MatomyMarket

Daily Deals Trends and Updates

Matomy Market — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:21:52 +0000

Daily Deals sites such as Groupon, LivingSocial and their international equivalents (KupiKupon in Russia, for example) have received a lot of press lately. Article titles like “The three worst daily deal mistakes and how to avoid them” prove that, from the perspective of merchants and advertisers using the group-buying sites to gain business, a consensus has yet to be reached on their true value.

However, in favor of marketers everywhere, insights provided by Daily Deals Media show merchant deal satisfaction at the level of “extremely satisfied” rose 9% between July and December 2011. Since average or less satisfaction ratings dropped, we can say that this vertical is still growing, albeit not quite as strong as it was one year ago, and merchants will continue to invest their marketing budgets in Groupon and its competitors.

At Affiliate Summit East 2012, I attended a session entitled “Effectively Monetizing Traffic with Daily Deals” which focused on new directions that sites like Groupon are taking to better meet their merchants’ needs, and what affiliate marketers can do to get the most out of this rather dynamic vertical.

Session Attendees

Scott Ginsberg, Director, Publisher Development, Commission Junction (Moderator)
Peter Hamilton, Partner/CMO, HasOffers
Carolyn Kmet, Director of Affiliate Marketing, Groupon.com
Rafael Zelik, Marketing Director/Partner, affiliaXe Ltd

Trends of the moment

Mobile

Daily deals are being seen more and more on mobile devices and inside mobile apps. The deals arena is definitely going towards mobile and geo targeting – Groupon, LivingSocial and others are good examples in how they offer creative that dynamically updates to show the most relevant ad to the consumer based on their location.

Personalization

Daily deal newsletters are getting more and more targeted and sophisticated. If in the past we were all used to getting the same emails with exactly the same deals, that is now over. Continuing the personalization trend directly to consumer inboxes, daily deals companies are starting to send deals newsletters based on your purchase history, favorite deals, and your shares and likes.

New verticals

When the daily deals trend started, (read my article introducing daily deals from last year), restaurant deals monopolized the offers. One-by-one, merchants of different colors joined the ranks, widening the appeal for users and affiliates.

Travel

More and more daily deals are going into the travel arena, creating coupons for travel, starting with flights and up to complete trip packages.

Jewelry and Apparel

Jewelry and apparel are markets that haven’t been explored by the daily deals gold rushers, and we expect to see this vertical take hold in the near future.

What are the big daily deal sites looking for in their affiliates?

Daily deals sites make affiliates lives very easy by allowing easy feed and tracking options. The session used Groupon as a case study, stating that they looking for innovation in promoting their brand. They like new and proactive approaches and are willing to learn from their affiliates.

One caveat: It’s important to be as transparent as possible when promoting daily deal brands as they are very concerned with brand sentiment and user value.

If you are a publisher looking for daily deals offers to promote, click here to view all the Matomy Market offers in the Daily Deals category.

Nadav Trenter Moser

Sales & Business Development Manager at Matomy Market

Sweet Offers for Valentine’s Day

Matomy Market — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:58:49 +0000

Valentine’s Day is a terrific holiday for affiliate marketing. Even though the recession isn’t over, online shopping gets a sweet boost right around February 14, with all those lovers looking for the right romantic gift.

In addition to flowers, chocolates, lingerie and old-timey shaving kits, Valentine’s Day fans are also looking to add a little lovin’ to their smartphones with fun wallpapers and screensavers. There are also fun apps that will help you get ready for your big date, like Pretty or Not, which selects your sexiest you from photos you add.

We’ve put together a list of offers to promote that are a perfect match for Valentine’s Day at this link: http://www.matomymarket.com/specials/valentinesday/

What’s on at GDC?

Matomy Market — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:15:41 +0000

We are making our debut at Game Developers Conference (GDC), as a silver sponsor! You can find us at our newly designed booth #2334, March 5-9, 2012.

GDC is one of the world’s largest and longest running game industry events, and with an expected attendance of more than 19,000 people over the 2 day exhibition (March 7-9). This exhibition is a must attend for anyone wanting to play a part in shaping the future of games.

