Knowing how well your marketing campaigns are doing is vital to the survival of an affiliate marketer. Without the proper information on where campaigns are succeeding or failing, it will be impossible to know where adjustments need to be made. This is true all year round, but is especially poignant during the holiday season, as the smallest error can be extremely costly.

According to Steven Leung,

“Estimating unique visitors is today’s most popular measurement of a site’s popularity and success. And marketers can easily use this metric to measure the popularity of their campaigns.”

With this in mind, it is important for affiliates to establish metrics for campaigns that can give them important data on success and failures. This will lead to common goals for all campaigns, which is the Conversion Ratio. Goals for Conversion Ratios will be different for everyone, depending on the product being marketed, but knowing what percentage of your visitors are actually converting into sales will show affiliates where to adjust their campaigns to help them reach their goals.

Share Results’ software is equipped with reports that can track impressions, clicks, and conversion rates to measure every aspect of a campaign. Affiliates can also take advantage of Share Results tools such as the ACID feature which the affiliate can use to track the performance of any keyword for their campaign.
If a site isn’t getting many page views, then affiliates will want to explore ways of generating traffic. Similarly, if a site is getting a lot of visitors, but few clicks, then looking into a change in creatives would be worthwhile.

Email affiliates have to measure how often their emails are being viewed, how often their links are being clicked and then how many people actually purchased based on those emails. Measuring Deliverability, Open Rate, and Click Through rates will help to measure if you are reaching your target audience and where to make changes, if necessary.

Being armed with the right statistics is the key to successful campaigns. Lord Kelvin said that,

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.”

Knowing where campaigns need work, will help affiliate marketers to adjust their campaigns to become more successful in the future.

We’re seeing green and red! This can only mean that Santa’s Ornament Shop has gone live in Share Results!

Santa’s Ornament Shop offers the largest selection of personalized Christmas ornaments available online. These ornaments have been hand selected for their quality and uniqueness so that the selection always meets the needs of anyone looking for that perfect inexpensive gift for even those who seem to have everything.

With something for everyone, affiliates can easily promote Santa’s Ornament Shops’ 3,000+ ornaments to visitors looking for the perfect Christmas gift. Customers who purchase will also enjoy free shipping on their orders of 5 items or more, adding just the right touch for the holiday season.

The site also features three very popular traffic generating fun activities (Disco Santa, Gingerbread E-Card and Birthday Cake E-Card) to which affiliates can direct their traffic if they choose.

Placements permitted in this program include:

• Banner Creative
• Text Ads
• PPC/Search Marketing (For more info please click here: http://www.shareresults.com/local_affiliate_desc.php?mid=17280)
• Coupons
• Email
• Newsletter
• E-Cards
• Incentivized
• Deep Linking
• Direct Linking
• 120-day Cookie
• Targeting US and CAN customers

Commission Offer
As a new affiliate to the Santa’s Ornament Shop affiliate program, you will earn 12% commission on all verified sales.

Special Launch Promotions
For every location an affiliate places one of Santa’s Ornament Shop banners (including links to the e-cards) affiliates will earn a chance in a drawing to win one of three $100 cash prizes. New affiliates must email SOS with their banner locations to qualify.

Affiliates also have the opportunity to earn up to 15% commission on sales during the month of December.

-Affiliates who refer between 25 and 49 sales: 1% bonus per sale 25 and over

-Affiliates who refer between 50 and 99 sales: 2% bonus per sale 50 and over

-Affiliates who refer over 100 sales: 3% bonus per sale for all sales

*As calculated at the end of December. An affiliate can only earn one of the three bonus structures based on their overall sales volume.

Join the affiliate program today to take full advantage of these exclusive affiliate promotions expiring December 31st, 2009.

If you are retail affiliate with a strong family audience and/or are a PPC or coupon affiliate, you are an ideal partner for this affiliate program!

For more info or to join, please visit: http://www.shareresults.com/local_affiliate_desc.php?mid=17280

According to a recent article from eMarketer.com, the No. 1 metric of success for the marketing and sales managers polled was the number of new customers acquired. Lead generation and increased sales were also tracked by more than two-thirds of respondents.

This holiday season, it will be more of challenge than ever for retailers to attract new customers to both brick and mortar and online stores. That is not meant to imply that there will not be shoppers. In fact, Marketing experts National Retail Federation (NRF) have predicted that the holiday sales for 2009 will see flat growth largely due in part to the recent recession and consumers being much more money conscious.

So, there will likely be a bevy of shoppers this season, but a post-recession, research savvy new breed of shoppers, best described as the selective consumer. That means that this season, more than ever, it is important to stand out, and make educated decisions about where advertising money should be spent.
That means operators will have to roll out customized promotions that are tailored to their customers. More significantly, it means that the operators who can forge a relationship with their customer base will be those who succeed this Q4.

“Marketers have been aware of the effectiveness of building relationships and trust with content since long before the Internet,”

said Gordon Plutsky, director of marketing and research at King Fish, in a statement.

“Technological change has rapidly increased media channel options and the patterns of information consumption among consumers. More and more marketers are abandoning old media—and traditional advertising—to venture out on their own with original content.”

