advertisers but not showing up in commission reports, or the company calculations of the value of their affiliate marketing channel.

Additionally, companies may be under-estimating the value of their own internet marketing efforts if their tracking tools are relying on cookies to track performance.

I wonder how many marginally unprofitable campaigns I have shut down over the years that might have been salvaged if the true value of the campaigns were being tracked and compensated.

Any ideas how this could be resolved?

comScore released their monthly qSearch search engine rankings report for April showing that Google has once again increased their total share of the total online searches to 43.1%, an increase of 6.6% from April 2005. Google is followed by Yahoo at 28% dropping 2.7% from April 2005. Microsoft comes in third at 12.9% off 3.2% (the largest drop in the group). Time Warner and Ask round out spots 4 and 5 with 6.9% and 5.8% respectively, both dropping from a year ago.

Interestingly, comScore has added Myspace.com to the list as the number 6 spot with 0.6% of the total searches. This amounts to 43 million search queries performed.

Total search queries reached 6.6 billion, up 4% from last month.

Ok, I hate to pick on individual companies and promotional deals, but I am going to anyway... I had a really bad offer come through the wire and a really good one, so I had to hunt for an ugly one to fit the title... As you can imagine, it wasn't hard to find, in fact I found the ugly one on my first random click of the general promotional offers I get all the time.

First, let's start with the Good:

Rugman.com comes in with the Good deal, they sent out a May newsletter announcing that they are now tracking Phone orders for affiliates. According to Rugman.com "Up to 25% of our internet traffic uses the phone to ask questions and finalize their rug orders. With the new affiliate phone order tracking on ShareASale, you will not have any 800# leaks". Great deal!

Now the Bad:

The headline of the email caught my attention " Add RSS to Your Site And Get A Comission Increase" (Yes they spelled commission wrong…). Finally a company using RSS feeds to help affiliates promote current deals on their site? Not so fast. If you add AutoBarn's JavaScript code to your site you will get a listing of their new items feed on your site, but they are not affiliate links and you get no credit if people click through them. They even try to explain this to you, but the grammar just doesn’t cut it. “Please note that you will not receive a pay-per-click credit if these links are clicked on a visitor to your site.” Wow!

But hey, they will increase your other commissions by 2% so long as you run their script. I suggest you run the script on a site you don't send traffic to, to get your 2% on your money paying site...

Finally, the Ugly:

Here's a Mother's day shoe banner from DesignerShoes.com that makes you want to jump up and add it to your site. And HURRY!

Now that MSN is officially running their own ads instead of Yahoo's, its time to start investing more time into adCenter. I was playing around with their bulk upload tool today and came across a keyword limitation of 10,000 keywords per "order". MSN adCenter works under the idea of Clients, Accounts, Campaigns, and Orders. Each company that sets up an account is considered a Client. When you login to your client, you have the ability to setup multiple accounts with separate billing information etc... (This is great for agencies).

Each Client can have a maximum of 10,000 accounts associated with it.

Under each account you can setup campaigns for your different products, services, or companies that you are promoting. Each account can have 10,000 campaigns.

Once you create a campaign you can associate 100 orders to a campaign. An order is a request for advertising, and each order contains your keywords and ads. Each order can only have 10,000 keywords, which means a single campaign can only have a maximum of 1 Million Keywords (10,000 keywords x 100 Orders). So if you have a really large lists, you will need to create multiple orders and possibly multiple campaigns to support your efforts.

When you add it all up though, you should be able to support a lot of keywords. 1 Million per Campaign, 10 Billion per Account, and 100 Trillion per Client. Not bad.

Managing a lot of keywords through the adCenter interface looks like it could be a nightmare though, with only 100 keywords showing at a time through the editing interface.

It's clunky but it's a good start.

I thought this was funny, and throught it would be nice to share a bit of light humor for this Cinco de Mayo Friday:

Salesperson: "You want answers?"

Finance: "I think we are entitled to them!"

Sales: "You want answers?!"

Finance: "I want the truth!"

Sales: "You can't handle the truth!!!"

Sales (continuing): "Son, we live in a world that requires revenue. And that revenue must be brought in by people with elite skills. Who's going to find it? You? You, Mr. Operations? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.

You scoff at sales division and you curse our lucrative incentives. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know: that while the cost of business results are excessive, it drives in revenue.

And my very existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, drives REVENUE! You don't want to know the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at staff meetings ... you want me on that call. You NEED me on that call!

We use words like comps, migration, discounts, licensing, global purchase agreements, business development. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent negotiating something. You use them as a punch line!

I have neither the time nor inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep under the very blanket of revenue I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a phone and make some sales calls. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"

Finance: "Did you expense the lap dances?"

Sales: "I did the job I was hired to do."

Finance: "Did you expense the lap dances?"

Sales: "You're goddamn right I did!"

I was surprised to receive a present from Google in the mail the other day. I opened up the Google Mini-Refrigerator (Cooler / Warmer) pictured here. This neat little gift from Google can be plugged into an outlet or a car lighter port and has a nifty handle on the top so you can carry it with you when you are on the go.

With the fridge came a personalized note signed by my Google rep and her Boss, and a nice little cardboard certificate recognizing that I have generated 1 Million Leads using Google Adwords! Wow, I thought, that is pretty cool.

After a few days though, I started to think about it. The picture of Dr. Evil came into my head when he puts his pinky to his lips and demands 1 Million Dollars, and his quickly corrected that 1 Million isn't such a ransom amount anymore.

Since Google's "leads" are actually clicks, I did some quick calculations in my accounts and since I started running AdWords, I have generated almost 13 Million "leads" in my own accounts, and well over 13 Million when you include some of the consulting other accounts I manage for a few select clients.

Now, don't get me wrong, I truly appreciate the gift, and love to be recognized for spending so much money with Google. Also please don't take the analogy to Dr Evil the wrong way, I don't think Google is Evil. But if you are going to take the time to personally thank one of your customers and recognize their performance, shouldn't you at least add up their leads? Thanking me for generating over 10 Million leads would have been better than recognizing the fact that I have generated 1 Million, don’t you think? It kind of belittles the scope of what I have accomplished with them. Quite honestly, it would have been better to send out the fridge with a note saying we appreciate all the business you do with us and wanted to thank you for your ongoing support.

Here is an interesting case study from Hitwise...

Hitwise Case Study: Affiliates and Partnerships
An Employment Firm

Learning from the successes of others is a great way to save time and money. When a employment firm was looking to identify the best partner for its business, it turned to Hitwise.

Over a 3 month period, trend analysis via the Hitwise 'Charting' tool revealed that a competitor enjoyed a 150% increase in market share of visits. In addition, by viewing the Hitwise 'Clickstream' report the client confirmed that the main driver of this growth was a new relationship with another website in the Employment category offering complimentary services.

This data, only available from Hitwise, showed the employment firm that this affiliate relationship was not only successful for acquiring new customers, but in taking market share away from other competitive sites.

Armed with this information, the marketing manager was able to:

• Gain insight into competitors' affiliate relationships and customer acquisition strategies.
  
• Measure the effectiveness of competitors' affiliate strategies.
  
• Identify, evaluate and select affiliates and partners for their own site in a more cost-effective and timely manner.
  

In November of 2005, Lee Gientke, the affiliate manager from ProHelth, submitted a guest blooger article to GoYaMi detailing his experience making the transition from CJ to Linkshare.

We have received some emails asking us to have Lee update us on how everything went and give us a follow up article on how things went and how their affiliate program has done since the switch. Here is his update:

As the Carpenters song goes, breaking up is hard to do. As I reported here last November, migrating from one network to another can be a bit challenging. I can only sympathize with the agony of the affiliates and affiliate managers who run programs on the BeFree/Reporting.net platform and with almost no notice have to migrate their programs instantly to what many say is a lesser platform. Negotiating contracts, convincing affiliates to swap links and implementation takes time and a ton of effort. In our case breaking up with CJ and starting our affair with LinkShare has been a resounding success.

Now if you’ll excuse my use of percentages and a certain level of ambiguousness -- this is only for competitive reasons and not because I’m hiding something – I’ll get on with the scandalous details of our affair with LinkShare. Some of my favorite metrics include:

• The number of affiliates with orders has tripled.
  ProHealth operates in a niche within a niche. We attract the big affiliates that everyone has but we also have a ton of affiliates who will have one or two sales a month. Because LinkShare gives me an affiliate’s direct contact information, I can give that little affiliate the white glove service they need to turn impressions into clicks and clicks into impressions.


• There was a minimal revenue drop during migration.
  This is a big concern from people considering making a switch. Our numbers were at the lower band of September’s historical trend but do you really expect to set a record when you’ve just culled 80% of your program? By the time the holidays came, we were fully back and in fact, the program had record holiday sales with an increase of more than 20%. Successful migration simply takes planning, organization, and execution – all skills that an affiliate manager worth their bonus has.


• Sales continue to improve.
  The first quarter of 2006 was a tough one for the supplement industry, with sales generally down between 3-5% depending on whose numbers you look at. We posted close to a 4% increase in q1 2006 versus q1 2005 when we were with CJ. If things continue as they have we will continue to post significant growth as compared to previous years.


• Having an account representative has been invaluable.
  My account representatives have been my wingman. Stephen and Tim tell me when the beer goggles are on and I’m about to commit a party foul. They have proven to be knowledgeable about their system, responsive to my questions and when they don’t know an answer they find it and get back to me usually the same day.


• I love LinkShare’s Reporting.
  Yeah, so the brass at LinkShare are trying to set a record by keeping Synergy Analytics in beta but their reporting in general is better. Without having to rely on my backend system or using complex Excel formulas, I can tell you what I sold, who is selling it and when it sold usually within 2 clicks. Oh, it also doesn’t time out or take forever for basic reports to load.


• My relationships with my affiliates are significantly better.
  I think it is almost daily that I hear an affiliate manager with a CJ program say something to the effect, “I’ve been trying to communicate with my affiliates using the tools CJ gives me but they are unresponsive.” At LinkShare, I have a phone number or an accurate e-mail address within 2 clicks so when I want to give someone a coupon or an increased commission, I simply call them. As a result of this personal communication, I have personal relationships with my affiliates. You simply can’t put metric on this on any level.

I know by now you are thinking, gee LinkShare must have paid him to write this because I don’t mention any problems. No, I haven’t been paid but they can make the check payable to Lee Gientke and mail them to the address they have on file. But to be fair, there are a couple complaints specifically:

• Communicate better with your merchants.
  I’m reading the forums, talking to colleagues and attending the conferences all the time but the last place I should hear about a new initiative from is an affiliate. LinkShare Signature is a classic case here. I had an affiliate call me asking me to explain how to use it. I had no clue what it was or how it worked and had to scramble to find out. How about an e-mail once a quarter letting us know what’s up?


• Talk to the folks at Google about search.
  Sometimes finding an affiliate within my database is a bit quirky if I don’t have an encoded id or an id number. I rarely am able to find anyone by their URL, which if someone is using a scripted redirect for their links, getting an encrypted id number is a bit hard.

So our affair with LinkShare is much like a license plate frame I saw today, “I miss my ex but my aim gets higher.” LinkShare has proven to be a better platform in many ways. I certainly am looking forward to the full release of Synergy Analytics, the refinement of Athena and the many other things that LinkShare has on tap in the coming months. And lastly, I’m always happy to answer questions if you have them – just drop me a line.

Lee Gientke
Affiliate Manager
www.ProHealth.com/shop
805/564-3064x212
lgientke@prohealth.com

GoYaMi got its name from the first two letters of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft because we see these as the Big Three in search engine marketing. The Mi portion has been dwarfed by Google and Yahoo because Microsoft has been getting all of it's paid ads from Yahoo's Paid search platform.

I had known that the partnership deal with Yahoo providing paid links on MSN was set to expire in June, but an email today from the Yahoo Search Marketing affiliate program prompted me to wake up a bit and say "here it comes!".

The email basically states that their affiliates should begin moving the MSN logos from their banner ads immediately, and no later than April 21st, 2006.

Here we go.... Welcome to the "Mi"....

Adam

A new magazine is launching for the Search Marking Industry, called "Search Marketing Standard" Anyone in the US can sign up for a free subscription now until April 30th, at www.searchmarketingstandard.com. (Only $20 outside the US).

It will be interesting to see how a magazine like this can keep up with the fast paced search engine marketing industry as many of the articles will be out of date by the time they are published. But it's still worth a read.

Blake from Google posted a message, on Google's Inside AdWords Blog, explaining why Google Adwords doesn't allow us to run ads to pages that have pop-ups. He says:

Well, we can sum up the answer to that in three words: bad user experience. Studies (such as the ones cited in The Most Hated Advertising Techniques by Jakob Nielsen) show that users truly dislike pop-ups, pop-unders and their ilk -- and (this is key to you as an advertiser) also tend to dislike sites that employ them. We want to ensure that our users have a very positive experience when they click on a relevant ad, and we suspect that you do too.

Thank God we have Google to keep an eye on OUR customers' user experience. I know a bunch of companies that found pop-ups actually increased their sales, and have personally chatted with a sales rep at a hosting company that popped up a message asking me if I needed some assistance.

What's next?

Sorry, we have declined your ad because you have some misspelled terms on your site, and research has shown that typos are a bad user experience?

Or, sorry Target, we have declined your ads for failure to use proper alt text to make your site accessible to our blind customers, and this could be a legal violation (they are being sued for this)...

Oh protect us great Google from our design flaws, provide us free automatic A/B testing and multivariate testing tools that will automatically enhance our websites for the optimal user experience. Or maybe we should be optimizing our sites for conversions?

Over at Google there has been a constant battle between revenue generation and user experience, remember when they turned off advertisers who shared the same display URL? Explaining to advertisers that this was done to provide the best overall user experience, clearly turning of some advertisers and having less bidders for spots didn't maximize their revenues.

It's great that Google want's to help, but I can tell you there is nothing more frustrating than trying to market a company that has decided that it is their businesses best interest to run a sale and promote that sale via a POP notification on their site, and having Google disable your ads because the knew better than the merchant what was best for their business and their customers.

Dear Google,

You used to have a great system that automatically optimized itself with a great customer feedback loop. If customers found the ads to be relevant they clicked on them. Your quality score analysis of our sites and how we communicate to our customers has crossed the line and made your advertising system a bear to work with. Tail terms that were once $0.05 and had no advertisers on them and very few clicks are now showing up at $5.00 per click, ridiculous....

Our ad dollars are flowing to Yahoo and soon to MSN adCenter... Get back to basics...

Sincerely,

Your Advertisers

I created a new site yesterday, and I thought I would share my process with you as kind of a mini tutorial on how you can build a professional affiliate site for a merchant relatively quickly.

I decided that I wanted to build out a site to market Rosetta Stone's affiliate program. Rosetta Stone is the leading language learning software provider.

Step 1: Register a Domain
I went to the Rosetta Stone Website and noticed that their title tag on their home page is "Rosetta Stone: Language Learning Software". Since languagelearningsoftware.com was taken, I registered Language-Learning-Software.com. Quite honestly if you are going to be doing paid search, the dashes look good in your ads.

Step 2: Web Template
For this project, I wanted it to look professional, so I decided to grab a pre-made web-template. I used to have a paid account with DotComBuilder.com this site has a lot of quality templates. When I had an account for a month, it let me download 5 templates per day. They also have some interesting pre-canned affiliate sites. Anyway I went through my templates I had downloaded and selected their e-book template:

Step 3: Graphic Modifications
In order to work with professional templates you need some good graphic tools. I prefer the tools from web design tools from Macromedia. I use Fireworks for graphics and HomeSite for HTML, but have plans to move up to Dreamweaver. Using Fireworks, I made the updates I needed to the buttons and logo on the site. Then I used HomeSite to make HTML modifications and work in the new elements and design feels I wanted.

Step 4: Content and Links
I spent a lot of time on Rosetta Stone's site learning about how they market their product to determine what I thought the key selling points were. I honed in on their unique approach to language learning, the 29 languages they offer, and the online demo. Unfortunately the didn't have all the links I needed in their general listings, but I was able to create the links using the URL redirection codes they provide for specific product listings to figure out how to link to each language page and the online tutorial.

Step 5: Final Preparations & Launch
The final steps were to ad Adwords to the site for some additional monetization opportunities, setup the hosting account. (I use 1&1 Hosting because I can host up to 100 external domains under 1 account for just $9.99 per month, can't beat that!).

That's it, I am now prepared to do the hard work, promotion:

Take a look at the finished product: Rosetta Stone Language Learning Software

Adsertive announced today that they have setup an eBay Auction selling their profitable music download network of sites and business that generates over $1M per year.

This listing is for a HUGE network of MP3/Music Download Related Sites & Products. This is a self sufficient, streamlined multi-million dollar business that has been operating extremely well since its successful launch in 2002. Since then, the network has generated over 4 million dollars in revenue for our company. The main website is 24/7 Downloads (247Downloads.com), which has been branded to billions of people across the internet. Currently the network typically generates between $75,000 - $125,000 per month in profits. This network will be a huge asset for whoever buys it. We sell 1 and 2 year memberships for our downloading software, and we have sold over 200,000 copies to date.

They also provide some examples of a few months of revenues indicating a profit of $75,752 in January 2006, a low month, and $150,958.49 for December 2005, a high month.

UPDATE: The auction eded with a top bid of $220,350.00 without meeting the reserve price, so the deal wasn't closed on eBay. Honestly this could have just been a hype campaign in hopes to get more inbound links to their sites both from eBay as well as from bloggers.

Click Here to see the old Auction on eBay

In December I wrote about the Squidoo Land Grab on my ReveNews blog. I setup a few squidoo lenses as a test and found the application to be interesting. Although I haven't spent much time on it, I wanted to provide some followup information and earnings report.

So far in the squidoo network, I have made $1.54, that's 0.035% of their total revenue of $5,488.11 to date. It would seem like Squidoo still has a ways to go.

Interestingly, I setup a Tax Preparation Lens and a Bra Lens. I have made slightly more money with the tax lens, but my squidoo lens ranking for the bra lens is #391 and my tax lens ranking is #803. Clearly underwear trumps taxes.

Interestingly my Affiliate Marketing Lens is hanging in there at #607, but it used to be in the top 100. Any 5-star ratings from my readers would help. ;-)

Names are still available, grab your Squidoo Lens today!

I don't work much with the Wynn in Las Vegas' affiliate program, but I might re-consider. The Wynn is running a special event for some of their top partners and are giving these partners a complimentary 2 night stay, dinner at Daniel Boulud, and show tickets to see Le Reve or Avenue Q. They are also throwing a coctail party and welcome reception to get these partners to meet members of their staff.

The invite went out to a select group of partners and the event is by invite only. Not only is this type of offer a great deal for affiliates, but it also shows a commitment from the Wynn to treat their affilaites as partners, show them their business and get them excited about marketing them. A great win Wynn deal!

Anyone else see any great perks like this out there?

Update: We have started working with the Wynn Las Vegas, gone on the Fam Tour, and have seen LeReve and Spam-a-lot. Great place!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Here is this year's Google logo:

Click on the following link for previous year's st. patrick's day logos.

After Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan announced that he was unable to view the new Windows Live beta during is daily search cast podcast, I sensed a possible conspiracy and decided to do some investigative reporting. After a few well placed phone calls, I struck gold.

"Windows Live is a Beta" said Natma Ralnami, Microsoft's Senior Vice President of Search Engineering, "Like any other Beta program, Microsoft reserves the right to keep certain members of the press out. It just makes common sense."

When pressed why Mr. Sullivan was specifically targeted in this reverse search engine cloaking scheme, Ralnami had the following to say:

"Mr. Sullivan wasn't specifically targeted; we implemented algorithms that identified online writers that might not be sympathetic to the kinds of issues a beta product like ours might run into.” “We just programmatically applied good PR 101 lessons.” Said Microsoft’s Ralnami.

Impressed by their impressive desire for PR Relevancy, I asked them what issues might trip an algorithm like this and get a writer caught in the Microsoft penalty box.

"Although we don't give out any specifics about our algorithms, I did do a bit of research into Mr. Sullivan's available online content and can clearly see a strong bias towards our competition as well as a potential "personal relationship" and / or fascination with Matt Cutts, a well known competitive engineer."

Well there we have it, straight from the source.

Sorry Danny, tricks are for kids!

Google is once again getting into the winter olympics spirit this year. Here is one of their latest 2006 Olymoic logos:

You can see the rest of their 2006 winter olympic logos here:
Google's 2006 Winter Olympic Logos

For previous years, view:
Google's 2004 Summer Olympics Logos
Google's 2002 Winter Olympics Logos
Google's 2000 Summer Olympic Logos

In case you were unable to attend affiliate summit this year in Las Vegas, AffiliateVideo.com has captured some of the sessions and made them available on their site. I actually spoke on the panel about pay-per-click search marketing. I have embedded it here for your enjoyment:

Top affiliates are starting to seriously question the ethics and policies of the major affiliate networks that have long encouraged their employees to participate as affiliates in their merchant’s programs to help them better understand the affiliate marketing industry.

This issue was first brought to light by David Lewis on ReveNews. David indicated that three top account managers left CJ last week to avoid enforcement of a new policy that would forbid them being affiliates.

It has been very difficult trying to pull together the facts from the rumors on this issue. So far here is what I have heard and believe to be true:

1. Commission Junction used to encourage employees to participate as affiliates.
   
2. Commission Junction recently sent out an internal email letting employees know that the policy had changed and that employees could no longer be affiliates. Apparently this email pointed out Sarbanes Oxley compliance as part of motivation behind the change.
   
3. Shortly after the policy change went into place, the following CJ employees resigned: Chad Darling, Andy Powell, and Don Batsford.
   

At the industry gatherings, over the past year or so, I have heard growing concerns amongst the top affiliates about what information affiliate network employees may or may not have access to. These concerns and fears have only been heightened by a string of x-affiliate network employees turned super-affiliates overnight. The networks have been very quiet on this issue and are reluctant to make any public comments. This lack of communication is causing an increasing concern of potential wrong doing at the networks. When the networks have to talk to their lawyers before commenting, nobody feels comfortable.

I spoke with an x-Linkshare employee who confirmed that when they were with the company being an affiliate was encouraged. I chatted with an existing Linkshare employee who wouldn't provide any information. When pushed to comment, the most I could get out was that they knew if a policy was in place but wouldn't explain if it was a policy forbidding it or encouraging affiliate participation by employees.

My contact at Performics indicated that they do have a policy preventing employees from being affiliates. Some in the industry suggest that it's not about having a policy, but more about if the policy has been enforced.

In addition to the concern about network employees running their own programs, Top search affiliates are increasingly concerned about the protection of their data and keyword lists as the networks continue to grow their search practices, where they run paid search campaigns for their merchant partners. How does a top search arbitrage affiliate know that they keyword lists aren't being scrapped from the HTTP referrer data that the networks collect?

At CJ, I have been informed that this data is protected fairly seriously and that only 2-3 people have access to this data and all calls to that database are tracked.

The real problem is the lack of communication, transparency, and full disclosure. Clearly the networks have had issues where employees have had access to private information and strategies of their affiliate partners, clearly many of these employees had and continue to have access to private information and reports on the top affiliate’s business metrics. So spell it out. Send out a communication to your affiliate partners letting them know what your policies are and how their information is going to be protected.

