Archive for May, 2012

The Power of Affiliate Marketing with Coupons

The Power of Affiliate Marketing With Coupons
The following is a guest post by David Snape. David has been an online affiliate for over 9 years. He has run an E-commerce store for almost 3 years. He is also the author of two books on dental health. You can find David at The All Things Pondered blog: http://AllThingsPondered.com

There are a number of advantages to marketing with coupons. Here are a few key points.

1. You get to capture the ‘last minute’ sale. Many people have had the experience of buying a product online. You probably have too. Imagine this scenario, you are just about to buy a product when an idea suddenly hits you. At the last minute, just before you are about to hit the ‘pay’ or ‘buy’ button, you wonder if you might save a little money. Why not? If you can get the same exact product for less, so much the better!

You begin to search for a coupon. You perform a Google search for a coupon for the specific product that you want and you find a nice 10% savings on the product you were about to buy anyway.

Does this sound familiar to you? I know I have looked for a money saving coupon on numerous occasions. I am very confident that I am not the only one.

Now, imagine what this scenario would mean to two different affiliates. The first one does not have a coupon to offer. The second one does.

Of the two affiliates that were competing for this sale, would you rather be the original affiliate that brought the customer to the merchant’s site? Or, would you rather be the second affiliate, the one who’s link they clicked through last in order to save a few dollars via a coupon.

2. Exclusive coupons take the above scenario a step further. You might be able to work with your affiliate manager to get an exclusive coupon. This means that when the customer checks out using your coupon, you will get the credit for the sale regardless of who the last affiliate was that obtained the customer’s click.

I have personal experience with exclusive coupons and they are very helpful. The reason this situation came about for me is because I had been given some specific coupons to use. We discovered that other affiliates were using the same coupons to draw traffic to their sites. They were in fact, using my coupons for their sales.

The affiliate manager was able to make my coupons exclusive. When other affiliates ‘hijacked’ the coupons I was using it was no longer to their benefit. I would get the credit for the sale.

3. Have you noticed the popularity of coupon sites? If you do a simple Google search for ‘coupon sites’ you will find that many of them have very good Alexa rankings.

Even though Alexa rankings are only an estimate of traffic, these numbers show that coupon specific sites as well as ‘deal’ sites are generally seeing a lot of traffic. This high amount of traffic probably means that they are making a lot of sales. They are providing extra value to search engine customers and the search engines seem to favor these sites.

4. There are a significant number of people who actively seek out deals and coupons. There are even people who will typically NOT buy something unless they can find a coupon for it or a special deal on it. This may be why sites like Overstock and eBay are so popular. People want to save.

Sometimes, you will run across an extreme statement like the one I saw on a blog the other day. This person wrote: “I have vowed to never pay full retail for any product again.”

If you can’t offer this type of customer a coupon, you could miss out on a significant portion of available sales.

5. People love coupons. Sometimes you can sway someone into making a purchase simply because there is a coupon available. For example, have you ever, as a customer been pushed over the edge to buy simply because their WAS a coupon being offered?
If you are like me or most people, the answer is yes. Coupons are powerful motivators. Consider the popular Groupon site. They have grown into a billion dollar company through the psychological and practical power of coupons.

6. This last point will be very interesting to you as an affiliate. I can not guarantee that you will have the same experience on this point, because it involves the whims of a third party. You know this company well. It is called, Google.

Everyone knows that Google makes it very hard to advertise affiliate offers with Google Adwords. Google has been pretty hard on affiliates over the last several years.

I can personally attest that I have an affiliate coupon site that is working from AdWords today. In fact, I have noticed that a lot of coupon sites are redirecting customers through their affiliate links to merchant sites. Often times when you see a “click to use this coupon” button or link, it is an affiliate link they are sending you through.

Google seems to allow this type of affiliate site in their AdWords program simply because they are adding significant and often times unique value for those searching for coupons. If you do a little investigation through your favorite keyword research tool, you will find that there are many coupon related searches all over the Internet.

Personal Experiences

My personal experience with utilizing coupons in my marketing tends to validate that coupon marketing is beneficial. In addition, my experience is from a unique perspective because my company enjoys both affiliate revenue as well merchant revenue. In short, I have seen the power of coupons from both the affiliate side as well as the merchant side.

There are people who will tend not to buy unless they can get a discount of some kind. A significant number of shoppers will look for coupons before they buy.

I have watched my affiliate revenues grow from coupons. My very first coupon was a product specific one. It worked great. There did come a day when we had to modify the coupon terms because it was too much of a good deal, but the sales continued even after that. Without a coupon we would have just been another affiliate who offered nothing but a review. Adding the coupon made a significant difference in sales for us.

From a merchant perspective, I have seen one of my best affiliates make sales by advertising a coupon for our site on Google. In fact, I have noticed that a lot of affiliates have coupon sites or deal sites of their own.

Coupon Marketing Is Powerful

I hope that I have convinced you that coupons are powerful or reinforced the concept if you already were aware of this fact. Many affiliates throughout the world are cashing in on the stable and long lasting phenomenon known as coupons.

