I often quote a research paper that we produced, on Profit Sharing (read: Affiliate Marketing) as the model of the future for managing paid search. We have used some very sound economic & mathematical calculations to derive at these conclusion – and I have yet to meet a mathematician or economist who can refute the evidence presented in our special report. Linkshare is obviously listening…

This is a great honour, and bears testament to the fantastic team & technology that the company has built from our Cape Town offices. We were also the Commission Junction Winner for the Global Vision award last year.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the event in person in New York, but we will have representatives from the company there, and if anyone would like to meet with them, please fill in my contact form.

Update: Ok – I’m going to try and squeeze this trip in! See you there, hopefully!

Sam announced the acquisition on April Fools day, and given my silence after the announcement, this caused quite a bit of confusion – with some people believing that it was an elaborate hoax! Also, I’ve been very busy in London, just arrived back in Cape Town now – so writing has been a bit slow!

In short (read the links above for more information), incuBeta has acquired Revenews & CostPerNews and is establishing a network of sites called PlanetBeta focusing on thought leadership in the online marketing & revenue creation space. This is also part of a broader strategy for us to incorporate much of the content from blogs that our Group’s 100+ staff write on a regular basis, for various personal and company blogs such as GottaQuirk & Clicks2Customers Blog. As a part of this transition, there will be a lot of upgrades made to Revenews in particular, so stay tuned for all the action.

The focus is going to be heavily in creating a network of thought leaders in our global industry and creating a platform of diverse voices. Lots of exciting stuff to come – I wish Sam Harrelson all the best in making things happen!

I’m sitting in Hawaii at the moment, trying to absorb the fantastic time we had this past week, and hopefully going to have some much needed vacation hours. I won’t be blogging much, if at all for this next week – but after the posts this past week, I’m sure that’s acceptable!
Well, for those who were not at CJU 2006 in Santa Barbara, I’m pleased to announce that Clicks2Customers has picked up a 3rd Horizon Award, for Global Vision. Previously awarded only one other time, to eBay – and as I quoted Sir Isaac Newton on Monday, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. From CJ’s website:

The award for global vision is presented “to one client whose action, strategy and initiatives best reflect a commitment to realizing
the global potential of affiliate marketing”

Thank you to everyone at CJ for the recognition in this award!

I will be uploading the pics from CJ into my FlickR account, and will let post when they go up.

How to Go Global Panel:

Progressive Search Panel

I’m having problems uploading my pics.  I’ll update this post later with the pics.

From our internal numbers, we had begun to see the return rates of cookie’d users declining, with some of the
affiliate programs that we work with. We figured that there could be a number of possibilities relating to this, including, but not limited to:

A) Changes in online user’s behaviour (i.e. they tended to either purchase immediately or not)

B) Changes on the merchant’s side (not following up with email
marketing etc.)
C) Cookie Washing

In order to determine the extent of cookie washing, we decided to outsource the creation of an independent study to Ben Edelman, a known expert in this space. The main purpose of the report, was to provide Clicks2Customers with a detailed overview of the state of cookie- based tracking within online advertising/affiliate marketing.

This report was initially intended to be for internal purposes only, but we decided that it would best serve the industry if it was released, so this is exactly what we are doing. Ben Edelman has retained full editorial control over the work, as an independent party to this research (he is neither an affiliate nor a software provider).

The report is located here and my analysis of it is as follows: The scope of the report was limited only to cookie based tracking, and some/most networks do use alternative methods (session/URL, batch, etc). In many cases, a large portion (40-50% of the transactions, from our stats) occur on day 1. The tests that Ben conducted related to cookie erasure when the program was initiated, potentially the next day when a computer is restarted, or perhaps longer. It is unlikely that the first day cookies are erased in large numbers but potentially this erodes future return sales.

Merchants are theoretically able to take advantage of affiliate activity, when their users delete cookies with anti-spyware, but only in short term. In the long term affiliates would lower their media spend or even decide not to participate in campaigns, because of too low ROI. Thus, merchants on the one hand sometimes don’t pay pay when cookies are deleted, but on the other hand the overall sales volume decreases in the long term.