Finally, the networks should take a hard look at these x-affiliates and communicate with the top affiliates they had contact with about what programs they are running, what sites they have, and give top affiliates a chance to determine if their business practices have been compromised.

The network's are in a precarious position here. Their business model only works because of the trust established with the merchants, and the affiliates. If the networks aren't open, ethical, and forthcoming about these types of issues, then their role in this industry will be diminished.

Clearly setting up a new network isn't rocket science. How many new networks started last year alone? In the past affiliates only went where the merchants were, as affiliate business have grown up, I believe that it's the other way around. Merchants will go where the top affiliates are.

I hope the networks will respond to these issues and re-establish that trust.

Related Articles:

Triple Jangro - ReveNews

Triple Jangro implications... Please Read! - VinnyLingham.com

Conflicting Interests - Revenue Magazine

The Dirty Little Secret: Are CPA/CPL Affiliate NETWORK EMPLOYEES Stealing Secrets from Publishers/Webmasters and Using This Data to Make Money? - StopScum.com

Google is sporting a new logo today celebrating the Chinese New Year also called the lunar new year or the Spring Festival. This day is the most important of the traditional chinese holidays. (Learn more)

Today google is sporting Mozart's Birthday logo. I had also downloaded some Martin Luther King Jr. Logos but was unable to post them on MLK day. Here they are:

Google has been making some waves lately with their new Google Video service (http://video.google.com). I thihnk one of the neat features is the ability to take a free video from their service and embed the video onto your websites. It will be up to affilaites to determine the best uses for this.

The VERY Wrong Way:

The right way:

Winter-Olympics.TV, a video news blog for the Winter Olympics, and SuperBowlAds.us, a site dedicated to SuperBowl Commercials.

I got a very important email from Overture today! Check it out:

Overture change de nom et devient Yahoo! Search Marketing Vos comptes Overture resteront inchangés

Madame, Monsieur,

Le 27 février 2006, Overture et sa maison mère Yahoo! combineront leurs solutions de référencement sous un nouveau nom - Yahoo! Search Marketing. A cette date, Overture SARL commercialisera ses produits en France sous le nom de Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Avec ce changement, vous aurez accès à l’offre la plus complète du marché en matière de produits et services de marketing en ligne. Au final, Yahoo! Search Marketing permettra une gestion plus facile et plus intégrée de toute votre campagne de marketing en ligne.

Votre compte Overture reste inchangé et le fonctionnement restera le même, cependant vous noterez quelques changements :

• Le nom Overture sera remplacé par Yahoo! Search Marketing dans tout votre compte
  
• La page que vous utilisez actuellement pour vous connecter à votre compte Overture sera accessible à partir d’une nouvelle adresse URL. Cette nouvelle page vous fournira également l'accès à des conseils, articles et modes d’emploi afin de vous aider à tirer le meilleur de votre campagne.
  

Vous continuerez à recevoir le même niveau de service proposé jusqu’à présent par Overture. A l'avenir, notre gamme de produits et services sera étoffée et plus étendue afin de vous aider à promouvoir au mieux votre entreprise.

Une fois que ces changements auront pris effet, vous recevrez un email contenant un lien vers la nouvelle page qui vous permettra de vous connecter à votre compte.

A cette fin nous avons dû modifier nos Conditions Générales Annonceur. Vous trouverez la nouvelle version des conditions applicables à compter du 27 février 2006 en cliquant sur le lien suivant : http://www.content.overture.com/d/FRm/legal/fr_tc.jhtml

Vous pouvez également consulter pour information notre nouvelle Charte en matière de protection des données personnelles qui entrera également en vigueur le 27 février 2006 en cliquant sur le lien suivant : http://www.content.overture.com/d/FRm/legal/fr_pp.jhtml

Veuillez recevoir, Madame, Monsieur l’expression de nos salutations les meilleures.

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Bertrand Jonquois
Overture SARL

Thanks for letting me know Bertrand. I think the jist is you are finally changing your name to Yahoo! Search Marketing in france on Feb 27th, 2006. But I'm not 100% sure since I don't speak french.

Danka!

Last week I published a new communications tool that lets you quickly see who in the affiliate community is online and click a button to chat with them via AOL Instant Messenger. Since posting the site, I have had a lot of great feedback and addition requests. Very few people have actually asked to be removed.

I guess this proves that our partner community wants to communicate with each other.

I was also very surprised by the number of affiliates who requested to be added to the list. Initially I though it would only attract merchants looking to be contacted.

Check it out:
http://www.affaimlist.com

Google squares off against the government subpoena asking them to provide information on sex related search engine queries during a specified week. Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have already agreed to provide the information requested. You would think they would have enough statically relevant information at this point. Google is probably using this as a PR opportunity to stand out as being more protective over their user's privacy.

You would think the government could just use Wordtracker like the rest of us.

You may or may not have heard the press recently regarding this site, but I just had the chance to take a look at it, and have to say. Wow, brilliant!

Alex Tew is a 21 year old college student in Wiltshire England who didn't want to graduate with student loan debt, so he decided to create a "Million Dollar Home Page". His idea was to take 1,000,000 pixels and sell them for $1 each in blocks of 10x10 pixels.

Well with some PR boost, the site has taken off. The viral marketing and inbound links, like this one have boosted the site to a PR7 ranking in Google, and the honor of Alexa's fasted moving site.

The last 1,000 pixels are available on eBay, and as of this post are selling for $146,700 with 5 days and 21 hours left.

Brilliant!

Here is another guest blog entry from Shmuly Tennenhaus, affiliate manager for ice.com.

Search Supremacy
By Shmuly Tennenhaus

It's approximately two fifteen in the afternoon. Approximately because my computer screen is dirty and I can't tell if that's a 3 or an 8 so to play it safe I'm going with 5 since it's smack in the middle. The phone rings and revives me from my post lunch reverie. With great effort, I extend my ink-stained hand across my pigsty of a desk and answer it with a courteous "yo". On the other end I hear tons of background noise. Then a single voice breaks through the cacophonous mix. Hi, my name is Billy and I'm calling from "searchengineexpertsoninteractivemarketing". He says the name of his SEO company in one breath and I am already impressed. Do you have a few minutes to discuss a product that can grow your sales instantly with a touch of a button by millions and billions of dollars all for less than two-hundred dollars a month and there is no committment whatsoever?

How can I possibly reject such a pitch? First off, the search sales guy just rattled off the longest run-on sentence ever known to mankind and not only did he beat the previous record for longest sentence ever, he actually walloped the revered record without even trying and he was not even out of breath and before he called me he just ran a five-minute mile. So, to confirm my excitement for the imminent discussion and to convey my approval for his rant-request, I express my reply with an enthusiastic grunt. Now, the grunt was actually the result of my lunch absconding from one region of my stomach and thereafter resettling to a more spacious abdominal area, with a fantastic view of my rib cage. But Billy is unaware of this reality and begins to happily meander into my work day.

Billy: I was checking your site listings on Google.

Me: Who?

Billy: Google.

Me: Yes. I heard you the first time. What is that? Is that baby talk like googoo gaga? Are you selling baby products?

Billy: (breaking into a sweat) Uh. Um. Google. You know. The search engine.

Me: Never heard of it. Are they new?

Billy: (frantically searching his "Sales 101" manual for the chapter titled "When a potential buyer is a certified dumbass") Well (regaining composure as per chapter titled "To Grin is not a Sin so continue on trucking and don't be sucking") Google is the worlds largest search engine on the planet-

Me: -of apes?

Billy (patiently chuckling as per chapter seven "Laugh and then get the sale, take the money and then laugh all the way to the bank) no. On the plant earth. Google is number one in search!

Me: I'm kidding. Just teasing you! Of course I know what google is. In fact I was just on it searching for a life. I'd love to get one for myself! (Billy emits a heartedly HAHAHA and gets back to his script.)

My day is about to go from worse to worser. Those with a PHD in the English language will point out that there is no such word as worser. And that is precisely how bad my day is going to get. It will reach a level that I must INVENT a word to properly describe the level of badness Anyways, Billy proceeds to tell me that the google rankings for my site are not too hot. Furthermore, my listings are the in pits. In fact, beneath the pit there is a busted pipe teeming with raw sewage and that is where my search campaign currently lays. Billy will then mercifully demonstrate the ineffectiveness of our search campaign. And I must admit that at this juncture of the conversation I am sold on his product, whatever it may be. Because nothing and I mean nothing makes me want to fully demolish and then restructure our search initiatives, more than receiving a call from a total stranger informing me that my work blows.

Let's face it; everyone today is doing search engine optimization. My grandmother does not own a computer and I'm guessing she also has a surefire technique to make a fortune through utilizing search. The next time I go and visit her (this coming Sunday) she may even offer me her proven and tested search program. Personally, I think she should try using her program to locate her own reading glasses that she is constantly misplacing.

By the way, if you're searching for some meaning in this column, I suggest you give Billy a call.

Shmuly Tennenhaus is an unsuccessful and ugly entrepreneur residing in Montreal. His parents are really starting to nag him about marriage.

If you have been reading Goyami over the past year or so, you know I love all of these holiday Google logos. Today I stumbled across a few Google logo sites that I wanted to share:

Google's Official Holiday Loog Page

Google's Official Fan Logo Page

Logoogle.com - Fake Google Logos

Here are some of my favorites:

Google Celebrates the Birth of Louis Braille today with a special Braille Logo:

Happy New Years everyone! Welcome to 2006. We hope your 2005 was profitable, and look forward to keeping you up to date on the new changes in the search / affiliate world in 2006. This year should be interesting, I think we will see a lot more of MSN Search this year, which should finally complete the "mi" part of Goyami. Gooogle, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Here are this years festive 2006 logos.

Click here for logos from Prior years:

Just a quick note of thanks on this wonderful Christmas day. This year has been great, and one of the things that made this year great is the great working relationships with some great affiliate managers. Again this year, the out-poring of thoughts, emails, cards, and gifts has been great and much appreciated.

In Goyami tradition, here are this year’s special Christmas logos:

And also in keeping with Goyami Christmas tradition, some special pr5 links to some of our valued partners who took special time to send holiday gifts this year:

Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and his outsourced affiliate program management consulting services site.

Andrea Harris and Todd Krvtich, of the Carfax affiliate program. The premeir affiliate program for used vehicle history reports.

Phillip Kidwell and Irene Shih of the eHealthInsurance affiliate program. The #1 health insurance affiliate program.

Beth Kirsch and Jeff Gordan of the LowerMyBills.com afiliate program. The best run mortgage and lending affiliate program.

Chad Darling, Jonathan Moura, and the rest of the gang at Commission Junction. The leading affiliate network, and a great affiliate management team.

The Google Adwords and Google Adsense gang. As always, thanks for the great service and wonderful Christmas gifts.

So I got this email from Figleaves UK (through tradedoubler), and it starts out like this:

"The lead up to Christmas has brought with it staggering results for our Affiliate Scheme."

Scheme? Is that what this is? They then go on to say how they are raising their shipping fee to £2 per order "To bring us in line with other retailers".

Hmm.... I have been spending most of the day promoting free shipping deals...

Oh well.... To be fair, I do need to point out that their US program is very well run. I havn't gotten any "Scheme" emails from them...

Here is a hitwise release on the increasing popularity of Gift Cards.

NEW YORK, Dec. 14, 2005 — While gift certificates have always been a popular gift choice for the hard-to-please recipient, gift cards have recently risen to prominence as an alternative to participating in the pre-Christmas shopping rush.

According to Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, the market share of U.S. Internet searches containing the words “gift card” was up 32 percent for the week ending December 10, 2005 compared to the previous week (week ending December 3, 2005). Hitwise captured 643 unique search phrases containing the words “gift card” for the four weeks ending December 10, 2005, up 13 percent versus the same week last year (week ending December 11, 2004). Retailer-agnostic gift cards associated with major credit cards such as; “visa gift card,” “american express gift card” and “master card gift card” dominated general gift card searches, while “itunes gift card,” “olive garden gift card” and “gas gift card” dominated specific gift card searches.

“By examining the number of phrases containing a specific term as well as the volume of searches for that term, online marketers can gain additional insight into consumer behavior and product popularity” said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Worldwide Research at Hitwise. “Combined, the search activity and trend of 2004 online holiday visits, indicate that the week after Christmas will be a busy one for online retailers as shoppers seek to take advantage of post-holiday sales and redeem their gift cards.”

Top Search Terms containing “gift card”
Period - 4 weeks ending 12/10/05

General Gift Cards
visa gift card
american express gift card
mastercard gift card
gift card
simon gift card
free gift card
buy visa gift card
master card gift card
mastercard prepaid gift card
discover gift card

Product Specific Gift Cards
itunes gift card
olive garden gift card
gas gift card
old navy gift card
walmart gift card
toys r us gift card
wawa gift card sweepstakes
hilary duff gift card
lowes gift card
napster gift card

We have a guest Blogger today, Shmuly Tennenhaus, the affiliate manager for Ice.com, sends us a satirical post about dealing with self proclaimed marketing guru's.

Marketing Madness
Shmuly Tennenhaus
12/01/05

The battery is running low on my laptop so this will have to be quick. There will be no time for mulling over choice of words. If there is still some juice remaining in my spanking new Dell when this is finished, I will run a hasty spell-check. Dear members of our industry, I write today informing you of a modern malady. This pandemic is rapidly spreading like wild fire in the backyard of a seasoned arsonist. The odds are that the majority of you have already been in contact with a carrier of this contagious condition. This head case is called marketing narcissism. According to the Greek legend, Narcissus fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool. Similarly, the marketing narcissist is a self-proclaimed marketing guru who falls in love with his own reflection on his PC. Narcissus was of the male persuasion and so is the typical MN. Women are clearly the smarter sex, though I am admittedly baffled with their unified obsession with Johnny Depp. However, at least when a female is an expert in a particular field, she doesn't spend her life spreading the gospel of her personal achievements.

A marketing narcissist is omniscient. Period. Even God, whenever in doubt regarding a business dilemma, will seek advice from this enlightened human. A marketing narcissist is omnipresent. Fact. Yesterday he was Idaho delivering a Power Point presentation to the Amish. Tomorrow he will be lecturing the Catholic clergy on the merits of preaching the E-Bible. A marketing narcissist is omnipotent. Non-fiction. He can walk on his head on water. Take that Jesus!

Are you a MN? Do you work with a MN? Are you coming down with MN symptoms? Is there a vaccine for MN? And finally, if a marketing narcissist hails from Minnesota, will he then be nicknamed as the MN from MN? I will do my best to shed light on this nascent outbreak. The following are common characteristics of a MN:

Coitus Confessions: During sex he yells out Seth Godin's name. If you never heard of Seth, your prognosis is a healthy one. FYI, Seth became a MN after seeing his own reflection radiating off his shiny skull.

Publishes Rubbish: He writes a personal blog dedicated to the fluctuating trends of marketing mannerisms. His blathering blog links to blistering blogs authored by fellow geishas, gurus, geniuses, gnomes and gnats. There is no happy ending to his pontificating penmanship. He has high hopes to one day publish a best-selling book with an exotic title (for e.g. Jack Welch Loves 2 Belch, Donald Trump likes to Hump!, Alan Greenspan has Touretts?)

Cherishes Cardboard: In his home, behind his life-size self-portrait, rests a Brinks-issued safe. Locked up inside are his most valuable possession; myriads of business cards stealthily accrued during networking sessions. To be fair, he always grab fistfuls of cards from the raffle bowl while supplementing them with his own, thereby increasing his odds of winning, but hey, this world is a competitive place.

Magazine Megalomaniac: He can recite verbatim the cover stories & editorials of Internet Retailer, Fast Company, Marketing Sherpa & Revenue, dating back to inception. These precious periodicals are his sole source of neurological nourishment. He reads them hot of the press. Literally. I kid you not. The man actually stakes out the printing location from across the street with a powerful pair of binoculars.

Expensive Excrement: Let's put the scatological humor behind us. For the sake of mature journalism, the subject of dung will remain far-flung. This essay will be wiped clean from all obscene references. OK. Here it is. The holy grail of marketing narcissism tendencies is when the MN habitually defecates dollar bills.

THE END

comScore has released Cyber-Monday Stats. Sales this year were $451 Million up 17% over last year. 55% of Black Monday (or Cyber Monday) sales were generated by consumers at work.

Gian Filgoni, chariman and co-founder of comScore notes that even though there was a lot of media hype over CyberMonday this year, this day was actually the 12th busiest day of the holiday season last year. "Peak sales actually occurred in mid-December as consumers scrambled to take advantage of the late-season discounts and free-shipping offers"

I sure hope the media continues to stir up stories of top selling online shopping days. Maybe we can have a CyberWeekend soon! Maybe every Monday in December is Cyber-Monday?

The news media is all abuzz about Cyber Monday. They are calling today the biggest online shopping day of the season. Similar to Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) where people on holiday head out to the retail stores, today is the day people get back to "work", and start shopping online.

According to comScroe Networks, consumer online spending will be up 24% this year.

Many online retailers are starting to extend their thanksgiving deals to include Monday. Cyber Monday Deals can be found on most major retailer sites and on coupon code websites.

So, what are people buying this year?

The New XBox 360 is making a lot of buzz (see News4Xbox.com) and the Apple iPod Nano are making a lot of buzz too (see News4iPod.com)

Visit 10BestSelling.net for more best selling products in various categories. (Everything from Gadgets and Shoes, to Toys and Baby Gifts)

Happy Cyber Monday!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope everyone has a happy, healthy and profitable holiday season. I have heard in the news lately that they are calling the monday after thanksgiving "Black Monday" for online shopping because everyone goes back to work and does their online shopping from their broadband connections at work.

Here are this years thanksgiving day logos. (still nothing creative from msn):

And previous years:

I thought this was too funny to pass up. I use the Quickbooks Online Edition for my accounting, and when I logged on today I saw this graphic at the top. At first I was shocked, is that two bugs humping each other? Upon closer look, I see it's a turkey taking off it's glasses. The extra eyeballs that the glasses created made me misinterpret the image at first. Wow! Take a look:

Have a great and profitable Thanksgiving!

Adam

Are your checks from BeFree missing? I have lost a bunch and had to have them re-issued. Today I actually received a BeFree check that was destined for another affiliate in New Jersey. I can only imagine where mine have ended up. At one point, one of my checks was lost and cashed by someone else. Seeing as I almost processed this check with my others, I can now see how that might have happened.

If CJ is going to continue to maintain the BeFree platform, they should seriously consider direct deposit.

BTW - Wireless Advisor LLC Affiliate, your check for Verizon Wireless is in the mail. :-)

Affiliates buy a lot of Domain Names. In case you missed it, Godaddy is offering a great deal on new and transfered domain names. Only $6.95 for a limited time.

We have a guest Blogger today. Lee Gientke, affiliate manager from ProHealth, shares his thoughts on their recent transition from Commission Junction to Linkshare:

Fear and Loathing in Affiliate Land

We had nothing to fear but fear itself, and we survived. There aren’t too many things that an affiliate manager fears more than a migration from one affiliate network to another. Things can, will and do go wrong - your top affiliates are wedded to a particular platform and refuse to work with another, contract negotiations get reopened because this or that feature was extra, and the uber geeks (the folks you can’t successfully migrate a program without) are on edge because an affiliate platform migration was not in their queue.

Well, I can proudly say we moved from Commission Junction to LinkShare without major carnage. Yes, I lost a couple decent affiliates who weren’t LinkShare fans because of this or that. Yes, the inter-organizational politics were a bit harsh for a couple days (but a couple beers have smoothed things out). Yes, the uber geeks were not loving me for a few weeks (let me be the first to say thank you to the IT guys across the hall – us marketing hacks across the hall appreciate you) and yes, certain things that are “extra” at LinkShare – like all things, everything gets worked out and everyone is happy.

Now that we are live at LinkShare, I can only say how great things are. LinkShare’s reporting is fast and doesn’t time out. Having access to my affiliate’s real names, phone numbers and addresses has allowed me to provide them with the assistance they need to perform at peak levels. Being able to directly communicate with my partners ultimately equals a more lucrative relationship for both parties and I don’t know an affiliate that isn’t happiest when they are making more money.

Yes, things can and will go wrong during a migration. Yes, there is a lot to fear, and potentially a lot to loose. And yes, you will be loathed by some. But none of the fear and loathing is outside of an affiliate manager’s normal day. The best advice I can give any affiliate manager or company contemplating a switch is to make sure you pack your sense of humor and smile along for the ride. The problems will get resolved and there is light at the end of the tunnel. And, most importantly, you can say you survived the fear and loathing in affiliate land.

Lee Gientke
Affiliate Manager
www.ProHealth.com/shop
805/564-3064x212
lgientke@prohealth.com

Wow, another year has gone by since last Halloween. I wanted to wish all of our readers a very Happy Halloween, and in Goyami tradition share the latest Halloween logos from the search engines. I hope everyone sold a lot of costumes this year. If you recall last year, I setup Halloween-Costume-Sale.com and did fairly well running PPC ads to drive traffic. This year the site continued to do well with PPC and organic traffic, and I added a bunch of new blog sites: Costumes-For-Kids.com, Costumes-For-Adults.com, Costumes-For-Pets.com, Top-Ten-Costumes.com, Halloween-Party-Supplies.com, and Team-Mascot-Costumes.com and sold 80% more costumes this year.

Got to love Halloween!

Here are the logos. Yahoo got creative this year with an animated flash logo, I wasn't able to recreate it here, but have a couple of screen grabs of the changes:

Yahoo's Static 2005 Halloween Logo:

Yahoo's Active Mouse Over 2005 Halloween Logo

Click here for previous year's Halloween Logos.

I knew it would happen sooner or later, the mainstream media is starting to pick up on the search arbitrage game. This month, Business 2.0 published an article entitled "The Merchant of Margaretville". You can't see the picture in the online article, but in the Magazine, there is a nice picture of some lying on his hammock sipping drinks. The article lays out, in simple terms, a three step process of signing up with an affiliate program, becoming and advertiser on Google or Yahoo, and posting ads to bank commissions.

It's a fairly good article, and one I might point my parents to in order to explain what I do, but it does over simplify the process, and might lead people to believe it's all easy money with little to no work. Good start for the mainstream press!

November 1st is just around the corner, and it's time to start thinking about who and what to promote heavily for the holiday season. I have been working hard on a new project, 10BestSelling.net. This is a blog focused on the 10 best selling products by merchant and by category. I am looking for help from affiliate managers who wish to get their best selling products listed on the site. If you would like to get your products online please download the 10BestSelling.net Submission Template, and send in your html formatted top 10 lists.

I hope everyone has a great, happy, and profitable holiday season.

Adam

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the battle between content networks (google adsense, yahoo publisher network) and affilaite networks. The thinking goes that a publisher only has so much room on their site, and their they will typically either montizie their site through affiliate relationships or through content network ads. Whose ads are they going to place?

I feel this might be limited thinking. For me, affiliate relationships are the content of the sites I create, and the content networks are some additional revenue producing opportunities for web surfers who don't find exactly what they are looking for on my sites.

This year, I created a number of Halloween Blog / Merchandise sites in order to primarily promote BuyCostumes. On these sites, I ran merchandise from BuyCostumes and advertisements for them and other affiliate sites. In addition I included some Google AdSense content links. (example site www.costumes-for-kids.com). I would have been profitable without the AdSense links, but the revenues I generated from AdSense have made up 10% of my revenues. Additionally, my paid search campaigns for Halloween would have turned unprofitable on October 24th without the AdSense revenues, but with the AdSense revenues I am still profitable and my ads continue to run. For BuyCostumes, this means I generated an additional $26k in sales and over $1,000 in additional revenues for Commission Junction.

