A suprising new ppc & conversation monitoring tool you have to try

I am always looking for new tools and services for both client and self to gain some intelligence into business. The other day I got an email from a long lost friend through Linkedin, she had a message of affordable intelligence. After a demo and presentation of The Search Monitor I could see dozens of ways this search monitoring tool could help me and my clients.

I was able to quickly get a few campaigns setup, lt takes about a day or so to start tracking everything, but on Day 2 I was surprised to see some data in there. I found violations, discussions on forums and more. Here are some highlights I wanted to point out about The Search Monitor:

• They can monitor an unlimited amount of social networks and blogs, if it has an RSS feed they can hook it in for you.
• Currently only monitors Google. Google regions and cities go live this month. Yahoo, MSN and few other by October.
• TheSearchMonitor can find affiliates that are linking directly to your site, through an affiliate link or other redirect.
• Daily email alerts. You don’t have to login to check on critical violations and alerts.
• Auto-affiliate detection by landing page (coming in September 08), Crawls to the destination page to automatically detect your affiliates and identify them in reports
• “Trusted Affiliates” for those affiliates that are above the law.
• $399 a month, Very reasonable

And of course I always come up with some cool ideas of my own. How could I use this?

• Great recruiting tool. What are your competitors doing or letting their affiliates get away with? No contact information is available but with some networking you can get around that!
• Use the tool to “price match”. Have a cut throat product and need to know when your competitors jockey their price?
• Test the local waters, you can easily see opportunity for products and services in the local markets

If you are interested in taking a look at it, contact me for a free 30 day trial of The Search Monitor. You won’t find mention of this on your website, email me I will put you in touch and get you taken care of.

09.Aug.08 Industry Blog Comments (0)

A plea for transparency, affiliates & networks need to give it up

“Transparency” in regards to affiliate marketing can go so many different ways. Affiliate networks are defining it from a managers/retailers point of view and opening up contact information and details about the affiliates. This enables an affiliate manager to make better choices on promotions, fraud prevention and helps keep the pulse of their program. What retailers are missing in some cases are true business plans and insight into what the affiliate is actually doing. Without the proper click tracking or analytics tools you literally could be getting traffic from any where in the world, from unsavory sources and causing your business more harm than good.

On the flip side, affiliates should be demanding some transparency from the merchants, as most are completely in the dark on a true conversion rate, keyword/coupon performance & other metrics. Not to mention affiliates are at the mercy of inventory, demand and competition. Of course there has to be some protection on key business strategies, but what is stopping merchants from providing some demographics and performance data so affiliates can invest their time and resources accordingly? Turn it into a white paper to help promote your affiliate program, affiliates will eat it up.

19.Jun.08 Industry Blog Comments (2)

Optimization of Monetization

I was looking over my google analytics account for one of my sites and the “Average Page View” rate jumped out at me as being insufficient. for the sake of needed a good example i’ll just tell you it was 2.35%. That means basically every visitor to my site is reading 2+ pages and then going somewhere else. It would be nice if they were all landing in the shopping cart through my affiliate link but my checks are telling me differently.

Analyze the data
I got into thinking about what I could do to 1) increase the amount of page views per visitor, 2) how to monetize every page view and 3) how to measure my successes and failures. My site’s traffic is all organic so looking at my analytics data is essential to really drive down into what they were looking for before landing on my site. I was surprised to find out over 90% came into the site from typing in a specific product name into a search engine. This excited me at first because I knew they were landing on the right (relevant) pages, but then quickly realized, I wasn’t retired yet. They weren’t buying.

Increasing the amount of page views per visitor for me is a technical challenge. Which I am undertaking. This is site is full of product reviews, hundreds of them. I was smart enough to include “buy now” buttons above and below the reviews but they went directly to the merchant. So a change is coming around that will link all buy now buttons in reviews to my store. I am hoping the change in redirection will help on the optimization side as well as the conversion rate (even though I am adding an extra click).

Make it easy to business with you, and they will do business with you.

Monetizing every page view is certainly unrealistic but optimizing your chances for a conversion is essential on every page. It’s not hard, make sure you have product information front and center, quality images, call to action and interactive components like reviews, newsletters, community, research, search box and anything else you can think of to satisfy the needs of your visitors. Make it easy to business with you, and they will do business with you. Of course doing all of this within the constraints of a quality, professional and trustworthy user experience.

Measuring this effort isn’t hard either, it’s the same metric affiliate networks use when reporting the success of program, Earnings Per Click. Clicks / Revenue = EPC. You could take it step further and create metrics like: Page Views / Revenue = Earnings Per Page View. And for you number nuts you can incorporate a jump script in which to measure affiliate site conversion .

Regardless of how you spin the numbers it’s important to offer your site visitors what they need. Looking at click paths, organic entry terms and site behavior you can begin to devise your website experience model.

Tags: monetizing your website

17.Mar.08 Industry Blog Comments (0)