The findings are as expected – the larger and more prominent networks are being unfairly (in my opinion) targeted by anti-spyware/adware companies. This does however present the problem that affiliates are often not compensated enough by merchants for users that purchase, post cookie-erasure. If this trend continues, it will potentially undermine the hard work that affiliates put into marketing campaings.

Remember, affiliate networks typically get a cut of affiliate commissions, so it is in their best interest to ensure tracking compliance, however, given the fact that this piece of market intelligence has not been available up to now, I can understand why there has been a perceived complacency on their part. The main issue here is, that these anti-spyware providers tend to see 3rd Party cookies as a risk to the user, but as we all know, in almost all cases they are completely harmless.

My recommendation to affiliates networks is that they implement “Private Labelling” of their services for their clients, so that cookies can be placed by sub-domains which the merchants own (i.e. www.vinnylingham.com would CName www2.vinnylingham.com to the service provider’s server and then when that server wishes to cookie the user, it will not appear as a 3rd Party cookie, but as one placed by www2.vinnylingham.com).

Ben also discovered that Google’s tracking system works very well technically, and from our experiences, the tracking is very accurate – it is worth noting the system that they use, as outlined in the report. Based on this report, up to 43% of cookies are potentially being erased (on a weighted basis), post the initial session the user conducts. This is scary thought for affiliates and I’m sure that this report will spark a lot of debate – so please feel free to post comments on this blog.

Update: I neglected to mention that Ben also put together this nifty cookie calculator, which calculates potential losses from cookie washing.

I also spoke at the final session on “The Future of Online Marketing”, and Linus from e-Consultancy covered this topic and more from the event on their blog.

Also, Synthasite, which is another division of incuBeta, has just launched their new website & blog. Synthasite is built using AJAX and is considered to be one of the most advanced Thin Client technologies around website development around. Synthasite recently ended it’s Beta program and we’re putting the final touches on the product – so keep an eye out for when it launches.

Some other popular examples of the use of AJAX is Gmail & OddPost (which is soon to become Yahoo Mail’s new email client). We only begun to scratch the surface of what AJAX can offer – so best to keep abreast of these new technologies. AJAX is one of the main technologies used in the new “Web 2.0” era.

How can performance marketers (aka Affiliates) make money using AJAX? Well, by building applications like Widgets which drive traffic to websites which can then be monetized by using affiliate program! AJAX skills are in high demand (although Widgets can be built in other languages too), and this is a good opportunity to build all sorts of innovative widgets for companies before they are able to do it themselves. To this end, we are launching Widgetopia very soon to facilitate relationships between developers, merchants, end users & distributors with the hopes of creating a marketplace where creativity can flourish. And this (creativity) is the foundation of affiliate marketing…

The blog is located at:

http://blog.clicks2customers.com

RSS: http://blog.clicks2customers.com/atom.xml

incuBeta:

incuBeta is a South African company, with offices in Cape Town. We employ a total of 50 staff to work on different online technology products, services & companies such as Desktop Search Bars, Synthasite & Clicks2Customers. incuBeta develops the technology solutions that power the Clicks2Customers business.

Clicks2Customers:

Clicks2Customers is a US registered subsidiary company (100% owned by incuBeta, with a small satellite office in California) which operates as a Paid Search Engine Marketing Affiliate. This is a very specific team of about 25 people within incuBeta who work in, and fully understand the PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing arena. We are currently in the process of setting up UK offices as well. This is incuBeta’s most successful business to date. We work with a few, very select merchants to drive them over $100m/annum in sales via the Pay Per Click search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc.

Synthasite:

Synthasite is a Proprietary Web Development Platform which we have created to assist us, and other affiliates in deploying websites which are largely built around product feeds, such as MeetPersonals. We have just finished round 1 of our Beta testing program and Synthasite is definitely a long term project for us. It’s a unique piece of intellectual capital that competes head on with products like Dreamweaver, Frontpage and the like, and something that we believe to be far more efficient in building affiliate websites.

Other products:

incuBeta is always investigating new and exciting products in the Internet space, focusing primarily on B2C marketing, and consumer driven applications. Desktop Search Bars is simply a forerunner to a new project that we are launching very soon…