Dan Murray, Internet Marketing Strategist, Ravenwood Marketing
Tim Ash, President, Epic Sky and SiteTunes
Adam Viener, President, Imwave, Inc.
Mike Jacobs, Vice President – Products & Services, iMarketing Ltd.
Adam’s company IMWave builds landing pages and sites, as well as sending traffic directly to merchants.
Mike manages all the campaigns for iMarketing’s clients – HotJobs & New York times, as well as being an affiliate himself.
Tim’s company build a bid tool, BidGuard, and eventually realized how good their software was and used it to arbitrage instead of selling it. They eventually diversified into SiteTuners which optimizes sites for conversions.
Dan opens with some leading questions:
“How do PPC affiliates fit into the merchant’s programs?”
Mike hits the first part – PPC arbitrage – buying clicks cheap and sending them to the site and taking the risk on the click. Tim focuses on comparison sites on a CPC basis.
Arbitrage is defined by Mike as simply buying clicks cheaper than their average EPC (Earnings Per Click).
“What’s happening right now in the PPC world?”
Tim hits out at the AdSense arbitrage guys who build sites and buy clicks from Adwords. He makes the distinct definition of Click Arbitrage on a CPA/Rev Share basis, and an AdSense Arbitrage basis. I personally think that the model of buying Google clicks to send to Google AdSense ads is going to disappear as Google improves it Landing Page Algorithms for Adwords with the Quality Score.
Adam mentions that Google AdSense ads are on by default – which is what affects many advertisers, without them even knowing about it. Adam also notes that as part of the AOL-Google deal, AOL will receive their own search platform.
Tim also impresses the fact that Google is driving out Private Label sites with the same functionality & content as the original. If the sites have different content and functionality, they should be fine.
Mike forces home his views that Google are tampering with the Min CPC in the backend – I don’t quite buy his view on this, but he has seen rising Min CPC’s on good keywords in the past.
“Are any of you using the MSN Adcenter?”
“Microsoft needs to taken seriously” – that’s the word from Adam. He says with the launch of Vista, that MSN will become a serious player. There are much higher margins for affiliates right now, and MSN allows duplicate display URL’s.
“Should you let affiliates bid on your brands?”
There is a quote from the Marketing Manager at Travelocity in Revenue Magazine May Edition, which basically said that when Travelocity stopped affiliates from bidding on their trademarks, they saw a marked increase in the number of competitors ads and losing sales to their competitors on their own trademark terms. They have since changed their stance on trademarks.
Adam points out that merchants are now looking toward trusted affiliate partners to work with companies on trademark bidding. This topic got very interesting – and now we moved onto questions – so I’m going to shut my laptop and aggravate the speakers a bit ?
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