The marketers studied in the eMarketer.com article considered their corporate Website the best method for achieving their top goal of reaching prospective customers. Social media and custom content and media were not far behind.

As the shift into more in depth consumer research continues, this season will see more value shoppers who will browse research and compare products on the Internet using Social media. Consumers are using social media more to search for deals and coupons via Twitter and Facebook, so marketers may want to channel more resources into that avenue.

For more techniques, tools, tips and great resources to make sure you’re getting every last drop out of your affiliate marketing campaigns, be sure to come back to the Share Results blog (http://blog.shareresults.com/). Until November 27, Share Results (www.shareresults.com) is throwing a big Holiday Blogging Event, packed with all kinds of seasonal information regarding trends for Q4, tips to get the best deals, consumer trends and how best optimize your affiliate marketing campaigns.

It’s week two of our Holiday Blogging Event, and in our last blog of the week, we ask, what one incentive do online consumers want more than anything else?

According to Forrester Research, 75% of customers prefer to shop with an online retailer that offers this incentive, and The Conference Board Survey supports these same findings, reporting that 90% of consumers say this would also entice them to spend even more online.

The incentive here is free shipping. It’s an attractive enticement, and most consumers have come to expect it, especially around the peak holiday season.

Many merchants debate whether offering free shipping or a discounted purchase price will be more attractive to the consumer. David Bell, marketing professor at the Wharton School observes that

For whatever reason, a free shipping offer that saves a customer $6.99 is more appealing to many than a discount that cuts the purchase price by $10.

Bell also concludes that 60% of online retailers cite “free shipping with conditions” as their most successful marketing tool.

So why is a free shipping offer so important to an online retailer?

• 78% of online customers say that exorbitant shipping costs discourage them from online purchases. (Source: E-tailing Group, 2008)
• 75% of people prefer to shop with online retailers that offer free shipping, compared to 61% in 2007. (Source: Forrester Research, 2008)
• 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges. (Source: Paypal, comScore, 2008)
• 61 of the largest 100 online retailers offered free shipping as of the week of Monday, November 10, 2008. (Source: Internet Retailer)
• 90% of respondents say free shipping offers would entice them to spend more online. (Source: The Conference Board Survey, 2008)
• 72% of consumers say that if an e-commerce site eliminated free shipping, they would use another e-commerce site that did offer free shipping. (Source: comScore Survey, 2008)
• People are searching for ‘free shipping’ earlier in the Christmas shopping season, and for longer. Searches for free shipping began to rise in October of last year, and actually peaked in the first week of January. (source: eConsultancy.com, 2009)

Need more reasons to offer free shipping this holiday season? Check out Free Shipping.org for a list of retailers who are incorporating this incentive into their marketing strategy—and succeeding!

Is your affiliate marketing campaign ready for the holiday season? If not, this is the blogging event to get you ready for the busiest season of the year. Check out last week’s blogs, and make sure to tune in again next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday for more tips and techniques to help you end Q4 with your most successful campaign yet!

If PPC is part of your affiliate marketing campaigns, (and it should be!) then the Affiliate Custom ID (ACID) Tool is a great feature of the Share Results software that you should become familiar with.

What is the ACID Tool?
The ACID Tool is a Share Results software feature that allows you to add a custom parameter to your links to enable more detailed tracking at the transaction level, and to track the traffic that you are generating directly to a merchant’s website.

What is the Benefit of Using the ACID Tool?
The great thing about using the ACID Tool is that you will be able to instantly identify which keywords are working for you. This information will allow you to tweak your future PPC campaigns, ensuring that you are getting the greatest return on your investment.

Where Do I Access the ACID Tool?
To access the ACID tracking, (1) go to the Share Results Banner Manager, (2) select your campaign, (3) select your creative and (4) add a unique identifier in the addACID text box and click on update.

How Do I Implement the ACID Tool?
Implementing the ACID requires that the additional parameter and value be added at the end of the standard affiliate link.

1) When you create your ACID link in Share Results, it will look like this:
http://www.shareresults.com/t/url.php/cid/[cid]/sid/[sid]/acid/[ACIDtracking]

[cid] = is the banner id generated automatically by Share Results
[sid] = is the site ID supplied by Share Results that identifies the affiliate
[acid] = can be your keyword or an alphanumeric value supplied by the affiliate

2) For the tracking to be PPC compliant, you need to modify the tracking to the following:
http://www.shareresults.com/t/url.php?cid=[cid]&sid=[sid]&acid=[ACIDtracking]
And note, when you are tweaking your tracking (in point 2 above), that you are adding “?”, “=” and “&”. This will ensure that your tracking is PPC compliant.

I Have my Affiliate Custom ID, Now What?
Once you’ve created your ACID, you need to add this URL to the destination URL in your PPC campaign. The keyword that generated the sale will now show up in the Transaction Report of Share Results. To view the ACID, look at your Affiliate CID column, shown below.

Are you getting ready for Q4… and the upcoming holiday season? It’s the perfect opportunity to start using the ACID tool. Log into your Share Results account and get set up with the ACID Tool by implementing this tracking to your PPC campaigns today! Have questions, need assistance getting started? Contact jamie at shareresults.com—he’d be pleased to help!

