We already know that TV advertising is still the king of advertising. A survey shown in NMA suggested that this medium has a 56% impact (i.e. influence), and when comparing to web banners’ supposed 4%, its clear to see which one is most effective – by a long shot!

But online, we are still seeing the rise of video still continue; whether it’s sharing a piece of smart viral marketing on Youtube.com, or viewing a ‘virtual catwalk’ on ASOS, we are finding that videos can not only draw in viewers, but could also have a pivotal role in ensuring conversions, as well as benefitting heavily from social sharing technique such as Facebook, Twitter and Sphin it!

We’ve already seen ‘Coull’ from Buy.at, which allows publishers to place affiliate links into video, but more recently, Dell have made their iVideo Widget available for affiliates through the TradeDoubler network. It provides a new way to actively engage with the consumer, providing a full interactive overview of the products available, the key USPs of each product, as well as an option for support; and of course, an all important ‘buy now’ button. This piece of inventory is of significant importance because not only does it demonstrate a committed approach from Dell to the affiliate industry by making available such a succinct and comprehensive tool, but also the potential reach this could have should affiliates adopt this.

Looking at another sector, like travel sector for example: How much more appealing would it be to see your hotel room through the medium of video, showing how much a great time you can have? It would certainly be a lot more interesting than a banner, and it’ll probably be more interesting than an episode of ‘wish you were here’ should the merchant get the mix right. With big-ticket items such as travel, the video form could also benefit from comments by happy customers leaving feedback to increase confidence levels, thus increasing conversions for affiliates. There is a wealth of opportunities to really make this take off.

I feel that videos, used in moderation and within a specialist site (as no-one likes information overload – imagine 20 videos on one site or similar brands…), could dramatically improve conversions. But I guess that the proof is in the pudding and time will tell as to whether the video becomes the next big thing that provides a commercially viable uplift, or will it simply be a nice addition in order to enhance stickiness as opposed conversions. One thing’s for sure is that marketers need to start taking video seriously, seeking its performance from early adopters, and give great contemplation to integrate this within their own affiliate marketing strategy.

                          

The IAB list various reasons such as more people shopping online, greater public access to the internet and social media. The appeal of low start up costs and the ability to work from home has obviously caught the attention of British entrepreneurs and this in turn has helped online advertising prosper.

Affiliate marketing in particular has gone from strength to strength. Spend in our sector has increased by 38.2% since 2008, a huge rise, with the indication that it will continue to increase. Such strong improvement has to be accredited to AM’s unique selling point of letting the client only pay for results. This means that every advertising pound spent can be accounted for and the ROI proven. As well as this, AM can be carefully analyzed and performance can be constantly tracked.

Through affiliate marketing merchants have the ability to establish an online sales force very quickly, and on a revenue share basis. This not only means their cash flow is not affected, but they also have the flexibility to alter or drop that sales force instantly.

No other industry has this flexibility. This is why the online community continues to thrive whilst the bricks and mortar world of business and advertising are scaling back. With the potential for a double dip recession, and the harshness of the banking crisis experienced in 2008, the world has been forced to look at alternative solutions. The whole financial climate has benefited online advertising.

In addition, AM is not standing still, with dialogue over payment methods and the ‘last click wins’ policy at the forefront of the industry. Such persistence to innovate and improve can only help the industry as a whole and ensure we are at the forefront of advertising expenditure figures next year.

                          

I feel this is all about to change though, Geo-social media has now reached a pivotal point in its development into the mainstream, the question of “what’s the point” is now answered with the introduction of retail offers or even free stuff for the Mayor.  As of August 2010, foursquare had over 15,000 venues, promoting special offers to a base of 3 million users worldwide. The figures look favourable for a service which is still in its infancy and show a bright future for the channel.  Foursquare is already valued at over $100m dollars and it is the market potential that has caught the attention of the eye of the eye of the other big players.