In order for marketers to be able to afford to run paid search ads to their affiliate sites, the sites need to generate a profit above and beyond the minimum cost per click fees that the search engines charge. Adding content ads to these affiliate marketing sites might just be the combination that makes the difference.

So, maybe there is a symbiotic relationship between affiliate networks and content networks?

How valuable would it be for you to pick a domain name and see what PPC keyword terms and pay per click advertisements that site was using to market their site?

What if you could monitor the keyword and campaign purchases of your competitors?

That was the initial promise and sales pitch for CompetiorKeywords.com.

They are offering a 7 day free trial, so I thought I would login and play with the tool.

At first glance, the interface was a little clunky, but I was impressed when I dug into the reports. I was able to quickly type in the name of one of my merchant's sites and get an extensive list of keywords. Many that had not come up in my prior research, which I thought had been extensive. I found terms that made me smack myself in the head and say "how could I have missed THAT one!".

Here are some of the "quick reports" that they offer:

Monitor Your Competitor's Keywords

Enter up to 20 domains and this report will quickly display a list of keyword searches that generated ads that marketed these domains. It's interesting to note, that these are "actual searches" that triggered ads, not necessarily terms those companies or their affiliates bid on. So if the competitor bid on IPOD as a broad match term and the actual term the user type in that triggered the ad was ipod nano, than this term would show up in the report.

Monitor Your Own Domain

This is very similar to the competitor keyword report, but is for your own domain. I am not sure why I couldn't have just put my own domain in the competitor report. The results are the same. My guess if I had configured a specific domain in my account than the competitor report would have excluded my listings. I did a search on one of my domains and it did pull up only a limited number of terms. My guess is that their panel hasn't search all of the terms.

Find Competitors Bidding on Specific Terms

This report lets you specify a keyword and see who is currently bidding on that term.

View User Searches by Keyword

This report lets you enter a term and see specific searches that included that term. This report is not nearly as powerful as Wordtracker. It is limited to searches that incude the term specified, where Wordtracker will list derivative terms. For example, a search for costumes might pull up Tony Arma Halloween Costumes it wouldn't pull up terms like Halloween Decorations.

View Your Competitor's Text Ads

This is a quick way to get an idea of the types of ads your competitors are running.

View Text Ads Containing Specific Keywords

This report let's you select a keyword term and display the text ads that contain that term. It might be a bit more useful if the urls accompanied the text ads.

View Text Ads Triggered by Specific Keywords

Again these text ads don't contain urls, it might just be easier to go and do a search on one of the search engines to see these ads. It should show multiple ads being run for the same merchant though, so it might have some uses, I just can't think of any off the top of my head.

View Competitor Landing Pages (Basic URL)

This report should pull up landing pages being used by a specific domain. My test indicated that it pulled up a few landing pages and some for competitive sites under a specified sponsor domain. I am not sure why that is, but seeing the landing pages used by a site is interesting.

View Competitor Landing Pages (Full URL)

Similar to the Basic URL report, this one actually shows the full url. I found this report to be a bit more interesting, it identified affiliate codes and tracking codes that the other report didn't reveal. I could see using this report to identify is a competitor is using specific tracking and bid management tools.

In summary, it's an interesting tool that provides some extra incite into competitive behavior and actual searches being used to trigger ads. The cost is a bit steeper than Wordtracker though. At $49.95 per month (approx $600 per year) it's 143% more expensive. If I had to pick one tool for keyword research I would go with Wordtracker, if your doing well and want to expand your research, this tool is interesting choice.

Microsoft has started to open up it's AdCenter Pilot Program in the US. Those wishing to participate in the Pilot program of their PPC advertising tool should fill out the form at:

http://advertising.msn.com/adCenterPilot/89621.asp

I will be speaking on a Panel about PPC Marketing at Affiliate Summit this year in Las Vegas. The Conference will take place at the Bally's Las Vegas on Jan 8-10, 2006. Eary Bird registration ends on 10/21, and since conferences have been selling out quickly in this Industry, I suggest that you Register today. I look forward to seeing you in Vegas!

MarketingSherpa has been tracking the Search Engine Mareketing Space for years. They have recently released their 2006 Benchmark Report where they look at SEO & PPC Tactics and Results. Their 296 page report may be the best source of competitive industry data available for the Industry. At $247 it's a steal for anyone serious about understanding the industry.

Additionally, they will hold their Annual Free Teleconference to present their latest findings on Tuesday October 11th, 2-3pm EST / 11-12 PST

Many have emailed me regading my posting about Schoolpop declaring bankruptcy. Here is a letter that was sent to me by one of our readers / fans, they received the following from Katie Scott, Schoolpop's Director of Sales and Service:

I apologize for the confusion that has occurred as to the status of Schoolpop. Here is a recap of the events that have occurred since Labor Day: On September 13th, Schoolpop did in fact file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and at that time, all of the employees, myself included were let go. Last week, the trustee handling the case contacted myself and a few others asking us to begin to communicate again with our Champions and Supporters regarding the now evident potential sale that is pending.

We have been asked to come back aboard and maintain the business until the sale is final and the new company will acquire Schoolpop's assets and programs. As the Director of Sales & Service, my intention is to make sure that every Schoolpop supporters' contributions are accounted for and recorded so that in the likely event of the sale, that the schools and NPO's receive their contribution checks. I encourage you to continue to promote the online shopping and Visa as we still have relationships with the vendor and Chase Bank and are maintaining those because we believe a sale will occur shortly. As far as the refunds due from the Supply program, I have personally recorded all refunds due and the trustee and court has this information so that once the sale occurs and the freeze has been lifted on any monies, these refunds can be expedited and sent out.

Again, I apologize for any confusion, that was not my intent, I want to make sure that our Champions & Supporters are aware of what is happening here so that at the conclusion of a sale, that the transition is smooth and without incidence.

Regards,
Katie Scott
Director of Sales & Service

Today marks Google's 7th year of operation. What a long way to come in 7 years! With a Market Cap of 87.6 Billion, that's building at 12.5 Billion per year! Not to shabby. In Goyami tradition, here are some of their Birthday logos, I couldn't find 1st, 2nd or 3rd. If you have them, please send them.

Goyami was named after Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in anticipation that Microsoft would enter the market in a big way, creating the big three in pay-per-click advertising.

Today, the mainstream media is all buzzing about Microsoft unveiling Adcenter to the public:

Microsoft Plans to Sell Search Ads of Its Own - New York Times.

Microsoft stats selling pad search ads on MSN - Reuters

My own personal experience with Microsoft is that they told me last week they had a queue of advertisers that are lined up and that they would get me on the list. Then when they are ready to get my ads online, I could submit a text file of my ads and keywords and they would try to get them up and running. They said ads would start running in October, and that I could probably get online towards the end of November. They also were not sure when any kind of live interface would be available to monitor and modify keywords, bid prices, etc...

I think they are working hard to get a piece of the Q4 PPC revenues, but that their system just isn't ready for prime time yet. I am not sure if the current flurry of press is anything solid or just more Microsoft PR build up to get advertisers online manually.

If and when Microsoft does open an online version of AdCeneter, you will be able at advertising.msn.com/searchadv

eComExpo is an online convention for affiliate marketers and merchants. The upcoming event on October 6-8 is the second time the event has taken place. Here is a Free Exhibit Hall and Keynote Pass. It's worth a look.

The last show took place in February of 2005. You can see a screen shot on my post from that time: eComXpo - Online Tradeshow for Affiliate Marketing.

Welcome to the Goyami CJU Schwag Awards Post In honor of this year's first expo at CJU. The CJU expo consisted of mostly merchants with postage stamp size tables where they could meet and great and market their programs and services during the lunch break at the end of the conference.

With any expo comes the Schwag, so here are the awards for 2005.

Best Schwag
The best schwag award goes to 4Inkjets.com for their small 1gb USB drives, good things really do come in small packages.

Best Schwag for the Kids
The best kids schwag award goes to CoolSavings.com for their piggy banks. Honorable mention to eFax for their cuddly animals, we might have ranked these higher, but the lost branding points since the first thing my 2 year old did was strip off the eFax shirt.

Best Publisher Schwag
The best schwag given out by a publisher / affiliate goes to David Lewis of 77Blue. Not only were his green cashbaq bracelets cool, but they were also the only schwag being given out by a publisher.

Best Merchant Branding Schwag
The award for the most "on-brand" schwag goes to BuyCostumes.com. Their pirate bandana, eye patches and earrings. Just what everyone needs to get into the spirit of Haloween.

Congratulations! Please note, we can only rate the stuff we get, so if you missed a good one, sorry, give us more stuff next year! Late mail in entries will be graciously accepted and reviewed.

Google can't afford to allow Microsoft to buy AOL from Time Warner. The Google AOL partnership currently provides $380 million dollars a year for Google. The recent stories of the Microsoft / AOL dealings have to scare Google.

The length of the initial AOL-Google deal was never announced, but it was renewed 17 months later, in October 2003. Assuming that deal was for 2 or 3 years, it's time for renewal either one month from now, or one year from now.

Having this inside knowledge of what was about to happen in the landscape of search suggests why now was the right time for Google to do a $4 billion secondary offering at $295 a share.

Google is also looking to play in the Internet access game, see http://wifi.google.com/faq.html and http://wifi.google.com/download.html.

Picking up AOL at this time seems like a necessary step to secure Google's advertising growth. They simply can't afford to let Microsoft steal AOL from their grasp.

A Microsoft Purchase of AOL will have significant regulatory hurdles with in the Instant Messaging Space. This would be a difficult path for Time Warner, and ultimatly might not be approved.

The AOL culture has an ingrained hatred of Microsoft from the early days, although the culture has changed signficantly as the old guard has been purged from AOL, I think the culture clash would be signfigant.

I think it's clear that Google should, will, and must acquire AOL at this time.

We look forward to welcoming Google to Northern Virginia.

This morning's highlight at Commission Junction University has been a great presentation from John Battelle on his view of the publishing industry and the transition from what he calls Web1.0 to Web2.0 where the old publishing model crumbles and is replaced by new content providers / blogs.

One of my favorite comments was that Adsense is "Beer Money for Bloggers."

John has a long history in the media world from Wired, Hotwired, and the Industry Standard. His latest efforts include his book, "The Search", his Web2.0 Conference, and he is working on building FMPublishing.

We have highlighted John's blog for some time, and consider him one of the industry's leading thinkers.

Everyone at CJU received a copy of his book, I'll let you know what I think when I finish it.

CJU 2005 Started today in Santa Barbara. Lara Lemmond and Ziggy Kopetti from Commission Junction gave a brief skit showing stereotypes of the merchant publisher relationship and then provided to give a decent recap of the core elements for merchants to running a good program. Slides and content were similar to last years presentation, so presumably there are a lot of first time merchants in attendance this year.

I guess the big question I want to pose to our readers, those in attendance and not, what the heck is this supposed to be in the front of the room?

An interesting question was posed at the opening session at CJU today. In talking about "optimizing their program" one of the merchants asked what they should do with Publishers (CJ speak for Affiliate) who are driving A LOT of traffic, but only a small portion of the traffic is converting into sales. Their issue is that although they are making money with this publisher, it is driving down their CJ Network EPC rankings.

I guess my feelings from a top affiliate / publisher perspective here is that EPC is only one indicator of a merchant's performance in the CJU interface. I think a company should focus on profitability first and foremost. If the publisher is driving profit, then it's profitable business.

If your in a very competitive category and you think EPC is going to make the difference of top affiliates marketing you or not marketing you, then perhaps you should consider 2 programs in CJ, one for high EPC publishers and one for low, but profitable EPC publishers.

If you focus on running a profitable business, the rest should take care of itself.

Since Google's change of URL policies, some companies have been helping their affiliates by full page / full site creative for their affiliates. DentalPlans.com is one of the companies that has been doing a great job with this. They have published full site templates in their In-House Program as well as on Commission Junction.

For an example of one of their templates, see Low-Cost-Dental-Plan.com.

Just buy a domain name, implement their code, and start marketing. It couldn't get much easier.

DentalPlans.com has agreed to offer Goyami readers an extra $5 per lead if they sign up for their In-House program via the following Dental Plans Affiliate Program link.

Affiliate Summit 2006 will be held on January 9-10th, 2006 in Las Vegas at the Bally's Las Vegas. Early Bird Registration will open soon. There will be optional workships on Jan 8th as well, including a workshop by Joel Comm of WorldVillage.com about making money with Google AdSense.

Speaker Proposals are due by September 30th.

After my recent entry about Geico suing competitors for bidding on their trademark as keywords, Hendry Lee of Marketingloop.com took issue with my analogy of a customer going to BestBuy and "searching" for Sony TVs. His issue was that this is an apples to oranges comparison because of the offline vs online world, and that BestBuy's sales people have an obligation to sell as best they can for the company.

While I agree that this is offline, I think the main issue here and in the case of trademark violations in general is if it is causing customer confusion and or dilution of the trademark.

While, I too am not a lawyer, I find it hard to believe that if someone does a search for the keyword "Geico" and sees and ad for Screentrade Car Insurance. It's clearly a competitor.

I am not sure how the courts will fall on this issue, but my gut tells me that bidding on a keyword should be considered fair use, so long as the ad doesn't cause confusion as to who the ad is for.

It would appear, at least in the US, that Google agrees, as this is their current policy.

After settling their case with Google, Geico has decided to start going after companies buying their trademarked keywords. Apparently, if they can't get Google and Overture to block competitors from buying their keyword terms, they feel they will have better luck going after their competitors.

I just ran a search for Geico, and came up with only one ad under their trademark:

Car Insurance Free Quote
Fill out a quick form and get up to
3 quotes from leading companies.
www.quoteserv.com

I guess QuoteServ.com will be getting a cease and desist letter soon. It's an interesting argument; does someone seeing the ad above think this is a Geico ad? I am not sure there is confusion.

If I walk into BestBuy and tell them I want to see their Sony TV's, will I not see Zenith TV's right next to them? I was clearly searching for Sony TV's, yet I see the Zenith, and am not confused that it's a Sony. Why are keyword searches any different?

If I typed in Geico as a keyword, and the ad said Geico Car Insurance, and I clicked on the ad an went to a competitor that would be a clear violation and confusion, but running a competitive ad when someone searches for a competitor's name, seems fair game.

It will be interesting to see if any of these cases actually make it to judgment.

eBay announced today that it will purchase Skype for $4.1 Billion. Skype is a rapidly growing free internet phone service. With this announcement and Google latest push into voice over IP with their Google Talk program we are starting to see a trend that could have significant impact on how people conduct business on the Internet.

With Google and eBay firmly behind these technologies, it won't be long before single click options appear on pages to allow customers to "call" companies for free over the Internet. Virtual call centers for accepting Skype and Google Talk calls will start popping up and orders that might need some extra hand-holding will begin to move from traditional phones to internet phones, saving customers and companies significant money.

I am sure eBay will be quick to add features that allow bidders to contact sellers in this fashion.

For the affiliate industry, it becomes even more imperative for merchants to come up with ways to track affiliate commissions from the click to the phone order no matter if it ends up on traditional land lines or VOIP.

It will be interesting to watch and see how fast these technologies become mainstream for internet merchants and customers...

Halloween is a great time for affiliate marketers. It's one of the few times in the year where everyone is buying the same type of merchandise: Costumes for Kids, Costumes for Adults, and Halloween Party Supplies. So it's time for affiliate marketers to build Halloween Costume Sale sites and publish their Halloween Coupon Codes and Deals provided by their merchant partners.

Here are some of the top merchants with Halloween Merchandise:

BuyCostumes.com

Fright Catalog

New Line Shop

WBShop.com

Lillian Vernon

The Halloween season also marks the beginning of the 4th quarter holiday shopping season, a great time for affiliate marketers.

Have a Happy Halloween, and a profitable 4th Quarter!

P.S. Be careful how much candy you eat, or you will be looking for a Low Cost Dental Plan.. :-)

Google and Geico have agreed to settle the lawsuit brought by Geico claming that Google infringed on their trademarks by allowing people to bid on the term Geico. Terms of the agreement were not released.

In December, a federal judge ruled in Google's favor indicating that bidding on competitive trademark terms alone was not a violation. This spurred Google's change in their trademark policies, in the US, to stop disallowing trademark keywords, but instead focus on disallowing trademarks in advertising copy. Google will still disallow some trademark terms on ads that are run in other countries (or set to run globally).

Since Google already had a ruling against it, a settlement at this time, indicates that Google probably had appealed the case, and both sides have decided to stop paying the lawyers at this time.

Management at Schoolpop has informed it's employees that they plan to file for chapter 7 bankruptcy this week. The schoolpop website is likely to be down within the next week or so, and management is attempting to sell Schoolpop's business units during the bankruptcy process.

Schoolpop was a loyalty program that let's people shop to earn cash for their children's school's. Schoolpop had long been touted in the affiliate industry as a shining star and an example of combining social good with affiliate marketing.

Japan's largest online shopping mall operator, Rakutten, has agreed to buy Linkshare for $425 Million. Rakutten plans to take Linkshare into more overseas markets.

In Japan, Rakuten runs top-ranked sites for online shopping, travel, golf reservations, community and greeting cards. The acquisition, Rakuten's largest yet, is expected to close next month. This is the Tokyo-based company's first expansion in the United States, though the company hinted that it expects to make more.

Linkshare had recently opened up Linkshare Japan, and was pushing hard on expansion in that area.

Stephen Messer, LinkShare's chairman and CEO, and Heidi Messer, president and COO, were also LinkShare's largest shareholders, with a 40-percent stake. Venture capital firm ICG held a 35-percent stake, with Mitsui & Co. and Comcast holding the remaining shares.

After informing it's customers that they had 30 days to re-activate any disabled keywords in their account, Google has confirmed that they had a technical glitch in the past few days that caused many previously disabled terms to be labeled again as disabled, even after they had been deleted and re-added.

Although Google claims that the problem has been fixed so it no longer occurs, this still negates a lot of the work that we all have been doing over the past few weeks as SEO firms and Adwords clients with many keywords have been scrambling to re-enable disabled keywords in their accounts and those of their clients.

Google should at a minimum extend the time frame in which disabled keywords will be purged from accounts. Additionally, they should offer significant monetary credits to clients who have been spending so much time trying to get their terms re-enabled.

Finally, this issue has gone unreported by Google. They should immediately email all clients and let them know what they are going to do to help resolve the issue. I would be really upset if I was a client who had re-enabled all my terms only to find them purged without notice.

What do you think Google should do?

Source: comScore Networks

Not surprisingly, the devastation caused by Katrina brought a virtual halt to online connectivity in cities hit by the storm.

- On the average weekday in the week preceding the storm, approximately 700,000 people used the Internet in New Orleans. On Monday, August 29, that number dropped more than 80 percent below that level. By the following day that decline had reached 90 percent.

- In the Biloxi-Gulfport area, Internet traffic exceeded 160,000 users on the average weekday during the preceding week. On August 29, that number fell by more than 75 percent, and by the following day online activity had fallen below reportable levels.

- The number of Americans offering a helping hand is evidenced by soaring traffic to RedCross.org. On August 31, nearly 1 million people visited the site, more than 32 times the average number of daily visitors from August 22-26.

- Americans turned to the Internet for the latest weather information as the storm approached. WeatherBug drew more than 9.9 million visitors on August 29th, while The Weather Channel (weather.com) saw 9 million visitors on August 29.

- More than 1.7 million online searches were conducted on August 29 containing the words "Hurricane" and/or "Katrina," a more than tenfold increase over the daily average of 143,000 searches during the five days ending August 26, 2005.

Hurricane Katrina has caused havoc in New Orleans and surrounding areas. You can help do your part to support the Red Cross' relief effort by posting ads (like the ones bellow) to your web sites. They have ads available in many sizes, and you can get your ads from the following site:

http://www.redcross.org/psa/bannerorder/all/

In June, I wrote an article about Google Sitemaps and how Google would allow you to submit a list of URLs for their spider to index.

Yahoo has taken a similar step by allowing lists of urls to be submitted to their free submission tool at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request.

These two services should help companies with dynamically generated content pages to get more of their site indexed by the top two search engines.

In an unsuspected move yesterday, Google took a leap into the offline world by starting to sell print ads to some of its top adwords clients.

Google took out full page ads in PC Magazine and Maximum PC magazine, and divided the space up among several of its advertising clients who wanted to reach this market.

Google has graciously setup a few sites to take advantage of all this PR about their foray into Print advertising, and displays what the ad pages look like, with clickable urls to the advertisers of course:

Google's PC-Magazine Ads

Google's Maximum PC Ads

You will also notice that clicks on the page go through their Adwords network so Google can extract per-click fees.

Google's advertisers have always loved more targeted and cheaper advertising opportunities. Google believes this move will help them leverage they advertisers thirst for advertising bargains into the offline print world.

PC Magazine typically charges $72,485 for a full-page ad. I am sure Google was able to lock in some discounts with longer term deals. The ad in PC magazine was split among 5 participating advertisers at a rate of $2,200 each. That's a lot less than 1/5 of the typical cost which would come to roughly $14,500.

Although neither side is talking about the specifics of the deal, my guess is that Google may have offered Ziff Davis, publisher of PC Magazine, some online advertising in lieu of payments. Swapping ads like this could be a big win-win for Google and their offline advertising partners.

We expect that similar deals will be cut with other offline print advertisers, and Google may come up with a way to sell these ads on a pay per call basis.

Let the deals begin...

comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines.

Google Maintains top Market Share

In July 2005, Google maintained its market share lead in the U.S. search market with 36.5 percent of all the searches submitted, followed by Yahoo! at 30.5 percent and MSN at 15.5 percent.

MSN Leads in Volume Growth

The total volume of online searches conducted in the U.S. increased by 22 percent year-over-year in July, reaching more than 4.8 billion. Market consolidation continued as the top six search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Time Warner (AOL), Ask Jeeves, and InfoSpace – accounted for 99.4 percent of all searches, up from 98.5 percent in July 2004. MSN-Microsoft saw the highest search volume gain among any of the top search engines, rising 30 percent from July 2004, accounting for 744 million domestic searches.

Yahoo! Tops inU.S. Toolbar Searches

The popularity of search toolbars has leveled off during the course of the past year, but usage remains high. In July, 11 percent of all domestic searches were conducted via toolbars, up from 8 percent in July 2004. Yahoo! remains the most popular toolbar, serving as the starting point for 51 percent of all toolbar searches executed in July. Yahoo! toolbars processed more than 282 million searches during the month, a 74-percent increase over the previous year.

Google recently started showing 3 sponsored listings at the top of some search queries instead of their old standard of 2 sponsored listings at the top. Based on the reports on how users interact with search engines, opening up this extra real estate at the top of the page (above the natural search results) opens up some new opportunities for advertisers, shows another Google shift towards the mighty dollar, and should help Google's Ad Revenues.

Combine this change with the effective increase in cost per click prices that the new inactive status keyword changes are having and Google is well positioned for a healthy 4th Quarter.

