Kevin Lee, [email protected] 1-800-601-4181 © 2005 Did-it.com Leveraging Affiliate Marketing...

Kevin Lee, [email protected] 1-800-601-4181 © 2005 Did-it.com

Leveraging Affiliate Marketing Programs to Drive More Sales and the Complex Search Landscape

Presented byKevin LeeExecutive Chairman, Co-Founder, Did-it.com, LLC.


What is Did-it

Jupiter Research Rated Did-it #1 of top SEM’s based on Business Value & Market Suitability.

Did-it.com. Founded as an organic optimization firm but now focused entirely on paid listings, Did-it.com received the second highest client satisfaction rating of any agency evaluated and the highest score for market suitability. Did-it.com’s willingness to customize its Maestro tool for large marketers has helped it attract a top-notch client list, and allowed it to private-label its technology for many conventional agencies.


Who is Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee, Did-it.com Co-Founder & Executive Chairman is an acknowledged search engine marketing expert. Kevin has translated his search expertise into proven PPC search success strategies and Did-it’s proprietary Maestro search campaign technology. The technology and strategies combine to give clients of Did-it a dramatic advantage in the paid search marketplace. Kevin’s weekly column for JupiterMedia's ClickZ is read by thousands as are his contributions to Catalog Age Magazine and DMNews.

Kevin is a founding board member and the current Chairman of SEMPO, and also serves on the Search Council for the Association for Interactive Marketing and the IAB Search Committee. Kevin is regularly quoted by the news media including the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the New York Times, CNET, USA Today, and the San Jose Mercury News.


What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially a performance based (commission based) relationship with online sites and marketers.

• More like Sales, less like Marketing

• Some Affiliates are publishers

• Other Affiliates are arbitrageurs


Affiliates and B-to-C and B-to-B

Most affiliate marketers are B-to-C paying on a revshare.

B-to-B marketing and affiliates generally don’t work well due to the sales cycle and the fact that paying on leads encourages cheating.

What do you pay on?

1. Immediate revshare

2. New customer acquisition bounty

3. Co-Branded portal arrangements


Care and Feeding of Affiliates

Recruiting and managing affiliate relationships can be a full time job.

Affiliate publishers have a limited inventory and so must decide whether to allocate that inventory to you or sell it or sign up for an ad network.


Affiliate Activity Tracking Options

Use a ASP

• Commission Junction / Linkshare

Use affiliate software

• Kowabunga

Use Tracking or Analytics Software

• Ad Tracking/Serving or Web Analytics


Affiliate Publishers and Organic Search Marketing

• Affiliates build content in an attempt to get free organic traffic

• Many affiliate sites building pages generate “spammy” sites with poor user experience.

• Engines constantly attempt to purge the spammy sites.

• Duplicate content can cause SEO penalties.


Organic SEO and WebServices:

Webservices, Product Data Feeds … a boon to organic SEO.

The GoogleDance can be deadly. Recent algorithmic changes seem to center around duplicate content.

Marketers providing feeds to affiliates to experiment with SEO have reaped huge rewards, but most affiliates using feeds will in fact feed off the tail of the search distribution.

Brands have the power to generate effective SEO closer to the head of the search curve.


Affiliate Arbitrage and Paid Search Marketing

• Affiliates risk their own media dollars

• They compete with you and with your channel as well as with your competition

• Domain display rules don’t allow for direct links to more than one player

• Some affiliates build mini-sites purely to arbitrage search

• Brand keywords deliver the highest potential ROI for arbitrageurs.


Affiliate Arbitrage and Power of Search Marketing

• Voluntary, audience-driven search.

• Seeking information

• Searchers have selected your listing from among competitors.

• “Hunt mode” not simply browsing around the web.

• Openness to persuasion and ideas

• Unique type of media can drive profits


Search Engine Landscape: Market Share of the Portals

How you measure market share determines results

The winners are clear, Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL.


The Searcher Experience ReviewedIn Google, the top paid or organic results get lots of

attention. Did-it.com/Enquiro/Eyetools Eyetracking Study February, 2005


Why SEM/SEO Strategy Matters:

SEM and SEO are a zero-sum game.

Only one marketer gets the maximum value. The system is Darwinian.

You need to be there early or drive your brand into the consideration set before the decision has been made.

No single strategy will work for every marketer.

What’s your strategy? Do affiliates fit in?


Who are you bidding against?

Do you feel like bid prices in PPC search have gotten out of control?

Are there some marketers you bid against that don’t seem to care about ROI?

Do you find yourselves exasperated by PPC search?


PPC Auctions, Two Types at the TOP:

There are only two kinds of marketers at the top of the PPC search results:

• Brilliant Marketers

• Total Lunatics

The key to successful paid search marketing is to figure out how to either:

a) Be the brilliant marketer that can afford a top position

b) Deal effectively with the total lunatics


Are you Running a Search Marketing or Search Sales Campaign?