Now it is your turn to take advantage of the natural psychological state of buyers and utilize it for your own benefit. If you are not currently marketing with coupons, you might want to start right away.

Note from Luke

PeerFly does not have affiliate coupons. We have affiliate offers that have coupons or discounts built into our landing pages, but no coupons specifically setup for affiliates.

CPA Discussion on Affiliate Forum CPAFix.com

cpafix affiliate forum

Last year I did an interview with Oliver Kenyon from CPAFix.com and since then CPAFix has grown into a real competitor in the affiliate marketing forum space. Just last week they passed 2,000 members and as of right now they have 2,212. There are about 1,500 threads and about 13,000 posts. Pretty impressive numbers! Well, earlier this week Oliver released an all new CPAFix with an awesome new layout.

cpafix CPA Discussion on Affiliate Forum CPAFix.com

I like this new layout quite a bit because it’s a lot ligher than the last one. Everything blends together a lot better and it just makes the overall experience a lot smoother when reading through the threads and posting. Besides the cool new layout, CPAFix also added some new features including a blog and some affiliate marketing tools.

CPAFix Blog

To be honest, I am not sure what I think of the new CPAFix blog. Right now there are only two posts on it, but I’m not sure if I see it really taking off. I suppose of Oliver can get some of the other members of the forum to contribute to it then it might be useful, but then again, it’s that the point of the forum? :)

CPAFix Tools

I am much more excited for the CPAFix tools than I am the blog. The new tools feature has four different affiliate marketing tools available:

  • Landing Page Generator
  • Banner Generator
  • Google Exact Results Tool
  • Link Cloaker

The actual quality of the tools could be improved in my option, but I do like the direction they are going. Tools are critical to any affiliate’s success so having these at your exposure could be very useful.

I am pretty good friends with Oliver, so I asked him for a statement on the CPAFix relaunch and the future of the site.

The reason behind the relaunch was because I always saw the potential behind the idea, I have never envisioned CPAFix as a forum although to many that WAS the basis of the site. To me it was always going to be a complete “platform” and resource for everything affiliate marketing, so the time was right to expand the site and get serious. Adding the blog, tools, resources and so much more goes hand in hand with the future expenditure of the project and enables us to open up so many more doors, we are far from done. I know now the hard work starts and I have pledged my all to the project and will not rest until I remain as the number one affiliate hub online.

The real value in CPAFix is definitely in the discussions going on in the forum. As their affiliate forum continues to grow so will the overall value of it. There are some very smart people contributing and there are some very good discussions going on. If you’re not already a member, you should definitely check it out and consider joining. I’m a Moderator so you’ll definitely see me on there!

Getting started with Media Buying

getting started with media buys

Last week I was lucky enough to attend Affiliate Summit Central and while I was there I met quite a few new interesting people. Without a doubt, the most interesting person I met was a guy named Max from WhatRunsWhere.com. Max is the COO of WhatRunsWhere and he was invited to ASC to have a sit down with attendees and discuss media buying. Prior to my discussion with Max, I did not have a whole lot of knowledge about media buying. I’ve done a few small media buys for PeerFly and I have a lot of publishers who make good money doing media buys, but to be honest, it just wasn’t something that I had given a whole lot of thought or research. Max, on the other hand, knows pretty much everything there is to know about media buying and he was nice enough to share a lot of information with me, which I am going to now share you with you.

What is a Media Buy?

A media buy is simply what it sounds like, buying media. You purchase advertising on a website or network of websites for a set time or budget. For example, you could email me and offer to buy the 300×250 banner placement on the right side of this post for $250 for a month. You are purchasing that media placement at a set rate for a set time. Often with media buys you will purchase the space at a set CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). In that case, you would pay maybe $3.00 for every 1,000 times you banner is viewed (not clicked). Sounds good, but why is a media buy better than just buying some traffic on AdWords?

Benefits of a Media Buy

There are a lot of benefits to doing a media buy as an affiliate marketer. With most media buys you can get a direct link approved. So, if the advertiser has put together a great converting landing page there will be no need to put in the time and money to getting your own landing page together to presell the offer. There’s also a huge opportunity to scale.

Depending on the site you are doing you are media buy on, there may be a great opportunity to scale your campaign and get a lot of traffic. Not to compare apples to oranges, but one big issue a lot of my publishers are having with 7Search is simply scaling their campaigns. You work hard to get something to work and then there isn’t a huge opportunity to scale. With most media buys, that will not be a problem. For example, let’s say you do a media buy on E! Online. A similar demographic of user may be an avid reader of Perez Hilton and TMZ.com. You can test their display traffic with a media buy, grab more of their inventory with a higher CPM, and scale through the roof.