Google has released their new "simplified account management" system which does away with keywords being "on hold" or "on trial". Now keywords will be labeled as either active or inactive. Additionally, any disabled keywords will be purged from the system in a few weeks. Google announced the changes several weeks ago, (see Google Adwords Gets Rid of on Hold Keywords.

In Google's FAQs, they say the following:

"We've created this system to give you more control over the quality and cost of your own ad. By choosing highly targeted keywords and creating relevant ad text, you can pay less per click. On the other hand, if you want to run on an obscure and less-searchable keyword, you can. But you'll likely have to pay a higher CPC for it."

This seems rather counter-intuitive. If the goal for the new system was to increase quality of the ads, then I can understand them charging more for less relevant ads on popular keywords, but why charge more on obscure and less-searchable keywords with little to no competition?

My guess is this new "simplified" account management system may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. If what they say is accurate about having to bid more on obscure keywords is true, than this could be no more than a way for Google to drive up their average cost per click fees on people who have done their research to identify non-competitive keyword niches.

It may not be "fair" but it should be good for Google's balance sheet. First they get to purge out a large amount of disabled keywords that are clogging up their databases, and secondly they get to drive up costs for inexpensive keywords without having to come out and say "We are increasing our minimum CPC". In fact they way the have approached this so far, they have actually indicated that the minimum CPC could drop below $0.05, but if you read carefully, this would only happen on highly completive keywords and already bid up keywords. So on those you might be able to bid $0.01 but your not going to show up.

Nice! What are you thoughts on the new system?

Wordtracker has released a new FREE Keyword Research Guide. They have asked SEO experts how they use Wordtracker to help their clients get top placements.

They created a fictional company, Virginia Veg and asked experts to provide real answers to the problems facing its CEO Susan Webster. The result is an e-book packed with insight, tips, and techniques on keyword research that you can apply easily to your own website. Contributers include:

• Bryan Eisenberg - Convert more traffic using Wordtracker


• B. L. Ochman - Understand your customer's real motivations


• Kevin Lee - Combine thousands of phrases for an effective PPC campaign


• Stephen Mahaney - Use Wordtracker to find the size of the market


• Ken McGaffin - Discover the most important sites in your marketplace


• John Alexander - Find inspiration in Wordtracker's top 1000 words report


• Neil Davidson - Learn how an Ad Agency uses keyword research to position a client


• Robin Good - Use Wordtracker to identify niche opportunities


• Nick Usborne - Incorporate keywords into your content and copy

Download your Free Keyword Research Guide Today!

James Martell has announced a new Boot Camp for Affiliate Marketers. At this 3 Day event on October 3rd, 4th, and 5th. James Martell will host a Boot Camp in White Rock, BC. Anyone serious about affiliate marketing and building content rich sites should consider learning from one of the masters of the Industry first hand. For more information click here.

Andrew Goodman recently write an article questioning if Search Engine Arbitrage should be called "Click Pimping". In Andrew's article, arbitrage is defined as people who buy cheap ads and land them on pages showing contextual PPC ads (like Adsense) in order to hopefully generate higher returns.

I guess buying clicks to sell clicks seems more like arbitrage than buying clicks to get affiliate sales / conversions. Perhaps Click Pimping should be those that are buying clicks to pimp other's products...

Are affiliate marketers the new media pimps of the digital age?

A quick search of the Wordtracker top 30 keywords for the day indicated a term I had never heard of, Googletestad. Why would so many people be looking for Googletestad, I wondered. So I started doing a little research, and to be honest I didn't learn much. I think Google may be testing something with this term.

When you do a search for Googletestad on Google you will sometimes see the following top paid search ad:

Congratulations!
This is a family save ad.
All systems are go!
www.google.com

It would appear that Googletestad actually stands for Google's Test Ad, and is used to test their adwords system in the live production environment.

So why is this showing up in the top 10 current keywords? Google must be running some massive traffic tests.

Any thoughts?

I received the following error message this morning when trying to do a search from the Google toolbar:

We're sorry...

... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

View Screenshot

On July 20, 1969, after a four day trip, the Apollo 11 astronauts arrived at the Moon. At 10:56 pm EDT on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon.

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and one more logo opportunity for Google...

Google announced pending changes to their adwords platform and keyword bidding policies today. We are tentatively optimistic about these changes. On one hand we should see a better opportunity to keep keywords running, on the other we are concerned about forced increases in costs per click across the board. Here is the meat of their announcement and some answers to some clarifying questions:

Google's Announcement:

What's changing

• Simplified account management: Your keywords will be active or inactive — instead of normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled. In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don't meet our performance requirements and your ads appear rarely for your keywords.

• Quality-based minimum bids: Soon, each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid based on its Quality Score. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be given lower minimum bids to stay active and trigger ads. Keywords with a lower Quality Score (including those that are currently on hold) will have the opportunity to run if your keyword or Ad Group's maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid.
  

  
  

  The Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.

  Ad Rank, or the position of your ad, will continue to be based on the maximum CPC and quality (now called the Quality Score).

  
  

Questions for Google:

Goyami:
Do you have a more specific target date for implementation?

Google:
Google has not set a specific launch date for this change to the AdWords system. The announcement indicates sometime in the next few weeks. We will notify you as soon as we have an update on the target date.

Goyami:
It says that keywords will be assigned a minimum bid based on it's
quality score. What is the range of minimum bids and where will we be able to see these bids?

Google:
The current range of bidding possible within the AdWords system is $0.05-$100. With this upcoming change, the minimum CPC will be reduced to $0.01, and therefore the possible CPC range for AdWords will be $0.01-$100.

Goyami:
When a keywords in deactivated, what is the process to re-activate?
Will the interface display how much you need to bid to display this ad?

Google:
After we determine your quality-based minimum bid, your keywords will fall into one of two states: active or inactive. If your keyword or Ad Group's maximum CPC meets the minimum bid assigned to it, your ad will remain active. If it doesn't, your keyword will be inactive. Our interface will show the minimum CPC required to reach an active status for specific keywords.

Goyami:
Can you explain in more detail how the Quality Score is calculated?

Google:
The quality score is the most important factor we use to determine your keyword's performance and ad's position on a search page in the Google Network. Your Quality Score is determined by your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors. The first 3 factors mentioned will be weighed heaviest in determining ad positioning.

Goyami:
In the past you have looked at how others performed on specific
keywords to decide if terms should be placed on hold, will these new rules apply only to my individual account and performance on the specified keyword?

Google:
The keyword statuses normal, in trial, on hold, slowed, and disabled will be replaced with active (triggering ads) and inactive (not triggering ads). In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed. Currently, accounts are slowed when they don't meet our performance requirements. The historical keyword performance is one of the factors and this will incorporate historical performance for your specific account on a keyword as well as the overall historical performance of that term.

We will keep you posted as we learn more, also let us know if you have any additional questions / concerns for Google.

Registration for Commission Junction's annual Commission Junction University (CJU) opens today. The popular annual networking and education event for affiliate marketing managers and affiliate marketers will be held September 18th - 20th at the Fess Parker DoubleTree Resort in Santa Barbara, California.

This year will offer a new specail Sunday workshop with affiliate marketing guru, James Martell, author of Affiliate Marketers Handbook. Also new this year will be the CJU Expo, Tuesday afternoon's networking mega-event.

Registration is $595 per attendee and begins on July 11th. This event has been known to sell out, so register early.

Happy 4th of July. Is Google losing their touch? No 4th of July logo today! Here is Yahoo's 4th of July fireworks logo and some of Google's logos from previous years:

Update: Looks like I spoke too soon. Perhaps the Google guys read my entry, but I check again this afternoon and they now have the following logo for 2005 published:

On July 13th, Jeff Molander of Molandar & Associates released a list of the top 200 retail-focused Web affiliates, The Affiliate List. The $200 list has been controversial from day one. Connie Berg and Shawn Collins do a good job of laying out and discussing the controversy.

I was a little confused about the contents of this list at first, and had a chance to catch up with Jeff Molander to get some questions answered:

Goyami: Interesting list, would affiliates like myself or Todd be listed?

Jeff Molander:
No... I don't think you're a "retail" guy are you? I thought your biz (and this is a planned "top affiliate list" that we might roll out next) was more specific to data feeds and SEM. I view that as somewhat separate from "retail" sites like FlamingoWorld and FatWallet. Also, it's all third party data and publicly avail. information.

Goyami:
I thought this was a list of top affiliates? IMWAVE is typically considered one of the top affiliates of most programs they actively participate in. They do paid search, and online sites, blogs, etc...

Jeff Molander:
Understood. Yes... I think there's a lot of value in rounding it out with PPC/SEO/SEM affiliates given how much is driven by them as a group. I appreciate the feedback.

So it would appear the list is focused on large website affiliates who have publicly available information. It's a great idea to rank affiliates so merchants can quickly identify the professionals. Jeff should probably consider some sort of form on their site to submit information and update listings. Much of what is publicly available is out of date.

I received this disapproval of one of my ads today from Google Adwords Support:

AD TEXT:

Fax-Easy.com (Free Trial)
Receive Faxes via email. Local
or toll-free fax numbers available.
Fax-Easy.com