Most significant is the recent launch of Facebook Places which looks to building upon the functionality offered by services like foursquare and Gowalla and make it available to its 500 million active users. As long as privacy concerns are dealt with appropriately this is going to be a real step forward for geo-social into the mainstream. The potential to utilise Facebook data such as “likes” to deliver real time deals and offers is mind boggling. Imagine that you go into town shopping and you call into a music store (and check in) to browse the recent releases. One of your “like” artists on Facebook has just launched a new album, the music store can ping you a message via Facebook to alert you to the release and even issue you a discount code. Amazing!

I think Facebook’s entry into the space is a good move but I do fear for the guys that started the whole thing off. After all if you are a Facebook user, which most people are these days, why would you log into a different app/service when it can be managed from within a single interface? It will be interesting to see what impact Facebook has. Will it grow the market and take other geo-social services along with it, or will it simply cannibalise the pre-existing user bases people migrate to a potentially superior service?

                          

It essentially allowed them to geo-target the existing content units they were using, so that their widgets would automatically display products from the correct local eBay site of the visitor.

As a bit of a research project, in a Mark Zuckerberg kind of way, we’ve analysed the data, and can see some positives results.

Obviously, to protect publisher privacy, to present this info on the blog, we’ve taken a random sample and then averaged out the data below:

So what are the points of interest?

Well, as you’d expect, clicks for the publisher’s “home” country remain fairly consistent, as do publisher commissions. The slight drop in home country clicks can be attributed to visitors from other countries, who before the implementation, would have still clicked through the widget despite it showing results for a different country.

The quite staggering number however, is the increase in clicks from other countries once the geo-targeting tool was installed by the publishers, actually out performing the publisher’s home countries!

So should we all run out and buy geo-ip databases to start coining in the benefits?

Well yes and no…

I feel that part of the increase is from publisher effort. Publishers may have already be making a conscious effort to increase their global traffic, and would have implemented this geo-tool as part of that. This would perhaps account for the fact that there was already low level activity reporting for other territories, in the before stats. Also, publishers may pick up the tool, and be spurred into improving and creating international content and traffic sources.

In addition, eBay’s global reach shouldn’t be ignored. You can promote eBay in 13 countries, all from one interface. Geo-targeting in this case is a no brainer. It’s obviously slightly more difficult if you’re promoting UK only merchants.

However…

I still don’t think you can totally ignore these figures. Sure it may not be applicable to every affiliate, but you never know where your site will crop up around the globe. An affiliate friend of mine, who runs a niche UK based camping site, whose primary traffic source was PPC, told me that it was not uncommon for him to get emails from the USA, inquiring if he delivered there.

I’m sure some of you have your own opinions on this, and may have even dabbled in other markets, but for those that haven’t, it may be an option worth exploring.

                          

Here at R.O.EYE we have been listening to publisher feedback and requests for additional assistance and resources. One of the most popular requests has been a downloadable resource for international eBay category IDs and I’ll explain why…

One of the best ways to optimise your custom banner or API integration is to apply category ID filters. This helps to ensure that only the most relevant results are returned.

Pretty straightforward if you are only receiving traffic from one country, however if you are geo-targeting to multiple countries, you will find that the category IDs are not the same in each country. This makes optimising your custom banner or API integration using category filters more time intensive, especially when you add in the complexities of different languages.

So to help we have developed a downloadable resource that contains all the up-to-date category IDs by country. This automatically updates with any new IDs and we have even included the English translation for anyone targeting the US and European markets! Here is an example of the category IDs for the German programme showing 4 levels of sub-categories with English translations:

Each programme is shown in a separate tab within the excel file so you will be able to find and match pretty precise categories with relative ease.

Finally, make sure that you’re signed up to the relevant eBay Partner Network programmes for the territories you want to promote, otherwise you won’t get paid for the traffic you drive to these sites.

Alex Harvey, Technical Solutions Executive at R.O.EYE

                          

Clothing is one of the most immediate things we as humans require to keep warm, but what we choose to adorn ourselves with goes way beyond than that of course. Higher up Maslow’s hierarchy goes esteem and aesthetic needs which are where the need for basic clothing becomes a passion for fashion.

But enough of my technical mumbo jumbo…!

The fashion and clothing sector in the UK is apparently worth around £40bn annually and InternetRetailing reported a few months ago that online fashion sales were “exceptionally buoyant” as the economy entered the spring/summer. Comments from ASOS in the same publication further backs up the assertion that shoppers are increasingly willing to shop for clothes online, citing their improved returns policy as critical to this trend.

