Partner Marketer

Richard Maven at UK-based  e-consultancy.com has a great interview with Jeff Molander up discussing topics such as analyzing ROI and customer quality at the affiliate level, tracking repeat business and more.

Here is an excerpt:

How do you feel affiliate marketing budgets might be affected if and when retailers move away from the ‘last click wins’ model?

Bottom line: This is where the action is — and things are just now beginning to heat up. Watch for companies like ValueClick taking all their performance-based media opportunities and roll them together for larger advertisers — using CPA affiliate networks like Commission Junction as an “indicator of purchase intent” in a more complex, yet highly predictable, shopper behaviour pattern.

Who wins on the publisher side? Those who provide the most value and the value game always comes down to actions.

Highly recommended.  Here is the link again.

-Ola

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Big news this morning.. Microsoft is launching an incentive portal and are opening up a CPA network.

In an attempt to generate more market share in the search space Microsoft has just launched a new cash back portal. You search for products and services featured on their cash back portal and get a certain percentage of each purchase back in cash. When your cash back balance has reached $5.00 you can redeem it.

As an example a Canon Powershot A470 digital camera is featured on the home page with most stores offering 2-5% cash back to consumers. Featured merchants include Home Depot, Barnes and Nobles, Circuit City, Sears, Overstock, New Egg, Office Max and others.

They also launched their brand new CPA network. Advertisers can advertise their products with a cash back offer and only pay for generated customers.

The cpa network is currently available to businesses that are:

• Headquartered in the United States
• A retail site with e-commerce capabilities
• Able to fulfill the physical shipment of a product
• Able to create and maintain a product data feed
• Able to implement a standard tracking pixel on your website’s order confirmation page

There is no open self-service sign up so to get started you have to fill in a form or talk to your existing Microsoft account executive.

Will this work? Microsoft is definitely going to get a fair amount of market share from discount buyers and consumers already interested in cash back offers. Is it the silver bullet they are looking for? Not likely.

It’s an impressive launch for sure and will be intriguing to test and follow for anyone remotely interested in affiliate programs and incentive-based shopping.

What do you think? Will it be a hit with consumers?

-Ola

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You probably did not miss the news that Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo this spring. It didn’t work out because Yahoo didn’t feel like getting bought.

But the most interesting piece of information coming out of the negotiations was this: Yahoo Search Marketing and Yahoo Publisher Network are two divisions that are now hanging very loose internally within Yahoo. Why? Yahoo decided to test outsourcing the search monetization to Google giving them approximately 3% of their inventory.

The test was hugely successful according to leaked reports in the press.

This means that Yahoo would make MORE money by outsourcing all of their search monetization to Google and scale back internal staff even after giving Google 10-15% of the gross.

Why is this? In order of importance:

1. Google has more advertisers.
2. Google has better targeting technology.
3. Google has a better system in place to get minimum bids out of their advertisers.

It’s not unlikely that YSM, YPN or both won’t be around much longer… an ad deal between Yahoo and Google could come any week now.

Hats off to Google of course for doing a great job making money.

But isn’t it sad that Google Adwords could be pretty much the only game in town for search marketing this fall?

-Ola

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