Ad Status: Suspended - Pending Revision
Ad Issue(s): Ad Text Trademark Term
~~~~~~~~~

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Text: Please remove the following trademark term from your
ad: "easy.com".

What are they smoking over there? I own fax-easy.com. I am sure they will clear this up quickly, but what a pain in the butt...

So I got this email from Overture today, I think it means that Lycos and Overture have teamed up in Germany. I wouldn't know since I don't speak German:

Overture und LYCOS verlängern und erweitern Kooperation

Overture wird künftig noch enger mit LYCOS Europe, einer der führenden Internet-Destinationen, zusammenarbeiten. Im Rahmen der auf mehrere Jahre angelegten Kooperations-vereinbarung werden auf den Internetseiten von LYCOS Europe in sechs europäischen Ländern weitere Produkte von Overture eingebunden.

I beleive the email goes on to give the top 10 keywords in Germany:

1. job
2. auto
3. vollzeit
4. hotel
5. digitalkamera
6. routenplaner
7. handy
8. geschenk
9. moebel
10. notebook

According to Fathom Online's Keyword Price Index (KPI), prices that advertisers had to pay to by keyword advertising dropped an average of 31 cents from April of 2005 led by a large drop in mortgage related keywords. This price drop marks the first decline in keyword advertising prices since August 2004, when the company started monitoring the prices.

Fathom's Keyword Price Index tracks 500 generic keywords across eight categories for the top five ranked positions on selected search engines.

Although Fathom clearly states that their tracking shouldn't be to gauge the financial health of search engines, Wall Street clearly differs in their opinion. Shares of Google shed $13.56 or 4.6 percent to close at $279.56 on Wednesday and shed another $6.75 on Thursday closing at $286.31. Yahoo's stock dropped 81 cents off 2.2 percent to close at $36.63 on Wednesday but gained it all back on Thursday.

James Peggie wrote an interesting article about companies looking at all the search engine listings for their company name and considering this SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) as part of their companies branding impressions.

Obviously you have worked hard to get the top ranking when someone types in the name of your company, but users often look at the rest of the listings as well. Are your competitors there? Are there forum posts listed with complaints about your company? All of these can damage your reputation.

So what is the answer. Affiliates! As the leading site for the keyword term, you have some control over who else gets top billing. Use the page that is getting the top ranking to link to other listings that you see in the lower rankings for your term that you would like to help improve. You should quickly see these listings of your choice getting better rankings.

Google has recently launched a beta test version of a new service for Webmasters called Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps allow webmasters to provide Google with information about what pages exist on their site to help the search engine better crawl their sites and reach pages that may be normally hidden to search engines inside database searches and queries.

At initial glance, the Sitemap interface looks a little daunting to the non-savvy webmaster, it is an XML implementation where you must tell Google where to find the XML file on your server, and you place a specifically coded file on your web server that tells Google what pages exist, how often there are updated, their exact urls, and their priority related to other pages on the same site.

Google offers a sitemap generation program you can utilize if your webserver is running Python version 2.2. Although I haven't tried it yet, the program is supposed to be able to generate these Google Sitemaps from url lists, webserver directories or from access logs.

Savvy webmasters should take a serious look at Google Sitemaps. Being able to communicate directly with the Google indexing spider to point it in the right direction and to tell it how often your content changes could be real gold for sites who have had a hard time getting their pages well indexed.

Non-Savvy webmasters can still create a lite version of a Google Sitemap without using XML. According to the FAQs

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=1
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=11
...
Notes about this format:

Your URLs must not include embedded newlines.

You must fully specify URLs because Google tries to crawl the URLs exactly as you provide them.

Your sitemap files must use UTF-8 encoding.

Finally, Google also has indicated in their FAQs that they will support OAI-PMH version 2.0 (a protocol used in the library world) as well as RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds using the link/lastmod fields. This is great news for bogglers, because they can quickly submit their RSS feeds to Google Sitemaps. I was quickly able to add Goyami’s RSS feed into my sitemap account.

Like their Magazine, Revenue Magazine's newly updated Blog, provides a lot of good content about the affiliate world. However, the blog inadvertently fuels the online sblog world (weblog spam). By listing and providing links to recent referrers and top referrers, the blog's home page has quickly become a list of links to black hat search engine optimizers who drive traffic to sites offering these links of recent referrers to get inbound links.

A quick look at their recent referrers shows xanax, rape glow, and hydrocodone sites... Nice...

Perhaps their choice of blog software and feature implementation should be re-considered...

Last week eBay announced they will purchase Shopping.com for $620 million in cash. Shopping.com is a comparison shopping and customer review site that went public in October of 2004 at $18 per share. The buyout places a 20% premium on Shopping.com's current valuation.

This week, Scripps announced it would acquire Shopzilla (formerly Bizrate).

David Lewis posted an excellent review of the industry and scorecard and predicts that Experian will by Pricegrabber as the price comparison site industry continues to consolidate.

Google has an ongoing tradition of commerating famous artists birthdays with their own special logos. Today, Google is celbrating the birtday of Frank Lloyd Wright. Here is their logo:

What if you could bump up your PR value by getting hundreds of bloggers to link to a specific site with specific keywords linked to specific pages. Let's say you had a flowers site, and you "encouraged" hundreds of bloggers to write a favorable review about your flower site and ask them to link to your site using the term "buy flowers online". Now what if you offered these bloggers $5 if they did it?

Read Blogging for Dollars, that's exactly what USWeb tried to do for one of their clients!

Do you think this is fair game? Would love to hear your opinion.

Yahoo has announced the release of their Mindset Beta, Yahoo’s Intent driven search.. Yahoo Mindset offers a slide bar tool you can use after you enter a keyword to indicated the degree to which you are looking for commercial information (shopping) or research information (non-shopping). Yahoo will then attempt to sort / filter their organic results to meet your needs.

The Beta has been posted on Yahoo! Next. Yahoo's site for posting beta tools they are playing with. There you will find Mindset, Music Search Engine, Yahoo's Beta Gift Finder, and more!

The question that begs to be asked is how does Yahoo determine the focus of a page to be commercial verses informational. Here is what their FAQs have to say:

Question:
What do you mean by commercial and non-commercial (informational)?

Answer:
Commercial implies that the primary purpose of a given page is to sell you something. Informational implies that the primary purpose of the page is to provide information related to your search.

Question:
That sounds vague. Aren't many web pages a combination of commercial and informational?

Answer:
Yes, that's why we assign each page a relatively continuous score ranging from -2 (most commercial) to +2 (most informational). Pages scored 0 are a balance of commercial and informational.

Question:
How are these scores assigned?

Answer:
We're using machine learning technology developed here at Yahoo! Research Labs to score web results.

Question:
Are you confident that the scoring in this demo is correct?

Answer:
Remember, this demo is a work in progress, put together by scientists to test new ideas and techniques. To start the scoring process, a small team of humans scored pages manually to develop the "seed set" of pages on which machine learning would be based. For the seed set, we didn't rigorously require everyone to use the same scoring approach, so the scoring results may need some fine-tuning.

Question:
Does this suggest that the whole demo is gibberish?

Answer:
We don't think so. The scoring may not be perfect, but it's good enough to get us started. Once we get more rigorous in our approach for manually scoring the seed set (perhaps by inviting smart users like you to do the scoring), automatic scoring should improve rapidly. Meantime, you're invited to play with the demo and share your feedback

More FAQs are available at http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/faq.php.

This will be interesting to watch as we learn more about how the Yahoo Machine determins if a page is mostly commercial or informational. Other slide bars might appear in the future, it would be interesting to have a dynamic slide bar that would appear to help determine what you are looking for when a search could mean two very different things. Take a search for Delta for example. A slide bar could come up to slide between travel and home building. A search for Alexandria could come up with a slide bar listing Alexandria Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Egypt.

Slidebars could become a great way to "refocus" a search, but if users are not actually typing in a new keyword, the question would be what terms are the search engines using to pull new relevant ads as searches are further refined.

It doesn't look like the current mindset beta is changing the ads at all, this could be a major mistake on their part. The slidebar just readjusts the organic listings on the page without affecting the ads.

Search engines make some major and minor upgrades to their index and algorithms throughout the year that can wreak havoc on companies relying on previously gained search engine placement for their traffic.

In a thread on Webmaster's world entitled "Questions for Google Guy", the "Google Guy" indicated that there would be some serious updates in the next few days. This is good news for some companies who have been complaining that their top listings all but disappeared a week or so ago.

Interestingly, Yahoo has started posting weather reports to their Blog at http://www.ysearchblog.com. Their latest report indicated that they had an index release on 5/31/05. that would result in a lot of new content and "fluctuations in the rankings" from previous searches.

Worrying about rankings can be a full time task. We recommend, as do most industry experts, that you focus on creating a great site with great content and follow the basic rules for site optimization to make it easy for the search spiders to index your pages and know what a page is about and what keywords are related.

If you are looking for some of the best advise on the basis and need to keep up to date on the changes in the search engines, continue to check in at Goyami, but also consider a subscription to Planet Ocean's Unfair Advantage Book and Monthly Newsletter.

I received a "Network Quality Announcement" from Commission Junction today indicating that they are taking a stand against allowing affiliate marketers from buying advertising from companies who download and install software on an end-user's computer. Here is the meat of their message:

In order to sustain this open marketplace of information, Commission Junction will no longer allow special programs engaged in the purchase of media from ad services that download and install software on an end-user's computer. For special programs currently engaged in such practices, Commission Junction requests that you immediately discontinue such practices. We will continue to monitor such programs to insure that special descriptions are properly updated.

The message then goes on to say:

As described in the Commission Junction Publisher Service Agreement (PSA), publishers who distribute ads using third-party services and/or place links on Web sites, not owned or operated by the publisher, must be disclosed as a special program. Special programs require both Commission Junction and advertiser approval, and Commission Junction reserves the right to reject a special program at any time.

Congratulations on the Parasite stand!!! This is long overdue. I am concerned a bit about the general verbiage. This message clearly opens up the ability for CJ to disallow any and all advertising other than links on a publisher's page.

It would seem to me that affiliate marketing has clearly moved so far beyond just this type of marketing that there should be more specific information about what is and is not acceptable without asking for special permission to do just about anything.

Goyami has come a long way this year, and as we continue to grow and exapand our audience we are asking for your help. ClickZ has opened up nominations for their 2005 Marketing Excellence Award. We would appreciate your support for the Best Business/Marketing Blog.

To nominate Goyami please follow these directions:

1. Click on this Nomination Link
   
2. Check off "Best Business/Marketing Blog" under the Blog section.
   
3. Enter "Goyami" as the Nominee Name
   
4. Enter "http://www.corante.com/goyami" as the url
   
5. Enter your own reason for nomination
   
6. Optionally include your name and email address.
   

Thank you in advance, we really appreciate your readership and your support!

Adam & Todd

Want to keep up to date on what's happening with MSN's PPC advertising program, check out http://advertising.msn.com/searchadv/. Here you will find a video from Steve Ballmer and Yusuf Mehdi from the MSN Strategic Account Summit on March 17, 2005, current press releases, and a form to register to receive update announcements and developments as they happen.

Microsoft's Longhorn is on the horizon and MSN's contract with Overture, Yahoo Search Marketing, is set to expire in June of 2006. Now is the time to start planning the future of keyword advertising on MSN.

Anyone who has run keyword advertising on Google's Adwords network knows that the budget you set for your ads has little to do with how much you will actually spend on ads. In fact, most people realize that a low budget actually reduces the chances of your ads displaying at all during the day regardless if you have hit your budget figure or not.

Yesterday I realized how far off this budget tool actually is. I have a small campaign for a merchant and had my budget set for $5,000 per day, significantly higher than necessary to insure my ads would display at full capacity. I had generated less than $7 in clicks for the day and my ads stopped running. I ran the ad diagnostic tool and it said I had reached my daily budget.

I have Google looking into the problem, but for now you may want to set your campaigns to the maximum budget setting of $250,0000 per day just to make sure they run at all!

A California judge recently declared a mistrial in the recent patent-infringement case between Yahoo and Findwhat. Yahoo has sued Findwhat testing Overture's original patent for search engine keyword advertising.

Yahoo / Overture's patent specifically targets the ability for advertisers to bid specific prices for specific rankings in search engines. Google side steps the patent with their Adrank formula which determines rank by bid price and click through rates. Findwhat however, uses overture's same model and is thereby at potential risk in this case.

After 3 years in the legal system already, The jury was hung, and the industry will have to wait for a future decision on this case. The next court date is scheduled for June 24th. Don't hold your breath for a quick resolution here; things can take a long time in our legal system.

I recently received my first consolidated check from Linkshare, who up until now has sent out individual checks for each merchant that affiliates earned commissions from. The check arrived with no information about what merchant's commissions made up the payment, and no report could be readily found to derive such information. When I asked emailed Linkshare, they gave me the following directions to obtain such a report:

"The payment report is only available now through Beta Synergy Analytics.
You will find a link to this at the top left hand side of your home page.
In reporting click on the 4th tab Network Transaction Analysis and on the left side of the page you'll find the link to the payment report."

Great, this works.

Wouldn't it just be easier to give details on the check stub? Or make this report available under the "payment reports" link on the main console?

I love the idea of consolidated check or direct deposit, but let's make it easy to do the accounting work guys!

This reminds me of the daily frustration of getting individual checks from BeFree and having to write the merchant's name on the check stub, because the only place the name exists is on the check and that goes to the bank.

Little things like this could pay of big for the networks by enabling affiliates to focus more time on earning more commissions and less time on non-commissionable accounting tasks.

Nielsen/Netratings' MegaView Online Retail Report measures at-work and at-home Internet usage. Here is some snippets of information from their report pulled from their press release and from Internet Retailer's May 2005 Magazine:

Who has the best Conversion Rates?

Merchant	Conversion Rate
QVC	16.3%
Lands' End	14.8%
Sportsman's Guide	13.5%
FTD.com	13.4%
L.L. Bean	13.4%
Amazon	12.8%
Coldwater Creek	12.7%
eBay	12.3%
Yahoo! Shopping	12.1%
Proflowers	11.8%
ColumbiaHouse	11.2%
Williams-Sonoma	10.7%
Lillian Vernon	10.5%
American Eagle	10.4%
Ticketmaster	9.9%

What are the best Categories based on Order Size?

Product Category	Average Order Size (US$)
Computer Hardware	584.47
Event & Movie Tickets	121.60
Automotive	119.23
Office Supplies	102.47
Consumer Electronics	99.12
Child/Baby Care	86.13
Sporting Goods & Outdoor Activities	74.15
Home & Garden	69.99
Shoes & Athletic Footwear	53.14
Flowers, Greetings, & Specialty Gifts	51.61
Computer Software	46.76
Jewelry & Watches	46.62
Health/Wellness/Beauty	45.94
Apparel & Accessories	44.68
Toys, Games & Hobbies	40.41

More interesting stats:

• Among the top 100 retailers, the average conversion rate was 4.9 percent for all retailers.
• 69% of retail purchases transacted online were conducted via a broadband connection during November 2004.
• Broadband customers spend on average $158.21 per person, 34% higher than the $117.89 average spent by narrowband users
• Conversion rates for broadband shoppers reached 26%, compared to 21% for narrowband users.

"Brick-and-mortar retailers are noticeably absent among the top performers in online sales conversion rates," Heather Dougherty, senior retail analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings said. "While traffic is high to popular brick-and-mortar Web sites, visitors are often researching purchases to be made offline."

Two busy shopping seasons are quickly approaching. Graduation and Father's Day. To prepare for Graduation and Father's Day look at deals being offered by your merchant partners. I am sure a lot of the merchants will be offering specials. I have found deals from Brooks Brothers, Ashford, Cross Pens, Vistaprint, Circuit City, Proflowers and more!

Let me know if you find any other gread deals for Father's day or Graduation.

Adam

I just read through Lawrence Deon's inciteful look at Google's recent Patent filing, and what struck my as most interesting was the part about potentially punishing sites for having "too many" affilaite links and also potentially punishing sites that link to pages with too many affilaite links.

Here is the section of his post I found interesting:

According to their patent filing Google records and scores the following web page changes to determine freshness.
• The frequency of all web page changes
• The actual amount of the change itself… whether it is a substantial change redundant or superfluous
• Changes in keyword distribution or density
• The actual number of new web pages that link to a web page
• The change or update of anchor text (the text that is used to link to a web page)
• The numbers of new links to low trust web sites (for example, a domain may be considered low trust for having too many affiliate links on one web page).
Although there is no specific number of links indicated in the patent it might be advisable to limit affiliate links on new web pages. Caution should also be used in linking to pages with multiple affiliate links.

Why do you think Google has targeted affiliate markeitng as such a bad thing?

Happy Mother's Day everyone! I hope you did well with your affiliate marketing this Mother's Day. I saw on the news that a projected 11.4 billion dollars are spent on Mother's day gifts with the top sellers being a night out to dinner, jewelry, and flowers.

Here is Google's Mother's Day logo as well as the logo I forgot to post for teacher's appreciation day.

I didn't have time to setup a Mother's Day Gift site this year. I had meant to re-configure my Valentine's Day flowers site into a mother's day gift's site with a similar look and feel. Most of the same merchants would work as well. But alas, time got away from me, and here we are just days before the Mother's day shopping season ends.

Then I had an idea, I am receiving all of these special coupon codes in my email for Mother's day, why not just take these deals and post them to my web-coupon-codes.com site in a special Mother's day deals section. This way I can leverage my coupon codes blog and have a mini-site that lists any deals I want to post for Mother's day. Since all the deals are specific for Mother's day, the section of the blog would be right on topic and might score high organically.

Todd and I have noticed blog entries ranking well and getting indexed fast in search engines. I think the nature of their RSS feeds and the ability to ping sites as new posts are entered make them great search spider food.

Personally, I like TypePad as my Blog software of choice. You can get a basic weblog for just $4.95 per month, 3 blogs for $8.95 per month, and for $14.95 a month you can get an unlimited number of blogs. The unlimited deal is great for any serious affiliate who plans to make the most out of blog technology.

Why TypePad vs Blogger? The main reason I switched from Blogger to TypePad was the permalink option which takes each post and makes a single page out of it along with any comments posted to that page. Goyami uses the same technology using their server side product, MovableType. TypePad is their hosted version.

In May of 2004, Google launched image ads on their content network, where advertisers could ad image ads in their normal adgroups and they had the "possibility" of showing up in the content network ads.

Today, Google announced that they will expand this feature by allowing advertisers to setup site targeted campaigns that will display image ads on a cost per impression (CPM) basis instead of their standard cost per click. For the first time advertisers will be allowed to specify which sites their ads will appear on. Additionally, Google announced they will start allowing animated images, which had been restricted in the past.

Full details are not yet available, as the service hasn't officially launched. It doesn't appear that Google will be opening this selective targeting option up to their standard PPC content targeted ads.

This move could open up more opportunities for content publishers to earn more money through the Google Adsense.

Google's content network has been affected heavily with click-fraud, causing many advertisers to turn off content networking.

Impression Fraud, where unscrupulous publishers need only generate web traffic to their site, might be even harder for Google's system to police since they won't receive the data typically sent with a click. My guess is that this fear was the main driver of the decision to offer site targeting for these ads. For this reason, I would caution advertisers wanted to run CPM ads to only select high-profile sites that you are familiar with.

The 80-20 rule is certainly alive and well with keyword advertising. It's true that 20% of your keywords will drive 80% of your volume. The question comes down to identifying the 20% as fast and as efficently as possible.

I have worked with some clients who's search logs indicate the terms people have found them under, and this has often been a great place to start. However this is often only part of the story. If they don't have the specific terms on their site, they haven't been found under them, right?

I agree with Todd, 100% when he says you need to be able to run quick tests to see if a program is going to work before investing the time on extensive keyword research.

Once you have found that great program though, I have been very sucessful in testing large keyword lists as a way to identify the 20% that will drive my volume.

It's getting a lot harder though to run any massive lists for a program, I might have to look at more of a staging approach, launching a large list of quality terms and letting them come off hold before launching the more extensive lists that I have been able to build.

I don't know which approach is best, and certanily I have used both approaches at different times where appropriate. I am sure Todd has as well.

The bottom line is it's getting harder to work with Google in this fashion and that means it's time to adjust to the changing times or advertise elsewhere...

I have come to realize that there may be some troubles at Google Adwords. To explain I need to give you some background.

I feel that Google like's Todd as a customer much more than they like me these days. You see, Todd is more of a head chaser and I prefer chasing the tail. Before you let your mind wonder here, this is still a PG site.

There are two main parts of search engine traffic, the head and the tail. The head represents a large number of keyword phrases that get searched most often, the tail represents the many different phrase combinations that don't get typed in as often, but make up a large portion of the search traffic. If you chart search engine traffic it will look something like the image displayed in this image, ironically named "serving, the long tail". Google has charted this as businesses and dollars, you more typically see this chart as phases and search quantity.

Chasing the Search Marketing Head
Todd likes to identify the most trafficked terms and find the right bid price that maximizes his profits. He will often focus on a very small select number of terms that drive significant traffic. He is willing to bid high on these terms because he has identified an arbitrage opportunity where he can make money on the term.

Google loves Todd because Todd is often paying a lot per click and is driving up the click costs on key terms where there is often a lot of competition. Todd isn't loving Google these days, because Google's new ad policy of only showing one ad per url is often pitting Todd against other affiliates and even worse, his merchant partners for displaying ads under the same highly competitive but easy to identify terms.

Chasing the Search Marketing Tail
Google hates me because I often generate keyword lists in the 100,000 to 1,000,000 range and go after every possible combination of phrase. I know that perhaps only 20% of these terms will drive any significant traffic, but in bulk these terms generate a lot of traffic at very low costs due to the lack of competition on these phrases. Google has indicated database problems on their side with accounts with large terms and has made some changes to make this practice more difficult. First the implemented a predictive CPC program that estimates potential traffic and will often put 80-90% of my terms on hold right away and then put 1-2 terms on trial to "test them out". Secondly, they have implemented a policy for new accounts of only allowing 50,000 active keyword terms per account.

You might think that Google"s headline above "Serving the long tail" might indicate they are looking for advertisers like me, but that is not the case at all. They are looking for a lot of small advertisers that want to purchase a few very niche keywords that will work for their business. They see the tail as a large number of advertisers who have yet to come online.

Troubles at Google?
The bottom line from my point of view, is that Google has positioned themselves in a very adversarial way towards affiliate marketers, and this could open the door for competitors to attract this very profitable niche of online advertising. I have already seen my ad spending jump on Overture (Yahoo Search), and am seeing more and more traffic coming from MSN. MSN should adopt very affiliate friendly policies when they run their own keyword advertising systems and steal this business away.

Perhaps Google’s bottom line is better served by getting more and more people to bid on the same key phrase and driving up bid prices on the most highly trafficked terms. It would seem helping these advertisers better mine the tail could be just as profitable.

Golf Deals are a good idea to promote as the Golfing season get's into full swing. Great deals can be found on golf clubs, golfballs, golfing apparel, and more. Here are some golf related sites that you might want to consider promoting:

• Edwin Watts Golf - on performics.
  
• The Golf Warehouse - on linkshare.
  
• Callaway Certified Pre-Owned - on cj.
  
• Golf Shoes Plus - on cj.
  
• Golf Outlets - on cj.
  
• Pinemeadow Golf on cj.
  
• Austad’s Golf - on cj.
  
• Golf Smith (Free Shipping) - on cj.
  

I suggest focusing on major golf brands like Taylor-Made, Nike, Titleist, Ping, Callaway, etc... Be careful of the generic terms like Golf and Golf Clubs, I have found those terms to get a lot of click traffic without much conversion. Misspellings should do very well, talormade, nikey, titelist, calaway, etc...

Free shipping deals on golf equipment like the one offered by Golf Smith might out perform the generic links.

If you have had good luck with other golfing related links, please let us know.

I don't usually post deals on Goyami, but this is a limited time offer that I thought our readers would jump on. This weekend only, you can get a free year of web hosting from Globat: Here is the link, act fast!

Globat.com: Limited Time Free Web Hosting Special

Follow-up:
After signing up for this "free deal" I later learn that the fine print says that you only get a refund for the "hosting" fees. They tack on some additional "set-up" fees that actually make this deal not free at all. I cancelled my account and then received a rude phone call from them basically telling me that I should have read the fine print and that they would be refunding the "hosting" fees and not the "set-up" fees.

I wonder if they will still give me my affiliate commission on the setup-fees! Bah!

What a scam. They should call it Web Hosing!!!

I won't ever promote this company again. For more honest hosting options check out one of the following:

1&1 Web Hosting - I personally use them and like that I can host multiple domains off one account without additional fees.

Yahoo! Webhosting Domain name included.

Infinity Host- $6.95/mo. Hosting

iPowerweb Hosting $7.95 - Free Setup

More Web Hosting Deals...

In Seattle a new trademark infringement case has been filed which could have ramifications on the keyword advertising industry. Intelius Inc., the online public records company founded by former InfoSpace Chief Executive Naveen Jain, has sued two California competitors for buying online advertisements through Google that use the Intelius name.

Intelus contends that competitors, Enformion.com and PeopleFinders.com ran deceptive advertising campaigns through Google that infringe on Intelius' trademark and trade name.

Late last year, a federal judge dismissed a claim by Geico Corp. about Google's sale of advertising keywords that use the Geico name.

A key difference in this case, which does not name Google as a defendant, is that Intelius is saying that it's competitors tricked consumers by running fake Intelius advertisements that linked to their respective Web sites. Intelius contends that not only did the competitors use ads that deceived customers into thinking they were going to Intelius, but that the competitors also duplicated key parts of the Intelius Web site look and feel.

The competitors however argue that advertising competitive keywords are legally acceptable, fueled by the Geico ruling. They further content that this is a nuisance case and poor business tactic by Intelius' founder, Naveen Jain.

After reading Todd's story about Google Gulp, I had to rush right out and try some for myself. It took me a while to track down a supply, I can't reveal where I bought them. I secured a large inventory and will be selling my supply of Google Gulp on ebay.

I also secured exclusive license to the logo for the eastern seaboard of North America, and plan on doing a major push in the summer when the drink comes out of Beta and the auto-drink feature has had all the bugs drained out of it.

After testing the first four flavors currently in Beta, I decided that my favorite was the Sero-Tonic water. There was just something about the other fruity flavors that didn't sit well with the Google plain vanilla design style.

I hear they are working on a promotion where you look under the bottle top for a free $25 coupon code to Google Adwords. One in four lucky winners will receive the top that will automatically send them 50 promotional mailers to sign up for Google Adsense.

Enjoy the drink!

Adam

Goyami is celebrating its half year anniversary this month, and what a 6 month's it has been. We have seen a lot of changes in the search engine marketing and affiliate marketing industry. We have also gone from 0 visits to over 9,000 a month!

Thanks Everyone!

Adam & Todd

Google has agreed to acquire Urchin Software. Urchin is one of the leading Web-Analytics packages, and has spent some time building out ROI tools that enable sites to track both their site visitor's behavior as well as their return on investment of their paid search engine keyword advertising.

This move opens doors for Google to sell AdWords and AdSense to Website owners in Urchin's database, as well as gives them more data as to what is happening after the customer leaves Google.

