Transcript CCT356: Online Advertising and Marketing - cct356-w11

CCT356: Online
Advertising and
Marketing
Class 4: Affiliate Marketing
Admin
 Online ad campaign critiques due two weeks from now
– questions?
 Annotated bibliography coming along well – post to
page please
Affiliate Marketing
 Well before social networking technologies, the power
of leveraging contacts was understood and leveraged
 WOM monetized – on completion of referral (actual
purchase) referee would receive a small payment
The Internet is for porn
 As with much
online
marketing,
the adult
industry was at the
fore of early
innovation
 Other examples?
Early affiliate programs
 Amazon Affiliate program – allows individual users to
set up their own “mini-stores” on their sites/blogs
 Multiple points of presence, all centrally serviced –
drives content
 Good for small/independent publishers – challenges for
such groups?
Types of Reward
 Cost per acquisition
 Cost per lead
 Revenue sharing
 Cost per click
 All possible, depends what you’re trying to do
CPA
 As with online ad models, acquisition can be anything –
but it is a positive action (e.g., downloading a paper,
signing up to a mail list, buying a product)
CPL
 Sometimes, potential leads are enough
 Benefit to affiliates?
 Benefit to merchants?
 Example: HR recruiting
Revenue Sharing
 Benefits both merchant and affiliate
 Can be tiered to encourage and reward affiliates who
drive revenue – e.g., Amazon tiered rates example
CPC
 Simple clickthrough awarded
 Used early when infrastructure was less sophisticated
– used less used due to click fraud
 Could still drive a lot of traffic and awareness, but if
clicks are garbage, more traffic is a net loss
 Still handy though – e.g., blog traffic networks
Tracking
 Tracking URLs with specific start and end points
 URLs carry information – affiliation network, ID of
affiliate and merchant, other relevant information to a
given campaign
 Supported by cookies to track behavior for given period
of time determined by merchant
 Allows for tracking of success by merchant and affiliate
alike
Issues
 Case: affiliate clickthrough leads to exposure, but
conversation happens after cookie timeout or through
other means
 Cookie reputation – blocked or deleted cookies = no
tracking = no commission
 Offline purchasing = no easy way to track
 Mobile devices = different levels of cookie support
Affiliate Marketing Concerns
 Good affiliate marketing = supplying merchant ads that
are relevant to topic and focus of site
 Bad affiliate marketing = accepting any old ad, creating
a cacophony of advertising and no consistency
 Issues of competition – as an affiliate, you probably
don’t want to host ads to competitive sites
 Issues of stickiness – if affiliate program makes viewer
leave your site, not effective
Affiliate networks
 Amazon, Google etc have the resources to run their
own affairs
 Smaller companies use affiliate networks – middlemen
who collect potential merchants and affiliates and try to
make good matches
Setup considerations
 Clear identity of business identity, goals, market
 Clear identification of affiliate campaign goals – leads,
acquisitions, simple exposure?
 Run your own program or join network? If latter, what
are costs associated, benefits?
 Prepare data for feeding to affiliates – and provide
copy/banners for use (e.g., download Firefox banners –
designed by Firefox for consistent look/feel, ease of
use)
A note on MLM
 Multi-level marketing – a form of affiliate networking,
but a problematic one
 How it works – levels and trickle-up effect of
commissions
 Why are they problematic?
Next week
 Search Engine Optimization – Search Engine
Marketing