Risks of a Media Buy

With most direct media buys you’re probably going to have to sign an insert order for traffic and it can cost anywhere from $5,000 – $50,000+. Obviously, there’s a lot of risk in simply handing over $5,000+ for some traffic that you aren’t 100% sure is going to convert for you. When I was talking to Max at ASC12 he said it’s really important that you pay close attention to the terms setup within the IO (insert order). Some terms will require you to use your entire spend (no refunds). If you run $1,000 worth of impressions and it’s not working out you definitely need to have the opportunity to get your balance back.

Also, with a media buy you may run into issues with getting placements updated or removed. If you’re running a set of banners on a site and the offer those banners is going to goes down you need to be able to switch out your creatives and update your links. If you are stuck doing this through an account manager then by the time everything is updated you could have wasted thousands of dollars. Max said at his peak he was running media buys generating over a million dollars a month in revenue and he would spend 18 hours a day monitoring his campaigns because if something went wrong he could easily lose $5,000+. It would be to your advantage to start small before you attempt anything on that scale and luckily there are some great places to do your own media buys with a much lower barrier of entry.

How can you do a Media Buy?

Setting up your own media buy is actually pretty easy. You can try doing a direct media buy with a website owner or you can go through a network that brokers out the display traffic of other websites. For my next media buy I plan to go through a network. Specifically, I plan to use SiteScout.

SiteScout is the #1 Demand Side Platform for the Data-Driven Media Buyer! We Are Experts in Online Display Advertising, Real-Time Bidding, Behavioral Targeting, and Ad Serving!

I’ve had many people tell me SiteScout is a great company to work with so they are going to be the company I use to setup a media buy case study (to be posted later). They have billions of impressions in their inventory and a wide range of websites you can buy media on. They also appear to have a knowledgable and helpful team. The minimum deposit is $500, which is higher than your average self serve ad platform, but it’s also pretty cheap compared to some of the other media buy platforms I’ve look at. If you’re interested in using a network to do a media buy I suggest you take a look at them!

As I mentioned, I plan to do a case study on my next media buy using SiteScout, so keep your eye out for that. I will mail it to my Affiliate Manager Exclusive subscribers first, so hop on my list if you aren’t on there already! :)

If you have any questions about media buying you are welcome to post them in the comments below or email me. Let’s make some money.

What are Postback Links and Conversion Pixels?

postback and pixel

As your affiliate marketing experience grows you will probably start running into issues with tracking all of your campaigns. When I am consistently running traffic I may have 5-10 campaigns going on 1-5 different traffic sources. If things are going well I’ll have thousands of clicks coming in every single day and in order to be able to properly manage those campaigns it’s likely I’ll use a 3rd party campaign tracking software. It gets even more confusing if you are using more than one affiliate network. I only use PeerFly so that makes things a little easier for me, but you might be split testing affiliate offers from 3+ different networks. So, you’re tracking software is tracking your clicks, but how do you track conversions? Well, you’ll need either a postback link or conversion pixel.

What is a postback link?

A postback link is a link your tracking software will provide you that you can place somewhere within your affiliate network and with it the network can ping your tracking software to let you know that you got a conversion. It sounds a bit confusing, but it’s actually very simple. After you’ve setup your postback link on PeerFly we will ping that link every time you get a conversion and that ping will add the conversion to your tracking software on your own server.

PeerFly/Prosper202 Tip
If you are using Prosper202 to track your conversions on your own server and want PeerFly to ping it when you get a conversion then you should remove everything after the gpb.php in your postback link. So, your link would look like this:
yourdomain.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php

Postback works really well, but another option is simply placing a pixel.

What is a conversion pixel?

A conversion pixel accomplishes the same exact thing as a postback link, but it works a little different. Both postback links and pixels will notify your server when you get a conversion, but with the pixel it simply adds an invisible image or iFrame to the advertiser’s conversion page. When that page loads (when the user is on the conversion page) your image or iFrame will notify your server that you got a conversion. Most advertisers prefer to use pixels and most campaigns we run on PeerFly are tracked using pixels. When you place your pixel on PeerFly it’s simply placed within our pixel. As I mentioned, there are two different types of pixels:

  1. Image Pixel
  2. iFrame Pixel

They work pretty much the same. Some advertisers prefer image and some prefer iFrame. If you have both options available I suggest just using the image.

Should I use the postback link or tracking pixel?

If your tracking software provides both a postback URL and a conversion pixel (Prosper202 does) I suggest using the postback. We have the option where you can place a global postback link on PeerFly, which means you only have to copy and paste your link in once and you’re all set for all of our offers. If you decide to use a conversion pixel, you will need to place that pixel on each offer within PeerFly. Also, some offers do not allow pixels to be placed on them. In that case, you have to use a postback URL anyway. You can always still place a tracking pixel if your traffic source uses one. For example, if you are using Prosper202 and setup a 7Search campaign you should still place their tracking pixel on your PeerFly account while using your postback link to track conversions on your tracking software.

That’s my quick rundown on postback links and conversion pixels. Of course, if you have any questions you are welcome to post in the comments below or contact me. Let’s get some campaigns up and making some money!

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