It is clear that Google is interested in what happens after the click and could signal a future move towards selling ads based on leads and transactions instead of clicks. This could move Google directly into the affiliate marketing business and could explain some of their recent moves that could be considered "affiliate unfriendly".

It will be interesting to watch, what are you thoughts?

Google has been known to put up new Logos that celebrate special holidays, today they put up a logo celebrating the birthday of Vincent van Gogh. What's next, a new logo every day???

Ad Blocking Issue Heating up at Commission Junction

In the latest release of Norton Internet Security, Norton enabled a feature called Ad Blocking which will attempt to strip out advertising from the web pages you are viewing. When Commission Junction realized that their domains were on the list of blocked ads, they quickly moved to add new domain names and encryption options to their merchant’s advertising urls. A series of emails, see below, indicate that the issue may be heating up and causing some friction between Commission Junction and their Merchants.

Email from Merchant:

You’re loosing commissions!

Hello All,

You're losing commissions due to Norton Antivirus blocking your cj.com links. I've noticed many of your tracking URL's you have for us begin with qksrv.net. These are being blocked. I'm positive though that if you switch this url to one that is not on the banned list, you'll immediately see your efforts payoff and commissions triple. You can ask cj.com for a new url which is not being blocked yet they call it reintergration. They are trying to stay ahead of Norto*n by switching urls, but it maybe a temporary fix until that url is add to nortons list.
These are some articles to help you get a better understanding.
http://www.keywebdata.com/articles.aspx?article=10.
http://www.stevedawson.com/article0001.php
http://accs-net.com/hosts/what_is_hosts.html

Regards,
Richard Chu
Online Marketing Manager
NGC Worldwide Inc.
rchu@ngcworldwide.com
617-848-4257 Office
646-270-7883 Cell

P.S. we are also on networks that are not currently being blocked and you can just replace cj's urls to the network of your choice. I can not spell these out because cj will filter this email so ignore the * s*hare*asal*e.com, cli*xgal*ore.com, and lin*kcon*nect*or.com all free to setup. Rather than fixing cj.com we would love to have your join us on one of these other networks.
The golf season is here. Being the number 1 performing sports site for cj.com last year, we'd like you make some money with us. We have proved copy that sells. Attached are new banners you may use.

Email from Commission Junction

Clarification of Ad-blocking Issue

Dear Affiliate,
You may have recently received an email message from one of our advertisers, NGC Worldwide, describing their view of ad-blocking effects on Commission Junction's ad-serving functionality. Because we value you as a client and your confidence in the reliability of our technology is essential, we'd like to more completely and accurately address how we've handled the ad-blocking issue.

As online marketers we are, of course, aware of the rise in use of software that blocks ads on an end-user's desktop. The affect of ad-blocking software can range from relatively non-invasive pop-up blocking to interference with general Web site viewing regardless of the presence of advertisements; these effects are often unwanted and unintended by the end-user. Ad-blocking software uses a variety of methods to accomplish its goal, and often aggressively blocks a large list of domain names including Commission Junction's "qksrv.net," "service.bfast.com", and ValueClick's "valueclick.com". Although Commission Junction has attempted to work cooperatively with ad-blocking software companies to approach controls more rationally, progress has been slow.

In response to the situation, last August Commission Junction released changes to our tracking technology in the CJ Marketplace, which allow advertisements to be served from new, unblocked domains and allow for encryption of some information in the link itself. To take advantage of this technology, publishers must renew any links which had been associated with qksrv.net. Our BFAST® also includes new technology to serve links from unblocked domains. These solutions have proven to be effective in combating the more onerous ad-blocking technologies.

If you need information about how to renew or use encrypted links, please search for "Get HTML For Links" in the Help section of the CJ Account Manager™. If you have any further questions, please access the "Ask a Question" feature in your CJ Account Manager or "Get Help" in the BFAST Partner Gateway.

Please accept our apologies for any confusion resulting from NGC Worldwide's email. And we wish you much success in your online performance marketing program with Commission Junction.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Cholawsky
Vice President, Marketing and Product Development
Commission Junction, a ValueClick company

CGI Holding (soon to be called Think Partnership Inc.) has Acquired Kowabunga Software, one of the leading providers of affiliate management tools for companies looking to run their own affiliate programs.

Think Partnership also owns the following companies:

WebSourced, Inc.

MarketSmart Advertising, Inc.

Rightstuff, Inc. d/b/a Bright Idea Studios

Checkup Marketing, Inc.

Cherish, Inc.

Ozona Online Network, Inc.

Think Partnership has also entered into an agreement to merge with privately-held Meandaur, Inc. d/b/a Proceed Interactive, a full service marketing and communications agency with a core competency in search marketing, which has offices in Chicago, Ill., Dallas, Texas and Los Angeles, Calif.

Finally, Think Partnership has signed a letter of intent to acquire PrimaryAds Inc., a leading provider of affiliate marketing services that connects website publishers with online advertisers (see www.PrimaryAds.com).

This could be the beginnings of a new competitive threat to Commission Junction, Linkshare, and Performics.

Happy Saint Patricks Day. Enjoy these cool Google logos...

Here are some more links to current articles on MSN AdCenter:

ZDNet.com's article: MSN vs Google and Yahoo, Round 3

USAToday: MSN to offer search ads through AdCenter

RedHerring: Microsof takes on Google

Reuters: Microsoft to roll out own search advertising service

Welcome to the Mi in Goyami. Microsoft is on the move.

I just wanted to take a quick moment again to thank everyone who keeps coming back and reading our blog. Goyami continues to see tremendous month over month growth. As you can see by the chart below we had approximately 3,200 visits to our site last month and are on track to do over 6,000 visits this month. So either we have a few very avid readers who are visiting Goyami hundreds of times a day or our thoughts are starting to reach a large audience.

Thanks for your support!

Adam & Todd
Goyami’s Editors

Over the past few weeks I have spent some time talking to some affiliate managers and reading some recent articles which lead me to believe that there is a lack understanding of perspectives between affiliate managers and search arbitrage affiliates, those affiliates that buy pay-per-click advertising and link directly to the merchant's site via their paid search ads.

First, I got dragged into a rather lengthy online discussion with Jeff Molander on his comments regarding my "Top 10 Ways to Repel Super Affiliates from your Program" post. We clearly have two very different perspectives and I believe our online comments back and forth helped us both learn and appreciate the other's point of view.

Second, I met with Beth Kirsch director of online marketing for Audible, columnist for Revenews, and co-teacher at Affiliate Boot camp. Beth and I had a nice chat in New York where I was attending the Search Engine Strategies conference. Beth had recently hired the former affiliate manager of Blue Fly, Jen Weiss, to be the new affiliate manager after Audible gave Beth a well deserved promotion. Jen had indicated to Beth that I used to market for Bluefly and stopped when she asked me not to bid on their trademark term.

Jen mentioned that bidding on the trademark term was "easy money if you can get it." So I decided to do some research on my old Bluefly ads. After about a year of trying to market Bluefly, I had spent $3,985 in ads utilizing well over 20,000 keyword phrases. I had exactly 9 clicks on the Bluefly trademark term, non of which converted into sales. From my marketing efforts Bluefly made $63,631.93 in sales and after backing out an incredibly high 30.67% return rate, I earned a total of $3,990.94 in commissions. This was probably the hardest $5.94 I have ever made in my life. Easy money? No. A lack of two way communications and mutual understanding of each other's perspectives? Absolutely! I don't blame Jen, clearly I am equally or more to blame for not clearly reading their guidelines for trademark bidding and for spending so much time on one program without trying to communicate with the affiliate manager.

Finally, I was reading Mary Wagner's Top Spot Column in Internet Retailer Magazine today where she talks about how marketers are wrestling over trademark use under Google's new ad policy. What stuck out to me was the quote from LinkShare's CEO, Stephen Messer:

"LinkShare doesn't encourage participation from Search Arbitrage affiliates... Our entire message to our partners has been, they have to add value, so they, (the search arbitragers), probably weren't working with us."

The obvious message being that Stephen Messer thinks that search arbitrage affiliates that buy ads and link directly to the merchant's site via affiliate links don't add value.

To be honest I am disappointed by his comments. Being a search arbitrage affiliate isn't as easy as some might think. There seems to be this perception that all that a search arbitrage affiliate does is bid on a company's trademark and make "easy money". This is far from the truth.

Perhaps we all need to spend some more time communicating with each other and sharing our different perspectives, it's the only way that a true partnership can arise and the truly valuable long term win-win relationships can be created.

In a world of instant gratification, Overture has announced that 80% of new paid ad listings should be online within an hour, while the remaining 20% shouldn't take longer than 2 days.

"We previously promised a three-to-five-day turnaround on new listing submissions, and we recognized that that was unacceptable," says Lisa Morita.

Wow, amazing...

I attended a session today about Search Behavior where Inquiro, and Peformics presented their latest studies on how people are using the search engines and their affect on site traffic and customer buying behavior. (Keynote also presented a study, but I found very little of it to be relevant). Here are some of the very interesting takeaways:

Inquiro’s Study

• Contrary to their prior beliefs about the importance of titles and descriptions, Inqurio’s study found that the only statistical relevant predictor of driving traffic volume from Google searches is your rank and page position.
  
• Inquiro’s study employed some very interesting eye tracking technology from eyetools which let them see exactly where people were looking on the page, for how long, and where there eyes went next. From this they have defined what they call “Searches Golden Triangle”. This is the top left portion of the screen where customers quickly scan from the top down for relevant information, if their eye catches something relevant they will quickly scan to the right to verify. From a paid search perspective on Google, it highlights that the most important spots would be Google’s two top sponsored link’s that appear above the searches as opposed to the ones that show up on the right hand side. I will try and get a copy of their slide that shows this but in ascii characters it would like something like this:

  XXXXXXXXX
  XXXXXX
  XXXX
  XX
  X

• Inquiro’s study further showed that if searches didn’t find what they wanted in their first “F Scan” at the top of the page, 60% would scroll down and repeat in the organic searches, while 40% would start a vertical scan from the top of the sponsored links on the right hand side. Eye tracking tools showed that only the top 1-3 ads were relevant, with 50% going to the top, 30% to number two, and then quickly dropping down to less than 10% seeing the bottom 3 ads on a page.
  

Performics’ Study

• Performics’ study took a look at 30 e-commerce sites and then looked at cScoreData for people who purchased from those sites and relevant keyword searches they had done leading up to the initial purchase. They found that 50% of all buyers made a relevant search before their online purchase.
  
• There was an average of 4-5 searches prior to purchases.
  
• Their research showed that most searches started off as searches on generic terms, and most buyers never searched on a brand term.
  
• When buyers who searched on branded terms tended to search on these terms later in the purchase cycle, just prior to making an online purchase, which may be why some ROI tools show branded terms converting at higher rates than generic terms. A special note, that many of these buyers were introduced and “pre-sold” on a specific brand from the prior generic searches they had performed.
  
• 55% of buyers did their last relevant search more than 2 weeks before the purchase.
  

This was a very interesting session, and I had a few takeaways from this that I think are extremely relevant to companies doing paid search and search engine affiliate marketers:

1. For companies paying for their own search campaigns, it is important to take a full view of your ROI. If you are only looking at short term click conversions that you may be quickly out spent by competitors who are able to see long term click trends and conversions and offline buying behavior driven from search.
   
2. Affiliate marketers should review the cookie periods that their merchants are providing. Anything less than 30 days means that you are probably directly driving sales that you should be getting credit for.
   
3. Affiliate marketers may also want to stay away from companies that are only willing to let you bid on generic terms, because these generic terms may be driving a significant number of “pre-sales” behavior that is then turning into branded searches just prior to the customer making the online purchase. If the merchant is reserving these high conversion ads only for themselves, and overwriting affiliate cookies when customers click on their own paid search terms, then they may be taking credit for the sales you are playing a large role in generating for them.
   
4. Finally, with the relationship between generic searches early and branded searches later in the process, are your ROI tracking tools only looking at the last click, or can they show the full cycle of clicks?
   

   It’s all rather thought provoking and is worth thinking about and spurring further discussions.

   Adam
   

Today marks the kick off of Jupiter’s Search Engine Strategies Convention in New York City. I will be on site and hope to post updates and interesting information that I take away from the sessions and events that I attend.

This morning I attended a session on the search engine landscape with presentations from comScore, Hitwise, and Neilson NetRatings. All presenters spoke quickly about their user tracking methodologies and then went into current findings. Here are some quick takeaways:

• Google still leads with approx 50% market share
• MSN is gaining on Yahoo for the second place spot and the industry is watching closely to see what Microsoft will do with their desktop position and large marketing muscle.
• Google is very dominant in European markets.
• Companies need to take a broad ROI prospective to measure the true value of their search engine marketing efforts. These tracking companies are showing that conversions can take place 30-90 days out and even longer. Additionally, companies must find ways to measure how search effects offline transactions to gain a full picture. ComScore noticed that in the electronics space, as much as 90% of conversions actually occur offline.

The next few days should be interesting with all the sessions and impending snow storm in New York.

Adam

I recently prepared a presentation for EcomXpo, and thought that Goyami readers might be interested in reading the script. The goal of the presentation was to give a PPC Super Affiliate perspective on what affiliate managers can do to drive us away from their program.

If you would like to see the slides you may Download the Presentation.

The Top 10 Ways to Repel Super Affiliates from your Program

Introduction:
Welcome to “The Top 10 Ways to Repel Super Affiliates from your Program”, my name is Adam Viener and I am the president of imwave and an editor of Goyami. My company, imwave, is focused on using search engine marketing to drive sales and leads to our partner’s websites, we do this for our partners and clients on both a pay-for-performance and consulting basis. Goyami is a search and affiliate marketing blog that I founded and is part of the target="_blank">Corante technology and business intelligence news network.

Super affiliates come in many flavors, so before we get into the Top 10 ways to repel super affiliates, I want to define the specific type of super affiliate I am talking about. More and more of company’s top affiliates are those that successfully leverage pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to your company’s programs. These pay-per-click search affiliates, also known as search arbitragers, risk their own money every day to buy pay-per-click advertising betting that the companies they have partnered with can convert that traffic into commissionable events on their site which will earn them more than the cost of their ads. These super affiliates spend a lot of time building keyword lists and often send traffic from their search engine ads directly to the merchant’s site without ever landing on a site of their own. Some of these affiliates do this on a part-time basis and continue to keep their “day jobs”, and they often test a lot of company’s programs across many industries to see which ones will convert the best.

As I prepare this presentation, Google has just recently announced their new affiliate policy of only allowing one ad per url in their searches. Undoubtedly, these super affiliates, like myself, are working hard to adjust their efforts to work within these new rules. So without further a-doo, let’s get into the top 10 ways to repel these super affiliates from your program.

Number 10: Poor or Missed Communications

I hear affiliate managers struggling with this question all the time, how should the communicate with their top affiliates? Should they call their top affiliates on the phone or wait for them to call? Well, some affiliates have full-time jobs, and may not be able to talk on the phone. Before I started focusing on this full-time, I sat in a cube-farm with my boss in the next cube. Talking on the phone wasn’t an easy option for me during the day. What about email?

Since affiliates may join hundreds of programs, they get a lot of newsletters. I had to setup a separate email box just for the newsletters which I hardly ever read. Right now, I have over 2 thousand un-read messages in that mailbox for only 3 months worth of messages. I have filters setup to highlight messages that come into that box that I might not want to miss. The partners that I communicate with via email have learned that adam@imwave.com is my 2-way communication email box, and partners@imwave.com (the one I have registered with) is not. For me, AOL instant messenger is my preferred form of communications, it let’s me contact partners when I need them, and allows partners to contact me when they need me.

Finally, I get very few postal mail communications from merchants. This is probably the best way to reach potential affiliates who are either not in your program or who have joined and are not active yet. A quick welcome to the program postcard might go a long way. Ebay sent out a flyer about how one of their affiliates earned over 1 million in one month, and that sparked my interest in their program, now I am one of their top affiliates. Sad to say, I have not yet earned a million in 1 month. The bottom line here, is that there is no 1 best way to communicate with your top partners, you need to learn what their favored form of communication is and adapt.

Number 9: Dropping inactive affiliates

How often do you non-active affiliates from your list? Some affiliates will sign up for all the programs in a specific network so that when they are ready to run a test they will already be a member. Does purging affiliates really save that much time in reporting and communicating? An affiliate who took the time to sign-up for your program could have great potential, affiliates belong to far more programs than they market today, please don’t purge us. If you must purge your list, be sure not to do it before your busy season, I had one costume site purge me right before Halloween.

Number 8: Providing Lots of Coupon Codes

How often do you send out coupon codes to your affiliates? Are these codes ones that customers must enter during the checkout process? If a search arbitrager is linking to your site directly from a Google ad, there is very little chance the affiliate has room to communicate the code, and even less chance that if they did the customer would remember to type it in. Coupons may be a great way to drive sales on your site though, so how can they work for arbitragers?

A better option would be to provide a landing page that sells the customer and promotes the coupon code, the best option would be to embed the code in the link, so that the customer’s don’t have to do anything but click on the ad and the offer detailed on the landing page, and is automatically included when they check out. It is important to mention the offer on the landing page, Google requires that any offer referenced in the ad must be available within 1 click on the landing page, otherwise the ads will be disabled.

Number 7: Asking Affiliates to Change Links or Ad Copy

How often do affiliates have to change their Ads for your program? If you make a change that breaks old links, typical website affiliates might just have a broken link on their site, but pay-per-click affiliates may be paying to drive traffic to error pages which will cost them money with each click to an error page.

Google determines the ranking of an ad based on the amount the affiliate is willing to pay per click as well as the click through rate of the ad for that specific keyword term. As ads are run over time, they build up position for important keywords, and if the ads are modified in any way, Google considers these ads new, and affiliates may have to pay more to maintain their ranking or risk driving less traffic and generating less sales. Always do what you can to make asking affiliates to change their ads, the last resort.

Number 6: Not Understanding the Metrics

Understanding your affiliates financial model is critical to the success of any program. How do you determine how much you are going to pay affiliates? You need to know their metrics before you should answer this question.

Pay-Per-Click Search affiliate pay for every click and often lose money. That is important, so let me repeat it. THEY OFTEN LOSE MONEY. These affiliates will often test a lot of programs to see which ones will have the best return per click. There are typically 3 possible outcomes of a test:

1. The ads lose money, and the test and relationship is over (note, they don’t usually tell you it’s over, they just pause their ads and move on to the next test)


2. The ads generate a small return per click. These may remain as ongoing tests until they start losing money.


3. The ads generate a good return per click, these are the companies that the affiliates fully engage and do additional keyword research, build out sites, or otherwise grow their revenue stream.

There are really 3 key variables that determine the revenue per click, two of which are more controlled by the merchant and one in direct control of the affiliate. The merchant controls the amount of commission they are willing to pay and what the customer’s experience when they reach the merchant’s site, which results in a conversion rate of the traffic that the affiliate sends. Affiliates control how much they are willing to pay per click. The amount that the affiliate makes per click is equal to the commission rate times the conversion rate percentage, less the cost per click. Let’s look at an example

Let’s assume the merchant pays a hefty 25% of sales (I have seen this rate marketed in Revenue Magazine by companies looking for new affiliates). Also let’s say the merchant’s average order size is $100. This means that if the customer buys they affiliate can expect to make roughly $25 per transaction.

The merchant’s site isn’t great, and they are only converting about 1% of visitors to sales, but the category is fairly popular and the affiliate feels they need to bid 35 cents per click to generate traffic on their keywords. When you multiply the $25 by the 1% conversion rate, you can see that the affiliate is making only 25 cents per click, so they can expect to lose 10 cents on every click. Nice rate, but bad return.

This merchant either needs to drastically improve their conversion rates or pay a lot more in commissions to make the relationship work. Merchants must do the math, and understand these metrics to make sure affiliates have room to bid and be profitable.

Number 5: Running Pop-up Ads

Pop-up ads can be an effective way for merchants to drive more sales and promote new features to their customers, but can have a drastic affect on your pay-per-click search affiliates. If the landing pages you allow your affiliates to link to have pop-ups your affiliates paid ads are going to get disabled.

Pop-ups include any additional browser window that opens when the customer enters or exits the landing page. Pop-ups are often implemented to promote customer surveys and seasonal promotions. If you feel must use a pop-up to promote your business please consider landing pages without pop-ups for search affiliates. Make sure these are clearly labeled and that you communicate well that they are available, because a search affiliate might just check the first ad to see if there is a pop-up, and if there is they might move on and never return.

Consider providing a parameter that affiliates can pass in the affiliate link to your site that disables the pop-up ad. Finally, you might be able to accomplish the same result using DHTML overlays on your site instead of pop-ups, this would allow messages to appear on top of your page without triggering pop-up blockers or getting your affiliates ads disabled.

Number 4: Difficult Display url Policy

Some merchants allow affiliates to link directly to their site via affiliate links, but have a policy of not allowing affiliates to use their domain name in the display url of their ads. This can confuse customers because they see one URL in the ad, but end up somewhere else. This policy often is a pre-courser for not allowing affiliates to link directly to the merchant’s site and forcing them to build their own site to market the company or abandon the company’s program all together. Finally, Google has a policy that display urls must match the landing page url, so this policy often forces pay-per-click search affiliates to market for your competition.

Number 3: Trademark Bidding Policy

Some merchants do not allow affiliates to bid on the companies name. I have found that bidding on a companies name and variations of their name often provide me a good indication of how well the site can convert traffic. If the site can’t sell people who are typing their name into a search engine, than they won’t convert any of the other more generic keyword traffic I could send them.

As you saw in the metrics, promoting a site with a poor conversion rate can cost an affiliate a lot of money. Additionally, many merchants have used affiliates bidding on their trademarks as a way to block competitors ads on those marks from appearing on the first screen.

With the Geico decision and Google’s new single ad per url policy in place, it will be harder and harder for companies to keep competitors from bidding on their names. Working with top affiliates creatively here could be very important.

Finally, if you must have a no trademark bidding policy, be specific and give affiliates a specific list of terms that they are not allowed to bid on. Also, when you make this list be smart and don’t include generic terms, even if they are part of your name, because you can bet your competitor’s and their affiliates will be bidding on those generic terms.

Number 2: Indirect Trademark Bidding Policy

Some merchants have adopted a policy of not only preventing affiliates from bidding on their trademarks directly, but preventing them from accidentally showing up under these terms indirectly. An example of this would be if you were one of the top flower companies on the Internet, and your affiliates might not be able to bid on the term flowers because the search engines might match the term flowers with keyword searches for your brand name, pro flowers, 1-800-flowers, or flowers direct.

The only way an affiliate could bid on these terms would be to implement a specific list of negative terms that their ads are not allowed to show for. If you adopt this type of policy, and your competitors don’t, their affiliate’s ads will show up on your terms even though they are not bidding on them directly.

And the Number 1 Way to Repel Super Affiliates from your Program?

Number 1: Not Understanding the Technology

Remember your policies have to work with the current technology, and some policies can have un-foreseen consequences. For example:

I have recently seen more and more default trademark policy language on Commission Junction’s merchants preventing direct and indirect bidding on companies marks and misspelled variations. The technological consequence of this is that pay-per-click affiliates who decide to participate in the program can not bid on any term using broad or phrased match, because it is impossible for them to ad negative terms for every misspelled possibility, especially when Overture only allows 15 negative terms.

The technical result of not allowing affiliates to use the company domain in their display url is disabled ads or poor user experience.

The technical result of putting pop-up ads on your site, is disabling existing pay-per-click affiliates ads and new affiliates never running tests to see if they want to market your program.

The technical result of asking affiliates to change their ads is affiliates losing rankings in their ads, higher costs for your affiliates and reduced results in your program.

Finally, the result of not understanding the technology, is more affiliates marketing for your competition who do understand the technology.

Conclusion:
Thank you for listening to, I mean reading, my presentation. At the end of the day, affiliates and merchants are both looking for the same thing, to create win-win relationships where both the merchant and the affiliate can make money and enjoy working with each other. That’s the only way this works.

Please feel free to IM (AdamViener) me or email me if you have any questions, I look forward to hearing from you.

Misspelled and Expired Domain names that get a lot of traffic are becoming hot commodities. As evidenced by two recent transactions.

First, Marchex has agreed to pay 164.2 Million for Name Development Ltd., which displays keyword advertising across a portfolio of more than 100,000 domains. With domains like careerinfo.com, debts.com, and hardware-update.com.

Name Development Ltd business model has been to buy expiring domains with existing traffic and point them to a parked page provider, like Domainhop and TrafficZ, who are willing to setup a site and pay them on a per-click basis. Companies like Name Development Ltd, use tools such as Popusearch and Mozzle to identify which of the expiring domains have a lot in sites linking to them.

Second, the misspelled domain voyuer.com was auctioned off for $112,100 at Snapnames during it's expiration period. The prior owner of Voyuer.com failed to renew the domain name from Network Solutions for $35, and Network Solutions sent the domain into the snapnames auction service to auction it off during the "grace period", the short amount of time after the customer's expiration date but before it was officially dropped by the Registry. In this process, SnapNames, Network Solutions, and the prior owner of the domain, share in the sales proceeds, with 15-20% of Network Solutions' unspecified portion of the sale going to the original registrant. So assuming that Snapnames shares 50%, the original registrant's percentage could be as high as 10% of the overall transaction, or $11,210 for the domain they didn't think was worth the $35 renewal fee. Not bad, but it might hurt a little knowing they could have sold it for the full $112,100. Of course, Network Solutions prominently spells this all out in schedule A section 14 service agreement that is subject to constant change and takes affect 30 days after posting the change to their site.

As more and more companies find ways to monetize "surfing traffic", expired domain names could be worth more and more. Additionally, creative affiliates should continue to explore possible domains with traffic that might drive sales to your merchant partners.

You can bid up a keyword term all day long, and Google makes more and more money, but a domain name that you purchase can be a long term asset for your company.

eComXpo is set to kick off tomorrow, and I had a chance to take a sneak preview today. This online tradeshow promises to be a lively event full of tradeshow booths, presentations, prize giveaways, and virtual networking chat rooms. This is the first year that this has been tried, and it looks like it will be a huge success.

With hundreds of merchants and thousands of affiliates participating, it's bound to be interesting.

Here is a quick screen shot of the main tradeshow exhibit hall:

The Goyami staff would like to wish everyone a very Happy Valentines Day!

In Goyami tradition, we have dug up some of the past Google Valentines day logos:

Tracking keyword trends with tools such as Wordtracker can be interesting. Yesterday I noticed that the top word being searched for was Wisconsin Quarter. A quick search on Google showed that an NPR article indicated that there was a misprint on some Wisconsin Quarters making an undetermined number of them worth up to $500. That's a great return on investment for a quarter.

This should turn into a hot news topic as well as a hot auction item, perfect for online auctions.

It has been almost a month since Google new affiliate marketing policy went into place, and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how some of the merchants have been reacting.

I have seen affiliate managers taking some proactive steps to help their programs continue to thrive. Here are some examples of what I am seeing out there:

