Google released a new version of their AdWords Editor a couple hours ago. You should definitely update. A list of new features can be found here.

Zanox doesn’t want any new affiliates, it seems. At least they don’t want to pay for them.

Zanox used to run a a snowball system as you might know it from multi-level marketing. Existing affiliates that acquired new affiliates received a percentage of the new affiliates’ regular commissions on top of their own direct commissions. So if you focused on bringing quality affiliates to zanox regularly, your monthly income would grow steadily. Some of the pioneers of affiliate marketing made a real fortune out of this and made their personal dreams come true.

Now zanox have decided that these alpha affiliates that continuously bring in new affiliates aren’t good enough for them anymore. They’re getting rid of the lifetime payout and now pay you a lousy 6 to 8 euros. Also these leads are not confirmed for payout unless the newly acquired affiliate generates at least 50 euros worth of commissions.

Let’s have a closer look at this: If an affiliate earns the threshold of 50 euros from an advertiser, zanox is earning somewhere between 10 and 15 euros from that advertiser already. That is their agency fee, so to say the cost for using the affiliate network, which is usually between 20 and 30 percent of the rewarded affiliate commissions. What are they giving to the affiliate? 6 to 8 euros. Now you figure out why that is!

If you want to read a success story of a retired alpha affiliate, visit Stefan Zwanzger at affiliate.de.

Gratulations to Hungary. Yahoo! is acquiring Indextools. The company offers a hosted web analytics suite including sophisticated conversion tracking. The company and the servers are based in Hungary. They’ve got sales people in Western Europe and North America as well.

Indextools was founded by Marton Szoke, a Hungarian entrepreneur with a degree in business administration but also a lot of technical knowledge. He spent some time studying in Vienna so he’s also fluent in German. Marton is a great guy and one of the very few CEO’s that take part in the development and management of their product.

After Google acquired Urchin, their analytics system became Google Analytics and also got linked with Adwords. Now that Microsoft introduced their own analytics solution, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Indextools as the future Yahoo! Analytics. The only problem: Currently Indextools is a fee-based service and clients with lots of traffic pay Indextools big money. I can’t imagine th

Yahoo! are working on a new advertising network. To me it looks quite similar to the DoubleClick network that was recently acquired by Google. Here is a video preview of Yahoo! AMP.

Usability

Even though Tradedoubler has made a huge step in the right direction, AdSense is still better. For example, Tradedoubler forgot to translate some of the interface words into local languages. Here’s an example of a mixture of a German interface with English wordings:

1:0 in favor of AdSense

Flexibility

Tradedoubler AdMatch lets you do way more stuff than Google AdSense. I like the fact that Tradedoubler also employs the product databases of its affiliate programs. However, Tradedoubler’s inventory of advertisers is minimal compared to Google’s. So even though Tradedoubler offers more in terms of looks, Google offers you way more matching ads.
2:0 in favor of AdSense

Technical Performance

I’m not impressed by AdMatch’s performance. It takes longer to load than AdSense, especially when it needs to examine a URL for the first time. Also, on Internet Explorer 7.0 on my Vista machine, AdMatch fails to display the ads under certain conditions. I can see that text is moved down and space reserved by the ad, but I can just see a blank space. I could reproduce that error on another machine.
3:0 in favor of AdSense

Conclusion

AdMatch is buggy! And Tradedoubler doesn’t have enough ads to be able to provide a good match for all these content sites out there. AdMatch is worth a try for those who run Tradedoubler affiliate programs already. Don’t use it if you make most of your money from contextual advertising!

The second acquisition for today. AOL buys social network Bebo for $850 mio. A real bargain compared to Microsoft’s engagement in Facebook. Also this was a clever move because Bebo has made good investments in their mobile platform. Perhaps AOL can get ahead of Yahoo and Google on the mobile space.

Google is working on an ad-serving platform for the masses. The so-called Google Ad Manager, currently in private beta, is aimed at small and medium-sized companies, creating a counterpart to DoubleClick’s DART.

The service is going to be free. The underlying purpose of Google Ad Manager is the further spread of AdSense on publisher sites. Just like Google Analytics is supposed to help AdWords clients optimizing their campaigns, Ad Manager is supposed to help AdSense clients to deliver more ads and collect more information about your site.

It’s a done deal now. After four months of investigation the EU gave their approval for the creation of probably the largest group of online advertising companies. I’m not a big fan of this decision because I don’t like monopolies. But it seems Google presented the EU a good case. Well done, guys.

I used to think I would never say that, but: Thank you, Microsoft, for trying to acquire Yahoo! Monopolies are bad for markets and Google needs to be challenged. The timing couldn’t be better. Yahoo! had announced job cuts and lately and their advertising revenue used to be better too. Windows still sucks though.

mocoNews reported that the Google AdWords Conversion Tracking doesn’t work properly for mobile ads. This is something that I had told Google over a year ago already. The Google AdWords Conversion Tracking is hardly suitable for the mobile internet. Why? Because it’s based on cookies.

These days roughly half of the browser handset in use do not support cookies. If you were Google, how would you know which keyword and ad triggered the conversion without cookies? Exactly, you simply wouldn’t know. Yes, as mobile phones get replaced regularly more phones will support cookies. But as pay-per-click is often a narrow-margin business Google’s conversion tracking becomes useless for mobile.

The Javascript in the Google conversion code might be another hurdle. But firing the pixel in the noscript image tag is enough to transmit the conversion to Google. It seems to me that the Javascript code is there only to display a Google ad and to collect more user data. That’s why they make the full code mandatory (see their terms & conditions).

But what’S the solution to the problem? Either Google offers their advertisers a batch-tracking service. Or the advertisers will have to use a third-party tracking service that records the click and conversion data and matches them through the AdWords API.