This year GDC will be hosting over 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round table discussions featuring a comprehensive selection of game development topics over 5 days, providing you with a detailed insight into the future of gaming. http://www.gdconf.com/conference/index.html

In addition to the conference and speaker sessions, GDC will be hosting a number of networking events, awards and parties helping you to get the most from your GDC experience. http://www.gdconf.com/events/

What’s On in San Francisco?

One of the most popular international destinations, San Francisco has many sights and activities to choose from, should you find yourself with some free time after the show.

Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and the Cable Car tours are a few of the many attractions that San Francisco has to offer. There is also an array of exciting restaurants to host your culinary requirements and complimented by some world class Californian wines. http://www.sfguide.com/restaurants.htm

If you would like to sample the San Francisco shopping culture, you must visit Union Square where you will find a mix of well know department stores and local boutique shopping. http://www.sfguide.com/sfshopping.htm

Must have information:

Matomy Media Group is a silver sponsor and will be exhibiting at GDC, March 7-9, booth #2334

For more information or to arrange a meeting with us at the show contact: events@matomy.com

February Platform Updates

Matomy Market — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Here’s a quick heads up about two updates to the Matomy Market platform that will make using the interface easier for all users.

1. We’ve updated the look of our publisher and advertiser dashboards, making our system even easier to navigate and perform daily affiliate marketing and management tasks in. We hope you enjoy the new look, and we want your feedback!

Functionality and navigation remain unchanged.

2. Additional languages: We’ve added German and Russian language compatibility to the platform. Here’s the full list of localizations now available: Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese (BR), Russian, and Spanish.

To select a language, look for the flag icons located in the header area of your account.

A big thanks to the Creative Department and our Matomy Market product developers!

From affiliate to Superaffiliate: How to incentivize your affiliates to bring in more results

Matomy Market — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:00:00 +0000

Naturally, an affiliate program’s success is largely dependent on its affiliates. As a result, one of the first steps in any affiliate program is affiliate recruitment (both from within the Matomy Market network and beyond).

As in any conversion funnel analysis, let’s look at the percentages. A percentage of potential publishers sign up to your program, fewer become active and even fewer manage to bring in a substantial number of quality conversions. Sounds like a glum outlook; however, by approaching as many relevant publishers as possible and improving the publisher conversions along the funnel, you can meet the challenge of getting recruits that will actively and successfully promote your products. I’d like to focus on just one of these steps and discuss several ways in which you can boost publisher conversion rates from registered to active, or in other words – how to incentivize your affiliates to bring in more results.

Payouts Payouts Payouts - Publishers love their payouts, and the higher the better! You should be willing to reward top performing publishers with special rates. This is a win-win situation; the higher rates can incentivize and encourage the publisher to send more traffic to the program, and you, in turn, receive even more high quality conversions. The fact that higher rates are available for top performing publishers should be communicated clearly, alongside the currently offered rate. If possible, the threshold for the higher rate should be given as well as the higher rate itself, because publishers are dependent on such information for optimization purposes.

Promotions – Promotions are also a great way to incentivize publishers: winter promotions, summer promotions, holiday promotions, anniversary promotions, there are plenty of reasons to start one!

Don’t know how to set up an affiliate promotion? A standard formula for an affiliate promotion is this: Offer a prize to publishers generating over X conversions in a specified time period. The prize should ideally be a higher payout (see previous paragraph) but any Apple gadget or Playstation could also do the trick. Keep in mind that the minimum number of conversions to receive the prize should be attainable, otherwise the promotion could not only have no effect, but even work as a disincentive…

Private Landing Pages - As do we all, publishers love to be acknowledged for their efforts and hard work by getting VIP treatment. Examples of such treatment for CPS offers could be creating a private landing page for VIP publishers, or providing voucher codes for publishers to offer your product or service at a discounted price. Such landing pages obviously help the publishers generate more conversions, keeping everyone happy!

Communication- You should also reach out to your publishers on a regular basis; welcoming them to their program and notifying them thereafter of any significant change such as new banners, new landing pages, new target areas, new rates etc. Publishers also love getting relevant info that helps them with their optimization such as conversion rates, average sale amount, the time it takes users to go from click to lead to sale, and so on. An email a week is a great way to keep in touch with publishers, and provides an opportunity to ask for their invaluable feedback which in turn could propel more such changes. For 3 recommendations that will improve your communication with affiliates, read May’s post from last month.