Merchant Provided Landing Pages
Many programs are starting to build landing pages for their top affiliate managers, so that their affiliates can host co-branded or private label pages that promote their company's products. Here are some examples of Landing Pages I have seen:

LendingTree (landing page)

eHealthInsurance (co-branded landing page)

LowerMyBills (available in CJ interface)

X10 Security Cameras (private label)

Monster Web Templates (private label with their own site builder tool)

HomeGain Local Real Estate Agent Finder (private label)

Proflowers (available in befree interface)

Affiliate Created Landing Pages
Affiliates have also been proactive in creating landing pages that market multiple companies. Here are some examples of some of the pages I have done, as well as others I have seen:

For-Sale-Now.com - Dynamic Comparison Shopping Site

WineByPost.co.uk - UK Wine Delivery Site

Carfax.Car-History-Reports.com - Carfax History Reports landing page

Loan-Center.us - Top 10 Internet Loan Sites for online Lending and Mortgages

CallAlertReviews.com - Call Alert Reviews and Comparisons

Go-Anywhere-PC-Access.com - GotoMyPC Promotion

Play-Real-Music-Online.com - Real Rhapsody promotion site

Great-ISP-Deals.com - Discount ISP deals and comparison site

AskTheTireGuy.com - TireRack Discount Tires promotion site

Oriental-Rug-Discounts - Rugman Oriental Rug Promotions.

HR Block Taxes landing page.

DealForTravel.com Travel Promotion Site.

Time Sensitive Sites
I have also seen affiliates creating specific sites to market specific holidays or time of year promotions:

Flowers-For-Valentines-Day.com Valentines Day promotions and deals.

Save-on-Christmas-Gifts.com - Christmas Gifts Site

Xmas-Deals.com - Christmas Deals and Promotions

Hallowen-Costume-Sale.com - Halloween Costume Site

HR Block Taxes landing page.

It is great to see affiliates and merchants working together to overcome the current Google policy change.

I am sure I have missed a lot of good examples, please feel free to add a comment to this post and tell us about the other sites you have seen or have created.

The Parisian District Court has ruled against Google, saying that Google's allowing competitors to run ads triggered by Louis Vuitton's trademark terms was counterfeiting, unfair competition and misleading advertising. The court has ordered Google to pay Louis Vuitton $250,000 and stop displaying ads for Vuitton's competitors whenever users type in the company's name into the search engine.

Google said it was still considering whether or not to appeal the ruling. "We're studying the ruling," said Google spokesperson Myriam Boublil. "No decision's been taken yet on an appeal." Only a month ago, Google lost a similar case with Le Meridian Hotels, in which the search engine firm was fined $2,550 and ordered to pay costs.

Managing different trademark policies in different countries could prove difficult for Google, and we may see this trigger harder positions on trademark bidding in the US in the near future.

Paul Kedrosky hypothesizes that there could be a financial model built around the trend in category keyword prices and the stock market segment.

Interestingly enough, I have had several calls from investment firms and hedge funds over the past few weeks trying to understand the changing policies of Google and how they might affect companies future revenues and thus stock prices.

I agree with Paul, that watching the trends in keyword prices could be a valuable predictor of future stock prices, I would also suggest that as an affiliate marketer that markets across multiple categories, that we may be in a position to understand customer buying behavior and sales conversion trends better than most.

For example, British Airways has had a run up on their stock of 15% since December, but this month their conversion rates tanked on the traffic I had been sending them and I lost quite a bit of money. Could that be a predictor that British Airways is going to have a stock slide?

Prices in keywords could be a good predictor, but tracking the trends in site conversion rates could be even better.

Microsoft has recently launched their new search engine and already pundits are questioning the amount of advertising for each search.

The bulk of the latest release revolves around Microsoft using it's own spider to identify relevant organic search results, brining MSN Search one step closer to owning 100% of their product.

On the paid search side, they are still running the bulk of their pay-per-click ads through Overture. Recently they extended their deal with overture until June of 2006.

Besides using Overture's paid search, MSN also offers up to 3 available spots on any search for featured sites willing to pay a minimum of $75,000 per year.

When you look at these moves and Microsoft's recent aggressive use of head hunters to build up their own internal search department, it clearly spells that Microsoft is targeting their full force behind search.

I think we will quickly see search being an embedded feature of the next operating system and quickly Microsoft will replay the browser wars on the search space.

Authoritative rumors have it that Google turned down a Microsoft buy-out proposal prior to the Google IPO. It will be interesting to watch how the search war plays out and if Google can do better than Netscape did in the Browser war.

Recent reports indicate that unscrupulous folks in Cyberspace may be using the Google AdWords "feature" of disabling keywords that don't get clicked to their own advantage. By running programs that do a lot of searches on a specific term, they can get their competitor's ads disabled, and allow them to gain top ad positions and lower rates.

This will be an interesting development to watch.

Google has been on the move recently, a 7 Fold rise in net profit surprised Wall Street sending the stock up 14 points today.

A little more quietly, Google has become an ICANN registered registrar which will allow them to start selling domain names. There is a lot of speculation about what they will do with this status. The most obvious fit would be to offer cheap domain names as an up sell to their blogger and gmail services. Some have speculated that this could be a move towards the hosting market.

Finally, Google has announced a new beta API interface to their Adwords product that will enable creative programmers to provide add on services and let savvy marketers gain better control over their Adwords advertising. It will be fun to watch as new 3rd party services hit the market.

According to an Internet Retailer article, as recent Nielsen/NetRatings report indicate that broadband users make significantly more online purchases than their narrowband counterparts, and spend more money online.

This bodes well for Internet marketers as more and more people buy cable modems and make the switch to broadband.

Yesterday Google and Yahoo each launched Video search. They both take a very different approach. Google's Video Search at video.google.com indexes the closed captioning text of programs they have been archiving since December. Yahoo's video search at video.yahoo.com actually searches for video content that you can display on your PC. but uses the names of the videos rather than the content as the key.

Both are in Beta. It's cool to find videos, and neat to see what was said on TV programs, but it would also be nice to find the programs and play the segment online that referenced the searched terms. It will be interesting to watch where this goes.

As of yet, neither appears to offer sponsorship listings based on the terms searched, but that can't be far away.

After a big win for Google on the trademark bidding issue in the US, the France courts have dealt them a blow over seas. A French court has ruled that Google must refrain from using the trademarks of European resort chain Le Meridian Hotels and Resorts to trigger keyword ads.

Google said it would appeal the decision saying it is without merit, but the court gave Google little time to comply.

It will be an ongoing challenge for Google to maintain different policies in different regions. If they keep getting hit overseas, they might need to rethink their policy on a global level for consistency.

Here are some answers to some frequently asked questions that Google has been receiving regarding their new affiliate policy. Interesting to note how they are now refering to the process of which ads to display as the "affiliate auction".

Goyami: If I have 2 ads in my account: 1 that has the visible URL eBay.com and one with my own domain in the visible URL, what ad will show?

Google: We will continue to pull ads from your account like we always have. This means we pull the Ad Group with the highest Ad Rank. Then we pull one creative from this Ad Group based on your campaign settings -- either we rotate evenly through the ads or we pull the one picked by the auto optimization feature. The one selected creative is then sent to the auction. If it loses the affiliate auction, we do not look for an alternate ad that is not subject to the new affiliate policy.

Goyami: How is my CPC set? Is it based on competing affiliates, even when they are not shown?

Google: The CPC that you pay for the ad click is based only on other ads that are shown. Your bid is not set based on lower ranked affiliate ads.

Goyami: How will my CTR ever have a chance to improve after the change takes place and my ad never gets shown anymore?

Google: Your ad may still show if competing affiliate-advertisers reach their daily budgets. Your ad may also be shown for certain variations of your broad keywords where your ad has traditionally performed better than others. As a last resort, you can increase your maximum CPC to improve its chances of showing.

Do you have any other questions for Google, send them my way and I will pass them on.

Adam

Goyami: “When will this actually take affect? I have heard 1/13, is that correct?”

Google: “This policy change will take effect over the next week or two. As with any large policy change, the roll-out must incorporate many aspects of our business, so time is needed to ensure that everything is set. I'm glad that you received some advance notice to allow you to make any necessary edits to your accounts.”

Goyami: "It says "we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL" Does this mean that there will be two allowed ads, 1 for parent AND one for affiliate, or just 1 total?

Google: “We now only display one ad in total for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL.”

Goyami: “Is this per page, so that if there are 2 affiliates 1 would show on page 1 and the other on page 2, or does the lower one just lose out all together? “

Google: “This is per search query, not per page.”

Goyami: “Are there any more details you can share? What are your thoughts on how to keep spending the same amount or more with Google under this new policy change?

Google: “At this time, I do not have any more information. What's important to keep in mind is that Google looks at two factors to decide which ad to show, CTR and MaxCPC. By improving the quality of your ad and/or raising your MaxCPC, you can increase the chances of your ad showing for any particular query.”

Goyami: “What if you have multiple ads in your ad group, and one is your old affiliate ad, and one is a new site that you create. Will adwords automatically pick the one with its own site when there is a duplicate higher ranked advertiser for the old affiliate ad?”

Google: At this time, we are still exploring how the system may react to this type of situation.

Unfortunately with Google's fairly vague announcement, the net is abuzz about what unique url means. I have emailed some questions to my Google rep, but until I get specific answers, it looks like we are back to rumor land. Here is what I have heard:

Single URL?
I have heard that Google will actually be looking at the final domain where the customer lands, including all re-directions and frames. They specifically pointed out that framed urls won't work. I have also heard that XXX.domain.com and www.domain.com will be considered the same url.

How Many Ads?
The announcement from Google was vague on if it was going to show 1 ad or the merchant's ad AND an Affiliate ad. I have heard 1 ad, period.

Per Page?
People have asked if this is one unique url per results page or for all results, I hope that it would be per results page, but at this point I don't have any confirmation.

Matching URLs?
A small "by the way" comment in their announcement reads: "Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page". Some have speculated that this could mean the display url has to match your link url, which would in affect ban search arbitrage all together since affiliates have to link through redirecting urls. I think however, this mealy means the finally destination where the user ends up has to match the display url.

Start Date? Google's announcement didn't commit to an implementation date, saying only sometime in January. Google has told their larger merchants that this will take affect on the January 12th.

Drop the Aff?
Google has also announced with this change that affiliates will no longer need to designate themselves as affiliates in their ads. I am not sure why they would make this move, seem counter productive to the user experience. Perhaps their research showed that nobody knew what aff meant anyway. It could be a sly attempt to get affiliates to modify their ads, thereby costing them their built up CTR rates and advantaging the original owner's sites who don't modify their ads.

Sounds like an opportunity for the super affiliates to re-define themselves. If I am no longer an AFF, what am I? Guess I would rather be a wise-aff than a dumb-aff, only time will tell...

ClizkZ's article on the subject has an interesting quote from Salar Kamanger, director of product management at Google. She says, "The new policy, which will be implemented over the coming weeks, is intended to create a cleaner interface for users, increase the diversity of merchants represented in the links, and reduce duplicate ads, all while recognizing the important benefits affiliate marketers bring to the table"

What are you thoughts? Do you think affiliates feel “important” to Google? Have you heard anything different?

Here is the information from Google Adwords:

Google AdWords™ Announcement:

Affiliate Policy Change

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.

---

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization Tips page for more information.

By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have a better search experience, which will help you reach more potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user experience and help increase the performance of your ads.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

Multiple sources outside of Google have confirmed that the company plans to announce a new policy today that will limit the number of sponsored listings that resolve to the same site per page of search engine results. Google plans to announce their new policy today and it will take effect on January 12th, 2005.

This new policy is an effort by Google to improve the customer experience by displaying more choices to the customer when they conduct any given search.

This new policy should have a large impact on merchant companies who have been relying on a large base of paid search engine marketers to drive traffic to their sites, including sites like eBay, Amazon, Overstock, and BizRate. Also affected are merchant companies that have relied on affiliates to help protect their brand names by having affiliates bid on these terms so that competitors won't be displayed when their brand is searched for on Google.

Of course the paid search affiliate marketer who relies solely on directing traffic directly through affiliate links to their merchant partners will also be greatly affected by this change. All indications are that Google will look at the final destination domain and or IP address to determine duplication of ads, so simple redirects will no longer work. These affiliate marketers will need to build out more individual content sites to survive.

Ironically, this move by Google will force these affiliates, myself included, to take steps that have prevented them from marketing on Overture's service, Google's main competitor.

Google's new policy could deal a major blow to the affiliate marketing community.

Has Google gone back on their policy to do no Evil?

A recent study of the consumer electronics business from comScore reveals some interesting facts about online purchase behavior.

One fact I found most interesting is that only 15% of the searches in their study resulted in online purchases following a search session, 85% occurred in a subsequent browser session, and nearly 40% of all purchases occurred 5 to 12 weeks after the initial search session.

Additionally, they found that an estimated 92% of the purchases were made offline.

I encourage you to read the full press release for more facts and details.

This brings into question two important questions for merchants. 1. What is your cookie duration and how was the duration determined? and 2. Do you track offline sales?

Merchants with very short or no cookie durations and no offline sales tracking are taking more than their fair share of affiliate generated sales.

May your 2005 be happy, safe, and profitable!

Google New Years Logos:

Y2k image lost in the "bug"...

Google has recently released its 2004 popular keyword terms and trends report, called the Google Zeitgeist. Britney Spears tops the chart for the most popular queries for 2004. The 2004 Interactive Zeitgeist is also impressive breaking down events driving search on a month by month basis.

New this year is the Google Local Search Queries categories!

This is all great information, and worth checking out.

I too received my Google mood radio this Christmas:

I am sure their heart was in the right place, and on first glance it's a really cool gift. Cooler than the USB hard drives they gave out last year, but not quite as useful.

Then I started to think about my current mood regarding Google, and I have to say, my mood isn't so good. Their new predictive CTR policy placed a large percentage of my keyword on hold this holiday season, and based on the speed of the "in trial" words, I am not sure they will all be running by next Christmas. On top of that, I have search terms with 6% - 20% CTRs on the search network being disabled, and am being told that they "must not have performed above .05% on Google.com. They won't provide partner search CTR rates, and I honestly believe that their whole new CTR scheme is broken and they are trying to keep the fact under wraps. I think this is going to greatly affect their revenues for Q4.

Then there is this whole "rumor" about them doing away with search engine arbitrage and forcing advertisers to link to their own urls. One estimate by a former eBay affiliate manager pegs Google's revenues from eBay affiliates at $20 million. That's just one large program, multiply that across all the merchants that affiliates are marketing and it spells a huge revenue drop for Google in Q1 if this is implemented as speculated.

So all in all, I would say my "Google Mood" is fairly bleak. But hey, at least I can look at my new radio when I'm feeling sour.

My New Years resolution is to spend more money with Overture.

As the Holiday shopping season rolls to a close this year, I was surprised and appreciatative of all the companies that sent holiday cards and presents this year.

I was too busy putting up holiday links and trying to work through Google's predictive slowing of the majority of my terms to actually do any business gift shopping this year, so I thought about what I could do as a last minute thank you.

In the spirit of Goyami and the Holiday season, I decided to give out PR5 Goyami links this year to those who sent presents! Because what say's happy holidays more than a boost to your search engine rankings? :-)

Special thanks and Happy Holidays go to:

David Rogers of the New Line Cinema affiliate program and WB affiliate program.

Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and his outsourced affiliate program management consulting services site.

Amy Rodriguez, manager of the Carfax affiliate program. The premeir affiliate program for used vehicle history reports.

Phillip Kidwell and Irene Shih of the eHealthInsurance affiliate program. The #1 health insurance affiliate program.

Nikki Stapp of Internet Marketing Ltd., outsourced affiliate management services.

Peter Greenberg owner of The Morrison House Hotel, the only luxury hotel in Alexandria Virginia.

Everyone on the eBay affiliate team and the eBay affiliate program.

Happy Holidays!

As the winter holiday begins, we just wanted to wish everyone a happy and save holiday. Thanks for reading Goyami!

Adam & Todd

Here are some holiday logos from Google and Yahoo:

The Blogvine strikes again. I posted an article a few weeks ago about a post on one of the message boards indicating that someone in the UK had spoken to someone from Google at an event, and that Google was considering banning search arbitrage and forcing advertisers to link to their own website instead of redirecting clickers through the standard affiliate redirect links. I thought I needed to further clarify what I have heard, because some of my merchants have started to contact me about making changes for the “impending Google policy change”. When I asked where they heard this was a done deal, they pointed me to a blog, that referenced another blog’s article, whose article referenced my original article. (The Blogvine…)

I called my Google rep, and she said this was the first she had heard anything like that. She said that if Google would ever make that kind of change they would announce it well in advance to give their advertisers time to adjust.

Here are a few points to consider:

1. Google is making a lot of money from search affiliates. As a public company, Google isn’t going to want to do anything that is going to hurt there existing revenue streams. The current policy gives Google a clear competitive advantage over their major rival, Overture.

2. Unlike Overture, who has this policy in place already, Google doesn’t allow you to bid for exact position. Google’s advertising system will automatically drop off non-performing ads, so the argument that these ads are hurting the search experience is not valid. If customers were not interested in the ads, they would not click, and they would disappear automatically.

3. Making this change would not only hurt affiliates, but would hurt the merchants that the affiliates are advertising. These merchants are often Google’s top paying advertisers. If affiliates were forced out, then these merchants would quickly see their competitors taking up the open slots. Google has already stated it’s policy of not blocking competitors for bidding on trademark terms, this policy has been recently solidified by their victory in their legal case with Geico. (See Geico vs. Google – Google Wins!)

So I believe that rumors that this change will happen shortly after the new year, are over exaggerated at this point, and I highly doubt we will see Google making this drastic of a change any time soon.

That being said, it can never hurt to expand your horizons and start building some websites and landing pages for your merchants. Overture has a lot of traffic to offer if you start making these pages now. Don’t hesitate to ask your merchants for co-branded or personalized landing pages, many of them would be more than happy to help you out.

Tell me what you think? Do you see this Google policy change happening?

Happy Holidays!

Adam

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that search engine giant Google did not violate car insurance vendor Geico's trademarks when it displayed ads for rival insurance providers when users search for "Geico" on Google. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia did not agree with Geico's assertion that the practice diluted its trademarks and caused confusion among consumers.

The judge said that "as a matter of law it is not trademark infringement to use trademarks as keywords to trigger advertising."

"It confirms that our policy complies with the law, particularly the use of trademarks as keywords," said Google general counsel David Drummond. "This is a clear signal to other litigants that our keyword policy is lawful."

According to Hitwise:
Of the top 500 unique search terms used in visits to shopping and classified sites, 86.7% were related to corporate brands, 10.8% were related to generic product names, and 2.5% were related to product brands. The fastest growing shopping categories were grocery & alcohol, books, computers, sports & fitness, and flowers & gifts, Hitwise says.

According to comScore:
Of the 25% of consumers who purchased a consumer electronics or computer product after searching online in the first quarter, 92% made their purchase offline. Of the 8% that bought online, the “vast majority” made their purchase in subsequent online sessions.

ComScore also found that generic product terms accounted for 70% of search volume for consumer electronics and computer products and for 60% of search-to-purchase conversions. In contrast, it found that branded terms accounted for 30% of search volume but 40% of search-to-purchase conversions.

Just a quick thank you to our Goyami readers / fans. We started Goyami this year, and our readership traffic is on a great trajectory!

Thank you for reading!

Yesterday a federal judge in Alexandria VA heard arguments on the Geico trademark bidding case against Google.

Geico claims that Google's AdWords program, which displays the rival ads under a ''Sponsored Links'' heading next to a user's search results, causes confusion for consumers and illegally exploits Geico's investment of hundreds of millions of dollars in its brand.

Google responded that the ad policy is no different from a supermarket giving out coupons for one product in the checkout line when a customer buys the same product from a different company.

We all await a ruling with baited breath...

Overture and Geico have agreed to settle the lawsuit brought by Geico, ending part of the trademark dispute battle. Geico had filed suit in May against Overture Services and Google, charging the two commercial search giants with violating its trademarks when selling advertisements linked to its name in search results.

Terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but a current search for the term Geico on Overture shows lots of competitors. Indicating that Geico may have backed down from their claims.

The case against Google is still on going however, and on Nov 19th, the Judge denied Google's motion for summary judgment, allowing the case to proceed to trial. In late August, the judge did dismiss claims of tortuous interference and statutory business conspiracy charges.

Both Google and Overture continue to argue that the use of trademarks in search related keyword driven ads is fair use.

Jim Hedger of Search Engine Journal, reported today that Ask Jeeves and Lycos will begin offering Search Engine Optimization Services. Seeing the search engines, who have inside information on their own algorithms and the ability to adjust algorithms and placement in their own engines to suit their clients, could cause some concern among the SEO community.

On one side: Search engines that offer paid optimization services, might call into question the quality of the search results.

On the other side: As a business, if I wanted to make sure my site works well with a specific search engine, who better to help me out than the owners of the engine? They can insure that my site works well, gets ranked, and doesn't violate any of the rules that might get my site in trouble.

This one will be interesting to watch to see how it plays out.

In keeping with the Holiday Logo tradition, here are some of the many thanksgiving faces of Google:

Have a great Turkey Day!

E-Commerce Times reported that Google has been sued by a company that claims that Google has indexed it's copyrighted nude pictures from 3rd party sites and failed to remove the images and the infringing sites from their index when the company contacted Google to ask them too.

It may just be me, but it would seem that the company should be more concerned about the 3rd party sites that are posting their copyrighted images without permission, and thank Google for showing them that it is happening.

Heck, doesn't everything that Google indexes belong to someone? You could argue that all content is copyrighted therefore Google should not exist.

What do you think?

Microsoft quietly launched their new search engine at beta.search.msn.com.

There had been some speculation that MSN would roll out their own PPC management utility to go head to head with Google Adwords and Overture when their existing contract with overture expired in June of 2005. However, the companies have announced that they have extended their agreement for another year until June of 2006. I guess Microsoft wants to focus on perfecting their organic search engine and spider technology before building a new platform to own 100% of their PPC traffic.

A quick search on their beta site for web hosting, indicates that Microsoft may be planning a hybrid strategy of hosting their own sponsored ads along side of Overture’s. The top two links in the top box and bottom box appear to be run from ads.msn.com while their 3rd link in these boxes and all the ads on the right hand side appear to be driven by overture.

ClickZ reported yesterday that according to an iProspect research study, one and two word phrases account for 88% of natural search referrals for about 40 "high traffic" websites between 2002 and 2004.

Here is the breakdown:

1 word terms = 39%

2 word terms = 49%

3-5 word terms = 12%

It would be interesting to see data on "sales conversions" vs natural search referrals (clicks).

A friend of mine sent me a link to a posting on Webmaster's world which reads as follows:

---
shaka1978 writes:
"A friend of mine attended a Google University seminar at Earls Court (London, UK) on Thursday last week. Apparently one of the guys from Google said that they were planning to phase out affiliate bidding on AdWords 'very soon'. The reason - showing several ads for the same merchant reflects badly on the user's experience.

I'm a full-time affiliate who primarily uses AdWords to send customers to the exact product page on a merchant's website. If this is true quite frankly I'm in trouble. I called my account rep immediately in horror and he said he'd heard nothing of the sort. I would certainly hope Google would give plenty of warning if they were planning such a huge change.

My concerns were dampened slightly by my colleague informing me that he also said Froogle was going to be 'huge' in the UK this Christmas.
Yeah right! A tall order seeing as Joe Public hasn't a clue it even exists, not to mention it hardly has any merchants onboard etc.

Anyway, I really don't understand what Google's long term plan is. How could they possibly afford to cut off all the revenue from affiliate bids, then kill AdWords completely by giving Froogle a big push (let's face it, why click on AdWords ads when Froogle gives the price). A double whammy, shortly after going PLC with investors to please, I don't think so."
---

This is probably just a nasty rumor, I am checking with my Google reps to make sure.

This would be bad news for super affiliates, bad news for merchants and bad financial news for Google. I was kind of hoping that Overture would take a look at all the revenue that Google is making and change their policy to allow affiliate links.

Has anyone heard anything similar?

Look out everyone, new standard verbiage has started to appear on CJ affiliate merchant agreements when merchants choose not to allow trademark bidding.

It reads as follows:
"You agree not to directly or indirectly bid on the brand name X or any confusingly similar words, mis-spells or derivatives of the brand. This includes Google, E-Spotting and Overture and any other PFP provider."

The word that causes me the most concern here is "indirectly". When you combine that with misspellings, it prevents affiliates from using any type of PPC search on a broad or phrase match basis.

Let's look at an example so you can see what I mean. I ran into this exact problem with Network Solutions, which is why I had to stop marketing them and take the $200k per year in revenues I was generating to one of their competitors.

Network Solutions is a good example, because they went through a lot of changes in their policy to arrive at the type of policy based on the wording above. If you ask Network Solutions for a list of keywords to market under, the will give you terms like Domain Names and Web Sites. So I will use these terms in my examples since they are the terms they really want to cover. Here are some policies they had and what an affiliate would have to do in their account to adhere to those policies:

No Bidding on our Trademark terms:

Affiliates can run the terms Domain Names and Web Sites without any problems with this policy.

No showing up when Trademarks are included with other terms:
Example: "Network Solutions Domain Names"

Affiliates now must get a complete list of trademarks and enter them in as negative keywords against their ad campaigns.

No showing up directly or indirectly for trademarks or misspellings:
Example: “Network Solution Web Sites”

Since it would be impossible to ad in negative keywords for all possible misspellings into your account, the affiliate must now run exact match only to insure that they don't indirectly show up when someone types in their keyword in conjunction with a misspelling of the brand.

This could have a great chilling affect over traffic volumes since a broad match or phrase match of "Domain Names" would catch searches like "I am having a problem with my Domain Name Provider", "How to I get a Domain Name". Now with this new verbiage affiliates must identify every possible search phrase and get it EXACTLY right to insure that they don't inadvertently show up when a trademark or misspelling is typed.

Is this really where we wanted to go?

Quite frankly, as our 2-year profitable relationship with Network Solutions found out, it's just easier to move to a competitor who "gets it" than to struggle with one who doesn't.

Looks like there is a new sheriff in town affiliates using spyware and cookie stuffing. His name is Ben Edleman. Ben is a student at Harvard University and Harvard Law School and his current research agenda includes analyzing methods and effects of spyware and uncovering affiliate commission fraud.

Ben has posted an interesting explanation of Cookie Stuffing where he outlines who benefits and why networks, who profit from the practice indirectly, may be less than financially motivated to put an end to it. Ben has also "called out" some affiliates by listing their sites, and showing exactly how they are performing the cookie stuffing.

