Mobile Marketing for Affiliates

Shawn Collins recommending resources for mobile affiliate marketing on video:

Check out my Mobile Space podcast on GeekCast.fm!

The Future of Affiliate Marketing in Germany

Pascal Fantou is becoming one of my favorite bloggers. If you can read German you should check out his latest post on the future of the affiliate industry in Germany. I’m not 100% sure if things are going to change as drastically as predicted, but I can definitely see Pascal’s points. Here’s a short summary in my own words:

Advertisers usually group their online marketing teams mainly by traffic source: search marketing, display campaigns, affiliate marketing. Back in the dark ages affiliates were primarily web site owners who would place text links or banners on their own sites to make some extra cash. These days many affiliates have turned into full-time entrepreneurs who have expanded their dominance also to search engines and social media.

Pascal’s point is that the media agencies and not the affiliates will be the key players in the future. They’re in close contact with the advertisers, they administer the big budgets and they’re actually becoming better at what they do. At the same time, small- and medium-sized advertisers will run their activities more and more in-house instead of through an affiliate or search marketing agency.

So what will happen to affiliates? A lot of their territory will be taken away by large agencies or the advertiser itself. For example in search marketing, why should advertisers pay for the profit of the affiliates and the affiliate networks if they can pull the sales in themselves? In some cases that would lower the cost of acquisition by 50%. Same thing with Google. They’re going after affiliates big time these days because they want the other 50% of the advertiser’s budget.

With the redundance of traditiional affiliates, especially in search marketing, the traditional affiliate networks are going to be dinosaurs. If they’re not changing their role to a technical solution provider they’re likely to die out. The winners are going to be the media agencies. They can combine large budgets of several advertisers and that way pay a lot less for ad network traffic.

The key to survival and growth for affiliates is specialization. Affiliates need to find niches where they do not have to compete with large advertisers and agencies. How about mobile?

Large Affiliate Networks Getting Lazy

In my previous post I wrote about how smaller affiliate networks drive innovation. They feel the need to grow everyday and the only way to do this properly is through innovation. This strategy is quite promising actually since I observe more and more established networks falling behind.

For example let’s have a look at zanox. They’ve come out with an application store that encourages affiliates to make their own tools available to other affiliates as well. At first this may sound like a great idea.

But when you really think about it you start to realize that they’re trying to fool us here. In my opinion this application store is nothing else but their attempt to lower the internal IT cost and create some extra PR buzz on the side.

The message that zanox is sending out is: “We don’t want to innovate internally anymore. Dear affiliates, do the dirty work for us, please. And no, we can’t guarantee you any revenue from sharing your work with your competitors. Go and figure it out yourself.”

Maybe I’m missing the bigger picture here, but I don’t understand why successful affiliates should make their self-made tools available to competitors in the form of other affiliates or merchants.

Small Networks Set The Standards

Usually the larger an institution gets the less innovative it becomes. There are a few exceptions, but generally the big players of an industry don’t drive innovation.

After UK-based AffiliateFuture the German 2nd-tier affiliate network belboon has also introduced a tracking technology based on local shared objects, also widely known as “Flash cookies”. Back then AffiliateFuture observed a 7% increase in conversions. I’d be really interested to see belboon’s figures.

I haven’t heard of any large affiliate network implementing something similar. For example Commission Junction has become so slow over the years. I take these types of networks are going extinct like the dinosaurs at some point.

Flash cookies are somewhat similar to regular browser cookies. Essentially they are files stored on a user’s computer. The main differences are:

1. Traditional browser cookies are stored in separate folders for different browsers. Flash cookies are always stored in the same folder, no matter which browser you’re using. That way the tracking works even if a user switches between browsers.
2. The browsers can only delete the cookies in “their” folders. They don’t auto-delete the Flash cookies.
3. Unless users block Flash elements, the tracking still works even if they run their browsers in a super-privacy mode.
4. Traditional cookies follow an open standard. Flash cookies are controlled by one company: Adobe.

The Day The Cookie Died

… may be March 19th, 2009. Internet Explorer 8 is out. The new private-browsing functionality blocks most affiliate cookies as they are third party. Let’s see how it goes.

I Love Ubuntu

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux on my netbook for a while now. The user experience has been great. It runs much faster and my hard-drive is never busy without me doing anyhting. So I decided to equip all of our office desktop computers with Ubuntu too. You’re not seeing one single Windows machine around here. In the next weeks and months I might be adding a few posts on how to make the most out of your Ubuntu installation.

Podcast Launched

I launched an audio podcast on mobile advertising and mobile affiliate marketing. You can listen to the show on GeekCast.fm or subscribe to it via iTunes or your preferred podcatcher.

Mobile Space podcast on GeekCast.fm

International Online Marketing Managers Wanted

I’m looking to hire one or two full-time online marketing managers as soon as possible.

You’re the right candidate if you have exceptional online advertising sales experience, either selling direct to client or preferably to media agencies. You will know instinctively how to pitch to clients and possess the imagination and knowledge to create truly integrated campaigns for key brands.

You will sell across our clients’ portfolio of consumer websites and mobile (WAP) sites. Selling everything from display (banners, skyscrapers, MPUs, eyeblasters and other rich formats) through to online sponsorship, branded content and advertorials, you will be comfortable with metrics of CPM, CPC and CPA.

The jobs are based in central Berlin, Germany. Offices are located within walking distance to Berlin’s coolest bars and clubs. Access to public transportation is nearby too.

We work with many international clients and publishers and can offer great progression with an exciting company. Anyone interested feel free to get in touch.

Moving everything into the cloud

I work on four different computers: the office desktop PC, a larger laptop for the couch, a small Asus netbook for travel (all running on Ubuntu Linux) and my home desktop PC running on Windows Vista. So you can see, the syncing of data has become a major issue to me.

To solve this issue I decided to move as many processes into the cloud as possible. Data that I have to be able to access are stored on a server that I also have physical access to. I do not save any files that I regularly work with on a specific client machine anymore. Having my files on a server also solves the issue of backups.

Now I’m in process of replacing as much client software as possible by browser-based services. For example, my calendar, tasks and contacts are stored on Mobical. My cell phone also synchronizes nicely with Mobical. Email are done through RoundCube, our company task and project management system is TaskFreak (both PHP/MySQL-based).

All these products re free, and you don’t have to sell your soul to Google in order to be able to use them. If you have anything else please feel free to share.

Seriously, cloud computing is the way to go. But all these app stores for mobile devices actually make us go back to the past instead of progress to the future. In the year 2009, why would I ever want to install a piece of software on a physical device that I have to replace at least every other year? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Buying software is old-school. Subscribing to a web/cloud-based service is the future.

One domain per ad group only

Google announced that they’re going to start enforcing their new one-domain-per-ad-group policy next week. They are trying to get rid of multiple domains within the same ad group.

I can understand that they want to improve their user experience and get rid of affiliate spam. However, with this new rule they also keep advertisers from absolutely legitimate testing.

For instance many advertisers test example.com vs. uk.example.com vs. example.co.uk vs. example.net. I’ve seen huge changes in click-through rates just by choosing the right domain for a specific audience.

And when it comes to mobile ads, advertisers would like to be able to test whether m.example.com or example.mobi or even just example.com generates the highest click-through rate.

With the new policy in place all these tests are going to be outlawed. I suppose they don’t want people to create multiple ad groups per keyword or use multiple AdWords accounts. But at the minute I think these are the only options.