Regular readers of the R.O.EYE blog will know that we manage the eBay Partner Network programme, but you may be surprised to learn that the clothing, shoes and accessories category has represented the most popular category on eBay.co.uk for the past two years. For an e-commerce site that has over 18m unique users every month you can imagine that this represents a huge number of online fashion sales!

To support eBay.co.uk’s major push into the fashion vertical with their Fashion Outlet, as well as managing a major online fashion retailer, Boohoo, we have been on the serious look-out for fashion affiliates of late. I have to report that in comparison to other retail (e.g. electronics) and travel verticals there are relatively few “super” affiliates in the fashion and clothing sector and it seems baffling to me why this is.

While there are a lot of fashion blogs out there, these tend not to be commercially driven ventures and often run by passionate, yet hobbyist fashionistas. This is all fine of course and we’d love to hear from you if you fit this description! But what I’m talking about are large-scale, shopping comparison, product feed/API driven sites with some serious promotion behind them. There are some very good fashion sites around that I am speaking to of course (wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t!), but relative to the size of the market I think there are way too few.

So in view of the scale of the opportunity here – what’s putting affiliates off?

Un-apologetically pointing to stereotypes now, but it’s easier to see how a ‘typical affiliate’/web developer/tecchie type would be much more comfortable building a site around gadgets and gizmos as opposed to dresses, shoes and handbags. (Cue angry letters from fashion-conscious affiliates with an electronics website!)

Or is it something else? Perhaps affiliates have weighed up getting into the fashion vertical and are put off for other, perhaps commercial reasons? Are search volumes too low and too competitive? Average order values and commission levels too low? Promotional methods and tools insufficient? Just a few top level thoughts but I’d really love to hear from affiliates who are seriously considering fashion as a vertical.

                          

Why Promote boohoo?

This is an exciting time to be promoting the boohoo brand as it grows in popularity as the first choice for women’s and girls’ affordable fashion, with their products having the ability to appeal to a broad customer base.

Offering a generous 8% commission on all valid sales, fantastic new offers and an AOV in the region of £40, boohoo is not only a consistent merchant but an exciting brand with an equally supportive affiliate programme.

We’ll be continuing to send out updates on prices, offers, best sellers, creative, along with all other aspects of boohoo. Other special deals are often announced at short notice and we’ll also ensure that this information will be sent out in good timing for you to get your links live.

R.O.EYE are more than happy to discuss this programme in more detail.

Daniel Austin Senior Programme Executive
daniel@ro-eye.co.uk

Sarah Gilchrist Programme Assistant
sarahg@ro-eye.co.uk

                          

Custom Banner Enhancements

• Custom Banner will continue to offer Flash integration but will now provide new HTML templates with the following options:
• Show the badges for Top-Rated Seller, Free Shipping, PayPal, Buy It Now
• The image-and-text format you are used to will be available but we will also introduce a text-only version
• Contextual targeting available for eBay DE, eBay AT, and eBay CH programs.
• Ability to filter for Free Shipping and Top-Rated Seller
• Multiple keyword and category search : you can now search across several keywords and eBay categories, or select the “Use Popular Search” option.
• Store custom themes : once you’ve chosen the ideal colour and font for your Custom Banner you’ll be able to save them and reuse in future banners.
• Improved performance for a quicker display of the Flash version of Custom Banner.

Enhancements to the EPN reports:

• A new EPC Download Report: The EPC Download Report allows all publishers who are on Quality Click Pricing to download their daily EPC at a campaign level for each program. This report will only include information for campaigns that had click activity for the date(s) selected.
• Transaction Download Report: The format of the transaction download report will not change, but we will modify how we populate two columns. For eBay programs, the “eBay Quantity Sold”, and “eBay Total Sale Amount” columns will be blank when an adjustment is being reported to a transaction. These columns will not be impacted when the transaction is included in the transaction download report for the first time

If you would like to discuss the opportunities available to promote eBay then please get in touch.