When you look at how some of these affiliates are attempting to hide the practice, you can't help but think, wow some of these guys are really smart. I was especially impressed with asmartcoupon.com's method of referencing an affiliate link as a 1x1 image call.

Let me start by saying that I am no saint. I toyed around with some iframes in my early days. I don't do it anymore, but let me explain why I went down that road in the first place, it certainly wasn’t in an attempt to “cheat” anyone. My feeling was that I put a lot of time into building a site, and was paying on a per-click basis to have the person come see and learn about the specific merchant, if I did an effective job pre-selling the customer, I should be paid for the duration of the cookie period, regardless if the customer clicked through at that very moment or logged off and then went directly back to the merchant's site and bought the next day.

Merchants benefit from affiliate sales activity without paying the affiliates all the time. In the travel industry they say that the number of transactions that start online and get completed via the telephone is 5 times the number that start online and complete online. Typically merchants don't have the technology to track back phone sales to affiliates, so affiliates lose out on sales they had a direct part of creating.

At Network Solutions, they extended the affiliate cookie period from 1 day to 7 days for affiliates, and quickly dropped it down to 3 days because they felt they were paying out too much for the sales. At the same time they track their own PPC activities out to 30 days and beyond for internal reporting purposes. As an affiliate I was happy to be getting 3 instead of 1, but know that the merchant continued to benefit from my sales activities long after they stop compensating me.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about not making enough money from my partners. I think it only works when you are able to create win-win partnerships. And when it comes to issues like “cookie-stuffing” today, or other issues that come up in the future, it is important to look at the issues from all angles.

Perhaps affiliates should be compensated for pre-selling a customer who comes back and buys later. Isn't that the whole point of the cookie time period? Maybe setting a cookie when the initial ad is displayed form the network should be an option that merchants can enable or disable in their program?

What are your thoughts?

Happy Halloween everyone! I hope everyone has had a profitable Halloween selling season. At Imwave, we did well selling Halloween Costumes and other merchandise this year using a quick and dirty Halloween Costume Sale site and PPC ads on Google, Overture, Kanoodle and Findwhat. Got to love Halloween.

I thought it would be interesting to see some of the many Halloween logos of our search partners. Here are a few:

Have you ever wondered why your ads are not appearing under specific term when you search for it on Google's site? Now Google has released a new tool for advertisers that will let them put in the phrase they expected to see their ad appearing under or the url from the search where they thought your ads should have appeared.

Once you enter in your terms, you get a complete diagnostic off all the ads that could appear for that term and their status. Is the keyword slowed in one of your ad campaigns? Does the term appear in multiple campaigns?

This used to be hard to hunt down, now it is quick and easy. Great job!

BellSouth and Google announced a deal today where RealPages.com will become the first yellow pages publisher authorized to sell advertising through Google AdWords® to small and medium-sized local businesses.

According the a ClickZ article Reps will be able to sell customers flat rate listings so that small businesses don't have do deal with the unknown monthly costs of PPC advertising.

Sounds like they will come up with some keywords and put in a daily budget figure into adwords, and than just mark it up. I wonder how they will explain to small businesses about how low they rank for important words, and why their ads may disappear after a while if nobody clicks on them.

It will be interesting to see how this get's implemented.

Dmitri Eroshenko posted a great article that covers the ABCs of Click Fraud in the PPC search industry. Click Fraud could possibly be the Achilles heel of the PPC search engine market if it goes un-checked, so it's worth keeping an eye on.

Read Dmitri's article here.

Are you currently tracking for Click fraud and asking the search engines for refunds? If so how?

At the Search Engine Strategies convention in San Jose, I heard the term “Ghetto SEO" used to describe the practice of creating pages to get to rankings that were “quick and dirty" without a whole lot of original content.

I had dismissed the term all together, until reading my monthly Planet Ocean Unfair Advantage search engine updates newsletter. In the Q&A section, one of the readers asked “Why is it that so may search engine results-type pages are now ranking high in searches at Google?" Planet Ocean’s response indicated that they are seeing more and more of these sites being removed from Google, but then went on to say the following:

"With reserve we’ll tell you the program that generates these pages is called Traffic Equalizer."

They go on to say that you should be careful about using this type of tool on sites that are deemed permanent since they feel Google will start banning such sites.

I decided it was time to visit the Ghetto and find out what they were talking about. I purchased Traffic Equalizer and played around with the software.

Traffic Equalizer is a piece of html page generation software that takes an html template (either their default templates, or one that you create) and a keyword list and merges the two together to create a site map with links to individual pages that the tool creates for each keyword term in your list. These individual pages can also include a directory style list of other sites that are related to your page that are pulled from 1 of 5 search engine resources. Assuming the template is good, and they placement of your keyword terms are well designed for search engines, they theory is that these pages would rank high.

I’d point you to my sample site that I threw up to test, but I realized that the downside to these sites, is that their structure and sitemap also make your entire keyword list that you are using to generate the site available to all. I did however find an example of a site using the software, I did use the program to add a related sites section to the pages of my Folk Art Site that I created to test out eBay's affiliate editor's kit tool. The site hasn't been doing great, and I figured out a way use the tool to enhance esiting pages and quickly build other artist pages by turing my existing page into a template. I suppose I could have done that by hand, but the tool did save me a lot of time by doing the work for each page and then all I have to do is add the pages to my site archectecture.

In marketing, the theory always goes, test, test, test, and then when you are done testing test some more. Find out what works and keep the good and drop the bad. I do think this is a useful tool, so it’s worth a test. I think you may find a lot more ways to use this type of auto-generation tool, than the specific task it was create for.

Other similar tools include:

Ranking Power

Traffic Turbocharger

Other Resources:

Traffic Equalizer Templates

Paid Search Affiliate Marketing Representative Wanted

Large well known Company seeks 100% commission only affiliate marketing expert to promote company’s products and services online and via Google Adwords, Overture, and other pay-per-click search engines.

Selected affiliate marketing representatives must fund their own pay-per-click advertising efforts. If the potential customer sent to our site does in fact buy online the affiliate marketing representative will be paid a small percentage of the transaction. Commissions will only be paid for online sales, any sales that take place offline in our stores or via the phone will not be counted. Please note, that some affiliate marketing representatives can and do lose money. The company will not be responsible for any loses incurred by the affiliate marketer.

Affiliates will market the company’s products and services, but must not use the company’s brand name or any of our product’s names or any possible miss-spellings of our brand names in any of their search engine marketing efforts.

Affiliate Marketing Representatives will not officially be an employee of the company, and will not be entitled to any company benefits.

Our policies for our affiliate program can and will change often. Any deviations from the current rules or changes that we will make going forward will result in commissions being withheld and immediate expulsion from our affiliate program.

Sign-up today, we are looking forward to you joining our affiliate program!

MSN has put it's Search Engine Preview back online. Make sure your site's are well ranked.

Here are some links:

Search Engine Preview

MSN Search Newsgroup

MSNBot and Webmaster Info

Looks like keywords in your domain name are going to be very important to MSN.

Enjoy!

Bill Gross is an innovator in the search engine space and the brains behind Go-To.com which became Overture and was sold to Yahoo. He founded the whole pay-per-click search engine advertising model. When he creates something new in the space, it is worth looking at.

On Tuesday October 5th, Bill Gross announced the beta launch of Snap.com, a new search engine and advertising model. Snap.com focuses on 3 major changes for the user experience:

1. User Control – The searcher gets to change the order of search results, refine search results instantly, and hone in on exactly what you’re looking for.

2. User Feedback – Snap.com takes into account what happens after people click on search listings at snap.com and others, to use as feedback on the relevance, and get you better results up at the top. Their goal is to help users avoid dead end searches, and saves time. Their goal is to figure out, based on millions of users, what people are really looking for so they can put custom formats on search pages where previous users signaled their “intent” by their follow-on searches.

3. Transparency – They plan to reveal every action and transaction at the site, so you know what we are doing and what other users are doing. They will even reveal their revenues. They think that users get better results because transparency prevents advertisers or others from gaming the system.

On the advertisers side, there are some changes too. The advertiser signup form indicates that you can buy advertising based on any one of the following models:

Pay per click

Pay amount per completed transaction

Pay amount per new customer

Pay percentage of transaction

Pay per impression

When you visit snap.com the first thing that jumps out at you is information about what is going on with their company. They show the top 10 products, people and music that people are currently searching for. They show how many searches have been performed this week along with graphs of the number of page views, visitors, searches, and advertisers. They even list the top sites referring people to their site. Interesting information...

The real changes appear when you actually conduct a search for products like digital cameras, they actually pull a product finder result set above the web search information, bringing product data feeds to the top. This information can quickly be sorted and filtered every which way, price, zoom factor, storage, lcd, size, etc…

When you get down to the “normal” search results, they are anything but normal. Company logo’s appear on the left hand side and search results include scores and the sort and filter results based on rankings for local and web based popularity and satisfaction scores. You can even sort / filter your results based on .com extensions (tld’s)

What do all the new columns mean:

Popularity is the number of visitors from the Snap Network of internet users who clicked on this specific result, right after the exact search you just submitted. Typically, the higher the better.

Satisfaction is the average number of pages viewed on this listing's site, right after the exact search you just submitted. Again, higher numbers are typically better.

Web Popularity is the number of visitors to the site from the Snap Network. As above, higher numbers are typically better.

Web Satisfaction is the average number of pages viewed on this listing's site by visitors from our network. You guessed it, the higher the number, the better.

Domain is the top level domain of the site. Most commercial sites in the United States are '.com' sites. However, depending on the search term, there are often excellent results in other domains, such as .edu (educational) and .gov (government).

The search engine is still in Beta, and a search result for Halloween Costumes shows some signs of what may be wrong. Yahoo and AOL logo’s appear along with web popularity and satisfaction scores for Yahoo and AOL's main sites for sites that are stores or personal pages owned by others who happen to be hosted off Yahoo and AOL's main domain names. Somehow I doubt store.yahoo.com/instylekids.com/halcost1.html is as popular as AOL.com. But tell that to Snap...

Overall the user experience is cool. I am not sure if the average user will take advantage of all the sorting and filtering capabilities, but it's nice to have them at your fingertips. The question will be if they can generate enough user demand on their site to draw the advertising dollars. You might also see them license their technology to one of the major search engines - this is what happened with Bill's original company. Only time will tell.

Media Daily News Reports that a recent study by Clicklab indicates that "fraudulent clicks can account for more than 50 percent of all advertising fees attributable to certain categories". The report categorizes two types of click fraud, competitor clicks and affiliate clicks.

The use of affiliate clicks here is another shot across the bow for the term affiliate in the industry. Soon affiliate will be synonymous with snake oil salesmen, and multi-level marketing. Perhaps this is why we have seen a move in the industry towards the term performance marketing. To be honest I like to think of affiliates as just independent commissioned sales reps. Perhaps Mercenary Marketers would be better...

Ok, I have a new pet peeve and would love to hear everyone’s comments on this. Google has implemented a policy to prevent some trademarks from being used in the Advertising copy. So merchants can request Google to disallow all ads from using the company brand (regardless of the keywords being used).

I am not opposed to this concept in general, but as an affiliate for a company, a internet sales partner who is driving traffic to the company's website, I feel like I should be able to request an exception in Adwords and be granted it rights to use the term as an affiliate without having to have the company fax in a letter of approval.

Here is my thinking. Merchants provide all of their affiliates with banner ads and email text copy that ALWAYS include the company's brand name and product names to promote their services. If the merchant is willing to let me stick an add on my website with their brand, why would they be opposed to letting me stick their name in an ad on someone else’s website (in this case Google).

I have actually run into some merchants who are willing to let me test their trademarks and misspellings to make sure their product converts but are unwilling to let me use their product name in my ad copy? So now when I am bidding on General terms for their product, I can't use their product name? Why would I want to promote someone's product without using their name in the ad?

Sure, I could use general keywords, and promote benefits in the Ad copy without using the company's name, but that may or may not be as effective depending on the amount of competition, the quality of the brand, and the quality of the competitive brands in the space.

Finally, the company misses out on all the Brand Awareness they could have gained from the ads, regardless of if they got clicked on or not. See the IAB's Press Release on the Branding Effects of Paid Search

Merchants, let's not tie an affiliate's hands behind their back for doing paid search. If you are willing to let them use your brand on their own Website, don't prevent them from using your brand in their paid advertising that they buy on other sites. It just doesn't make sense.

Revenue Magazine reported that network-driven affiliate marketing will reach $1 billion in 2004 in the UK. Twice as lucrative as the previous year. Tradedoubler, one of the UK's largest affiliate networks, reported 54% growth just from February to March with sales up 328% over the same point in 2004. This makes Tradedoubler one of the fastest-growing affiliate networks. The magazine goes on to report that affiliate marketing will account for up to 3.5% of Brittish e-commerce this year and up to 20% for some merchants.

Just though everyone might love a great example of the types of emails affiliates get. Here is one from CollectiblesToday, we don't even market them at this time...

++++++++++++++++
Hello!

Just a quick reiteration on our search engine policy. Please do not bid on our trademark name, Collectibles Today, or any variation thereof. We have just implemented a strict policing policy and offenders will be deactivated immediately.

Please also refrain from outbidding or bid jamming us on our sub-brands. These terms include Ashton Drake, Ardleigh Elliott, Bradford Exchange, etc. and any variations thereof.

Other keywords are fair game. If it's in the OED, it's viable! In fact, we have a weekly text email that goes out with suggesed keywords. If you would like to be on this private distribution list, or if you have any questions please email me at okrylov@collectiblestoday.com.

Best regards,
Oleg Krylov
++++++++++++++++

Today, if you do a search for "Collectibles Today" with the help of their affiliates, they pretty much own the space. In a few weeks, as their partners are forced out, their competitors will own their brand. Shop.com is already on the first page, there are two other competitors bidding on their brand that don't make the first page today but will soon.

Brilliant Strategy!

I was talking to my Google Rep today and she showed me a great trick. Some of you may know this already, but just in case, I thought I would share it with you.

I wanted the ability to track the performance of my content ads separate from my search ads, and I didn't want to have to create separate campaigns with duplicate words with one campaign set to search and the other content. (I had heard this approach presented as a work around at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose).

You can use a dynmaic call in your url called "ifcontent" and "ifsearch" it works like this.

www.CJ-URL?sid={ifsearch:Search-SID-Code}{ifcontent:Content-SID-Code}

Using the dynamic insertion, the correct tracking code will be used for search and content targeted ads.

Of course this can be applied to any of your links to add parameters.

Oh brother. Recent reports on a new search engine for the gay community using Google's Adsense search capabilities say that Fagoogle is fully in compliance with Google regulations, and as such is neither endorsed, nor shunned by Google.

To be honest, if Google had problems with Booble, I can't imagine them being willing to accept such a blatant rip off of their trademarked logo. This would be a terrible president for them to set. I think it's fine if they want to allow the search, after all that is what the Adsense search is for, targeted and more narrowly defined search. But the logo??? Come on....

Executive Search Firm Heidrick & Struggles International Inc. said it earned nearly $130 million by selling Google Inc. stock it got as payment for finding the Internet company a new CEO in 2001.

Nice Deal!

See the full Mercury News Article

In Hamburg Germany on Tuesday, a state court dismissed a trademark infringement case brought by Metaspinner Media against Google Deutschland for selling keywords that were triggered of Metaspinner's trademark terms "Preispiraten" or "Price Pirate" software.

Google also faces another lawsuit in the US, recent filed by Rescuecom accusing Google of allowing and advising rival computer service companies to use its trade marked term in their list of sponsored search terms.

Google continues to be the Trademark lawsuit voodoo doll. When will the madness stop?

Suing Google over Trademark infringement appears to be the newest PR stunt. Who ever heard of Rescuecom & Metaspinner anyway? If they start settling, it could be a gold rush! Get a lawyer and get in line!

Goyami has been splogged twice in the past few days! What does being splogged mean you ask? You have been splogged when a spammer comes to your blog and adds a comment to one of your postings that is just a bunch of links to their websites in an attempt to get inbound links to boost their search engine rankings and site traffic. In the past few days we have seen two splog entries linking to vulgar adult sites. Don’t be a splogger!

Of course every negative spurs positive ideas! Why not be a blinker instead. What is a blinker you ask? Blinking is when you actively participate in blogs by adding meaning full comments and include meaningful links in your message and or signature line of your message. So if I added a comment to a blog and put in an SEO optimized signature like the one below, I would be a productive blinker adding meaningful content to the blog discussion and helping my SEO rankings at the same time! Be a blinker!

Adam Viener
President & CEO
IMWAVE, INC.
Super Affiliate & PPC Search Engine Consulting

Today was the final day of Commission Junction University. My morning started with an 8am focus group. CJ asked some of their top pay-per-click search engine marketers to sit down with their product management group to discuss what CJ could do to help us drive more revenues.

The general consensus was that CJ could do a better job educating their merchant partners on how PPC marketers could help their programs, and how the basics of search engine advertising works. I proposed that CJ offer affiliates the ability to put in their adwords and overture conversion tracking code information so CJ could dynamically serve these codes on the merchants’ conversion pages. This would enable us to get conversion data for each keyword without having to use unique urls with sid codes on each keyword. This idea was well received by CJ’s product management team, but several other affiliates expressed concerns about how much data CJ and Google had about their campaigns.

Later in the day, I attended James Martell’s session about earning a living via affiliate marketing. See Todd's posting for a good run down. It left me thinking that I should be working on some more content sites.

We continued to make great contacts, and I enjoyed talking with other top PPC search "publishers" about their businesses.

Another great day, and great event. Thanks CJ!

USA Today reported today that according to a recent IAB / PWC Report, Search Engine Marketing is up 97% in Q2 2004 over the same period last year. Search represented 40% of the 2nd Quarter's overall $2.3 Billion in Internet Advertising.

Day two at Commission Junction University was interesting.

Jeff Pullen, CJ's General Manager, gave a good opening overview of where the industry has gone over the past year and what CJ's plans for the future are. He made special note to let people know that CJ is committed to maintaining and enhancing the BFAST technology that BeFree is based on.

In the keynote address, Tim Smith, President, Tvtalk, Inc. presented "Karate vs. Judo: Marketing in the Age of Consumer Control". Although he focused a lot on broadcast media, he laid very thought provoking concepts about the progression of advertising as consumers become publishers. Basically, his theory is that advertising is being turned on it's head as consumers take more control of the content. Ultimately consumers become the broadcasters of content and therefore affiliate / performance marketing may become the key element on how these new broadcasters cash in on their content. I also think this theory also puts products like Adsense in a great position and should make us all think more about how to best leverage content match advertising.

The funniest part of the keynote, was when Tim shared some of his "consumers creating content" examples. The audience loved the Bush and Blair's 'Endless Love' Video. If you haven't seen this, it's great!

My favorite part of the day was the Networking Match session in the afternoon. The conference attendees were placed into NetworkingMatch.com's database and setup with seating arrangements at various tables. In a series of six 8-minute meetings, you got a chance to connect and network with other conference attendees and explore how you might be able to work together. I made some very interesting contacts which may turn into longer marketing partnerships.

In the evening, CJ hosted a Dinner and Awards presentation. The presented Horizon Awards to outstanding Advertisers and Publishers. (Merchants & Affiliates). I am not sure if I can remember them all, but will post a link when CJ publishes them. On the merchant side I recall awards going to eHealthInsurance, BackCountry.com, and ShopNBC. One the Affiliate site I recall awards for FatWallet, UPromise, and Clicks2Customers.com. I think they said there were 7 awards, so I must be missing one.

Day 2 was very productive.

Yesterday (Sunday, Sept 19th, 2004), Commission Junction kicked off their CJU event in Santa Barbara California with a 101 course on best practices for Publishers and Advertisers. (Publishers and Advertisers are CJ slang for Affiliates and Merchants). The content of the session was interesting, but the most interesting part of the session came when the audience was able to ask some questions. After some general questions about how do I find and contact super affiliates (shameless seo plug 'grin'), some of the super affiliates used the open microphone as an opportunity to raise some concerns about trademark bidding. This promises to be a hot topic this week at CJU as Merchants are starting to face the new Google open trademark bidding policy and finding more and more competitors bidding on their names.

Merchants need to start thinking of affiliates more as part of their sales force. As a sales rep for the company, affiliate managers have armed affiliates (their internet sales team) with lots of creative work. They have access to banner ads containing the company's trademark, copy for their site containing the trademark, and access to the complete product catalogs, many of which contain the trademarks of other company's products that the merchant sells.

I think some companies believe that if a potential customer types in their trademarked name or misspelled name into a search engine that, since they were looking for their company's site anyway, they would have "obviously" gotten to the companies site and were ready to buy directly. To me this has some logic, but isn't 100% true. If this were the case, why does any company pay commissions to an inside sales team? In theory, the customers had taken the time to call the company anyway, so they must be ready to buy right? It's funny how we all recognize that customers need to be sold on the phone, why not online?

As the discussion continues, it seems that the best affiliate managers and programs are starting to adopt a stance of controlled bidding so that affiliates don't drive up the prices for the merchant while insuring that the merchant's competitors don't encroach on their company's terms.

After the session the evening kicked off with a party at CJU headquarters. It was great to see a lot of the affiliate managers we have been speaking with. After the CJU event, we went out for dinner with eBay and a great Cajun restaurant called the palace.

eBay gave out a t-shirt that said "I came, I saw, I BID" which is interesting, because I actually did go to eBay yesterday, and saw someone selling a $50 Google Adwords coupon for only $9.95 and I did bid/buy. What a bargain!

More to come...

I recently ran into a series of articles on the affiliate trademark bidding debate on RevNews by David Lewis. These are three good articles worth reading on the subject:

PPC Bidding by Affiliates: It's about Controlling Your Brand (Part 1)

PPC Bidding by Affiliates (Part 2)

PPC Bidding by Affiliates (Part 3)

With Google's recent change in their trademark bidding policy, many companies are finding that their competitors are now free to bid on their company’s trademark terms. With little legal precedent to hang their hat on, companies are starting to turn to their affiliates for help.

In the past, many companies have specifically banned affiliates from bidding on the company’s trademark terms as part of their affiliate agreement. At the same time the companies started bidding on their own trademark terms on Google. But, companies can typically only buy one ad under any keyword phrase, and they have started to see the remaining spots being taken up by their competitors and their competitor’s affiliates.

In order to combat this, companies have started to turn to their top Affiliates for help by allowing their top affiliate partners to bid on the company trademarks with strict advertising copy guidelines that protect the company’s brand image. Typically the companies will also ask that their affiliates not overbid them for top position to ensure that their new strategy doesn’t bid up their price of bidding on the trademark terms.

Commission Junction has started promoted this “Blocking Strategy” to their clients. At the IAB Road show event in New York in August, representatives from CJ presented Brooks Brothers as an good example of successfully deploying a brand blocking program using their top affiliate partners.

So far I have personally had two companies approach me about starting to bid on their trademarks, and have seen a lot of programs that allow trademark bidding with maximum bid amounts defined in the contract.

“We would rather make a portion of the revenues and share them with our affiliate partners than let our competitors steal our sales!” Said one such affiliate manager.

Could this be the way the industry is heading on trademark bidding?

I just stumbled across a great deal from NameSecure. For a limited time you can get up to 25 free .info domain names. This is great if you are looking to build some sites with some keywords in the url, because .info isn't as crowded as .com.

Yahoo! announced yesterday on their blog that they have begun beta testing a travel search engine that searches over 50 travel sites for air, hotel, and rental car rates. Their new program is based on the technology of FareChase that they acquired earlier this summer.

It will be interesting to watch and see if and how they integrate additional pay-per-click advertising opportunities into the search. I suspect they will leverage their new Local Search / Advertising platform.

Powerhouse hosting has announced that they will offer 10 inbound pr4 links free with every hosting account.

Details from their site:
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10 Free PR4 Links

Finally.. Something you can really use. Join the only hosting company willing to work harder for you.

10 PR4 or higher Incoming links to your site. A $200 Value FREE with purchase of our web hosting package.

Your sites link popularity (number of other sites linking to yours) is a big deal if you want to be found on search engines. 1 Way PR4 links are especially hard to obtain unless you pay for the placement. 10 PR4 incoming links will give your site a jump start on page rank.
---

On one hand I find this very smart, because it will help their customers get listed on the search engines, on the other hand, the links don't sound relevant, so it stinks of Spam. I wonder how long the links will be counted for before they are marked as spam?

According to CBS Marketwatch. The first batch of employees at Google were able to sell some of their shares yesterday. The stock closed up $1.26.

4.7 Million Shares came due yesterday, another 39 million will be available for sale in November, and another 177 million in February.

If the article is correct in indicating that only 19.6 million shares were offered at the offering, there could be a lot more sellers out there than buyers. It may be an interesting stock slide through February.

WebmasterWorld will hold it's 7th Search Conference in Las Vegas on November 16th-18th, 2004. There will be three tracks (Seach, Affiliates & Advertising, and Webmaster General). For more information about the event, visit:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/conference/.

Search Engine Roundtable has posted some more upcoming events.

CNET reports this morning that "Geico gets green light to sue Google, Overture".

Judge Leone Brinkema of the U.S. District court for the Eastern District of Virginia has denied Google and Overture's motion to dismiss six charges brought by Geico, which alleged that the search companies' use of its name to trigger search-related advertisements was trademark infringement, unfair competition and dilution of its marks under the Lanham Act.

The judge did, however, grant Google & Overture's motions to dismiss claims of tortuous interference and statutory business conspiracy.

This case will be an interesting one to watch. If Geico prevails there will be floodgates of litigation and settlements against PPC Engines, and could hurt the industry as a whole.

Stephen Mahaney of Planet Ocean Communications pointed out in one of his Monthly subscriber newsletters that it appeared that pages that contain Google's Adsense advertising codes were being removed from Yahoo's index. This month he has done additional tests and appears to have confirmed that this is the case.

He suggests putting the javascript code in a separate .JS file or else using IP delivery to show Yahoo's bot a page without the Adsense code in it.

Hopefully this Yahoo "bug" will go away soon.

A good sign that Affiliate Marketing is growing is the launch of Revenue Magazine - the first magazine dedicated to Affiliate Marketing. I have read the first two issues cover to cover and am anxiously awaiting the 3rd issue which was just recently published.

Although a lot of the magazine is focused on traditional affiliate marketing methods of putting links on your own Web site, I am sure they will branch out quickly into the world of search engine marketing and affiliate search arbitrage, the art of buying pay per click ads for less than the commissions you receive from the affiliate partners and pocketing the difference.

It's well worth the $25 subscription fee. Visit their site to subscribe.