Slowly but surely, Bing is building more bang.

For the third month in a row, Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing gained a slight increase in the U.S. search market. Accounting for 9.3% of U.S web searches for the month of August, a .4% increase from its July share of 8.9%, Bing continues to gain market share from its giant competitor, Google.

Similar data indicates that Google remained the leader of the U.S. search and advertising market with a 64.6% market share in August; this down 0.1% from July. Yahoo also dipped from a 20.1% market share to 19.3%.

While comScore reports on Bing’s rising popularity, it still finds that most Google users are still turning to old-faithful. That being said, Bing’s steady rise does present an attractive opportunity to affiliates who might be ready to try their optimization hand with another search engine, which for the time being remains less popular, but perhaps less competitive as well.

Here is what our experts recommend for affiliates that want to experiment with Bing to get more traffic:

1. Experiment with PPC on this engine to test the ‘keyword waters’. How does your keyword performance compare with your current Google campaign or past campaigns you have run?

2. If you own multiple sites you might want to create a site specifically optimized for Bing – remember that this may take some time to determine its success, so be prepared to invest 6-12 months on this project.

3. Set-up your additional affiliate marketing ID’s in your affiliate account to track traffic results and conversions. In Share Results you can create additional site profiles and track performance of specific key words using the ACID ID Tool. Speak to your affiliate manager to learn how you can set this up today!

4. Set-up monitor tools to monitor site performance with your favorite third part analytics account.

Here are some recommendations for merchants wanting to build their business with Bing:

1. Suggestions 1 & 4 that that we made for affiliates above, are equally important for merchants, plus:

2. Make sure your affiliate program is set up to support Bing. Have creatives such as text links featuring products that you think would work well with Bing (for example, your target consumers who would be using Bing), and clear policies about PPC.

By all reports, Bing is doing well—very well. Its user friendly and attractive design and useful way of sifting through information is, if nothing else, turning heads. Who knows if those heads will stay permanently glued to Bing, but the potential is definitely there.

Are you on board with Bing? We want to know!

The Bing search engine was launched by Microsoft in June 2009 and was followed in July by a search tie-up with rival Yahoo .

If you are an affiliate looking to promote products associated with a charitable cause this fall, you may want to consider partnering with T-Shirtmonster.ca. This October, the online t-shirt retailer is working in affiliation with the Breast Cancer Society of Canada to offer fully customizable t-shirts in honour of Breast Cancer Awareness month. ”The Breast Cancer Society of Canada is a registered, national not-for-profit,  charitable organization dedicated to funding Canadian breast cancer research into the detection, prevention,  treatment and to ultimately find a cure for the disease that women fear most.” If you have Canadian traffic, T-Shirtmonster.ca is a great way to promote to your potential customers north of the border who are in favour of this type of non-profit initiative.

Read More…

If this is your first time here, OR if you just happen to be looking for about 50 mini reviews of Big Affiliate Marketing blogs…then check out the BAMroll and let us know what you think!

I present the following worthy additions to our blogroll:

• PPC Blog is pretty self-explanatory. The very qualified blogger writes about search marketing trends and business, adwords optimization, Baidu and Yahoo search marketing, second-tier PPC strategies, SEO, and social media marketing.
• Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog is written by Matt, but that’s all we know about who he his. We know what he does though: write about advertising, creatively…and usefully!

May they inspire you to download the OPML file on the BAMroll page, and/or grab a badge.

BAMroll, get your BAMroll! It’s Thursday, and we have a couple of useful blogs for you to check out. Without further ado, here are reviews the latest posts of the latest BAMrollers. I hope they motivate you to keep reading!

• Daily Marketing Tips includes a post on Direct Marketing-4 Comprehensive Ways to Excel at Marketing.  You can download a free guide with more details on the blog, or just check out the post itself. (Yes, free!) Here is a summary:
  • have a good sales pitch
  • dress sharp
  • communicate well
  • present your best features.

• SEM Geek posts on Why the “WHAT” Is More Important Than the “HOW” in PPC Marketing.” The suggestion is that anyone can create a PPC campaign, but to develop a successful PPC campaign requires a deep knowledge of the product or service being promoted. As this marketing channel gets more attention, smarts matter more than skills.

For daily updates, download the OPML file on the BAMroll page. We also have badges.

On the heels of the highly successful Project Working Moms… And Dads, Too! campaign, eLearners is now offering affiliates the chance to promote a really great offer, which just kicked off the month of May. There’s no appearance on Tyra’s talk show in store for prospective students.   However, there is a wonderful chance for working moms to pursue an accredited certificate or degree online, while they continue to work full or part-time.

DegreesForWorkingMoms.com is perfect for any mom who is thinking about pursuing their education through on online program via a reputable academic institution. Affiliates who publish educational content or have sites geared toward working moms, will find success with this offer. Banners are available in a variety of sizes (125 x 125, 300 x 250, 120 x 600, 728 x 90 and more). In addition to niche creative and a landing page, email marketers may also be considered to promote this offer.

Read More…