                          

Anyone who has ever worked with or experienced problems with Flash will be jumping for joy, it’s early days yet, but ultimately there will be better cross browser/platform support, as HTML5/CSS3 is a web standard, as opposed to Flash which is a 3rd party plug in. To see how this works in practice follow this link. If you open that example page in an unsupported browser (i.e. IE8) you still get the banners rendered fine, just without the glitz and glam.

In the same scenario Flash would just show an empty hole, and in terms of load time HTML5 wins hands down in a flat out Top Gear style drag race!

Most content units are a flash unit and the equivalent HTML5 unit could potentially be more seamlessly integrated with page content. The benefit of this is that the advert looks less like advertising and more like content. In addition, the content is readable by search engines, so jazzy HTML5 pages will rank for SEO. Flash doesn’t!

In summary, if you are an advertiser and you are looking to refresh your suite of banner ads/content units/live booking iframes etc make sure your agency is up to speed with these developments!

                          

"The App craze has been a game changer"

It has been acclaimed that “this is the year for mobile” for a few years now, and while I think this decade is a more realistic timescale there is no doubting that mobile has come along way in the past couple of years. It doesn’t seem that long ago when WAP internet was cutting edge, fully blown mobile web access was just a pipe dream.

Obviously the arrival of the iPhone and Android have changed everything, with slick interfaces and 3G technology, browsing the web on a mobile is fast becoming the norm.  According to EConsultancy 14m people in the UK used their mobile browser to access the internet in October 2009 and more than 18m people were using Apps by the end of 2009. Mobile phones are also believed to overtake PCs as the most common web-access devices worldwide by 2013

While mobile internet penetration looks to rocket, there appears to be a spanner in the works with the direction ecommerce appears to be taking. The “there’s an App for that” craze has been a game changer that has made merchants reassess the way they approach the mobile platform. Due to the drawbacks of the mobile web experience such as limited screen space, slow loading speeds and poor data input experience; “offline” App frameworks have proven popular amongst some of the largest players. eBay and Amazon both have fantastic Apps that offer functionality far exceeding what would be achievable through the mobile browser.

It would seem that Apps are the way forward (for now at least), but how do affiliates fit into the merchants mobile strategy? From what I can see merchants are utilising Apps following ways.

• Brand / product engagement (Compare the market, Tiffany & Co, IKEA)
• E Commerce platform (Amazon, eBay, Allsaints)
• Value added Service (Argos, Love film, Voucher Cloud, Red Laser, Sccope)

In most cases the above groupings are dominated by first party merchant Apps, reducing any opportunity for affiliates to promote them. App based ecommerce platforms bypass any form of standard cookie tracking that is reliant on the use of a web browser. Brand /product engagement Apps are usually associated with brands that don’t have a web based ecommerce platform, and even if they do the user experience of trying to complete a sale on non-mobile site can be horrendous.

That leaves affiliates with the group I receive the most queries about, Value added service Apps. This may seem obvious but is still isn’t that clear cut. Many merchants still don’t have a sound mobile strategy and are unsure whether the mobile should be run as an internal marketing channel or to open it up to third parties such as affiliates. Argos and Love Film are two great examples of merchant Apps that offer a value to the user, but they reduce the opportunity available for affiliate development, after all merchants will not want to pay out commissions for Apps which simply replicate their own functionality.

Third party price comparison Apps such as Sccope and Red Laser did start to show some promise toward the end of last year, but the problems are two fold 1) the transition from App to merchant payment process is horrendous unless the merchant has a mobile optimised site 2) Merchants may wish to negotiate App deals outside of the affiliate channel, as shown by eBay’s recent acquisition of the Red Laser bar code scanning technology.

So where do affiliates fit it? My opinion is that the affiliate industry as a whole is not prepared for mobile. I speak to many affiliates who have great ideas for generating sales and leads for programmes but the tracking technologies do not exist to put these ideas into action. Payment processing and sales submissions appear to be a major stumbling block for completing mobile purchases. In-App tracking is not supported by merchants or affiliate networks and unless the merchant has a basket/checkout service that is optimised for mobile, linking to the website results in a very poor user experience. Mobile does have a future but it seems that that future is in the hands of the Merchants.