Most marketers run a search engine sales campaign, not a search engine marketing campaign.

Take an integrated marketing perspective on SEM, it will allow you to do things you could not do as a search engine sales generator

The marketers at the top will often be taking a holistic view of search.


Affiliate keyword arbitrage is Search Engine Sales

There is a right way and a wrong way to empower affiliates to engage in PPC search.

Know the opportunity cost of outsourcing risk and reward.

Controlled chaos beats complete anarchy.

Have a strategy based on the numbers because no one strategy works for eveyone.


SEM and the Buying Cycle

DoubleClick comScore study:The number of searches leading up to the purchase varied by category. Buyers on sports/fitness sites conducted 2.5 relevant searches; apparel buyers made 4.7 relevant searches; computer hardware buyers, 4.9, and travel buyers averaged six relevant searches in the 12 weeks before their transaction.



Overture comScore study:The study of consumer electronics shoppers found that “83.3% of CE/C shoppers initiate their research with a broad term, suggesting the Web is a key resource early in the buy cycle.”

If you believe that exposure and branding are important then consider this study when looking at immediate conversion data.



Campaign Goals and Objectives should line up with the profile of the searcher.

While longer phrases tend to be further down the cycle, short ones may be as well, brands, products, etc.


Strategic Tuning:

Do you want to?

• Jump in at final stage keywords only (as an affiliate running a search sales strategy would)

• Work on building momentum throughout the buying cycle

• Take into account offline purchase behavior (difficult to measure)

• “branding effect” when buying keywords


Better Creative: Titles and Descriptions

1. Different strategies for different engines2. Editorial guidelines are different3. Types of searcher are different4. Length of title different5. Description length different6. Placement on page differs7. Fonts may change8. Truncation may occur9. Domain name many not be visible


Creative Strategies: Google #2

Better technologies help you blow out broad keywords:

• Creative Optimization (more compelling)

• Breaking out the top broad matches and writing the tuned ads is KILLER

Example: Keyword “discount vacation” on broad match will deliver a basket of keyword traffic. Which of those deserve a separate AdGroup or landing page?


Insertion Orders and Budget Caps:

Who in the audience is setting a daily budget cap in Google to manage to a specific budget?


Insertion Orders and Budget Caps:

DO NOT Set Budget Caps too low:

a) Google or the Overture will kill high ROI

b) Take control through technology

c) Cut back on poor ROI terms

d) Inventory predictions are usually wrong

1) Assumed CTRs

2) Assumed search volume

3) Assumed levels of competition


Track AND Optimize at the keyword level:

Over emphasis on tracking is like driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror:

a) Track at the keyword level

b) Act at the KW level, tune campaigns

c) Right level of attention

1) Competition and Volatility

2) Upside Potential

3) Potential for Waste


Averages will kill a campaign & your business:

Using historical averages have little bearing on the current marketplace:

a) Look at directional trends

b) Drill down by time of day, day of week

c) Fine tune a campaign

Don’t let a portfolio approach hide listings that are actually un-profitable but look profitable when averages are used.


Profit Maximization

To maximize profit, you must:

1) Buy the best clicks first

2) Keep buying clicks until you maximize profits

3) Take into account offline media and PR

4) Build a simple media model for your online media


Profit Maximization Elasticity Modeling:

With Overture and Google, you trade off incremental profit for order volume. Total profit is more important:

Option #1: 10,000 clicks at $.50 CPC = $5000

$1000 Total Profit.

Option #2: 50,000 clicks at $.53 CPC = $26500

$3500 Total Profit.


Creative Strategies: Landing Pages

Test landing pages as a lift in conversion

• Ambiguous listings have multiple good landing pages. Which one works best?

• Change the offer

• Change image, navigation choices, merchandising, copy length, headline

Small lift in landing page conversion is a huge lift in efficiency. The multiplier effect works both ways.


Function lift & Accumulated lift

0

10%15%

20%

10%5%

10%15%

20%100% 110%127%

152%167% 175%

193%222%

266%

0%5%

10%15%20%25%30%35%40%45%50%

0%

50%

100%

150%

200%

250%

300%Function lift

Accumulatedlift

A variety of paid search strategies combine to grow profits


Conclusion:

Paid Search Marketing is a win lose game.

Your competition are going to engage in SEM or SEO, and probably are already doing so.

Search is part of an integrated marketing plan because of how it fits into the buying cycle.

Questions? e-mail Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman, Did-it.com. [email protected]

Kevin Lee, [email protected] 1-800-601-4181 © 2005 Did-it.com Leveraging Affiliate Marketing...

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Transcript of Kevin Lee, [email protected] 1-800-601-4181 © 2005 Did-it.com Leveraging Affiliate Marketing...