To summarize, here are the 4 things you need to remember:

Payouts
Promotions
Private Landing Pages
Communication

Give these a try and you’ll learn that with a little love and attention you can get most all of your publishers heavily invested in your program! At Matomy Market, Advertisers who implement these suggestions see a sharp improvement in the percent of active and highly active affiliates, and as a result, in their affiliate program as a whole.

Author Shaked Markovitch manages advertiser affiliate programs as a member of the Affiliate Solutions Department at Matomy Market. You can contact her at shaked.m@matomy.com

A look back, and looking ahead to 2012

Matomy Market — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:07:32 +0000

Dear Matomy Market Partners,

This was a productive year for Matomy Market, and as we are now busy with sorting our resolutions for next year, I wanted to share with you a short recap of Matomy Market’s activities in 2011.

We re-branded this year. In April, the Adsmarket Group became the Matomy Media Group, and Adsmarket became Matomy Market. But it was not just a change in name, look and feel. The purpose of the re-brand was to better utilize the synergy between the companies within our group and reflect our integrated offering to our partners, an offering that provides one gateway to multiple media distribution channels, platforms, and technologies.

We continued our expansion. In addition to our Matomy LATAM branch in Spain, we opened offices in the Netherlands, Mexico and Germany, so that we can now offer more localized affiliate offers and services. We strengthened the capabilities of our affiliate marketing channel in the United States by acquiring award-winning digital ad agency Adperio, which specializes in social media and virtual currency, and look forward to seeing new growth in 2012.

In September, we launched a new product, our affiliate program management platform. This product encompasses all of the know-how and technology features that we have acquired and developed over the years as an affiliate network. We can now offer advertisers the ability to easily set up and manage their own affiliate program with Matomy Market’s platform and services.

For our publishers, we enriched our offers selection with exclusive campaigns from brand advertisers, entered new and emerging categories such as daily deals, broadened our international selection through our global branches, and most importantly, gave more attention to our long-tail publishers by setting up a dedicated Affiliate Services team that provides support to our publishers in finding their way in our network and growing their business.

And finally, to better communicate all these new products and services, we launched a new website for Matomy Market, emphasizing transparency regarding our products, offers, media channels and technology.

Looking forward to 2012, I am certain that affiliate marketing will continue to flourish, despite the unstable economic times that we are in. I talk to a lot of companies that are now looking to reduce costs and minimize risk, and affiliate marketing maintains its position as exactly right channel for that purpose. Our industry is stable and strong.

The IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council in the UK recently released their Advertisers’ Survey results, which indicate that the affiliate marketing channel is set to enjoy growth in 2012. Chair of the IAB Affiliate Marketing Council, Helen Southgate, commented: “Affiliate Marketing is one of the few channels that is a performance only model so it makes real sense for Clients to invest their marketing budget here as there is less risk. It was really interesting to see that nearly 20% of respondents said they spent over £100k in affiliate commissions a month and over one quarter said that affiliates account for more than 20% of online budgets.”

In 2011, we invested deeply in the innovations you see in our affiliate tracking platform, as well as placed emphasis on strengthening our services teams and enriching our network with many new merchant offers. At this point I feel confident in handing over the reins to Assaf Suprasky as the new Manager of Matomy Market. Assaf has been with the Matomy Media Group for the last 6 years, the last year of which he was Senior Vice President of Publishers at Matomy Market. As for myself, I will continue leadership at Matomy Media and focus on the development of our new mobile advertising unit.

I wish us all a happy holiday season and a prosperous year in 2012!

Adi Orzel

What’s on at Affiliate Summit West 2012

Matomy Market — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:52:26 +0000

Matomy Media Group begins the 2012 trade show circuit with the Affiliate Summit West show in Las Vegas. You can find us at the Meet Market exhibition, table KK and in the main conference, booth #237.

The Meet Market opens the Affiliate Summit show, an exciting opportunity for you to speed network with a number of affiliates and merchants who are there to share information on their products and services. Each table is a meeting spot to learn, network, close deals, and create partnerships and contacts.

The main conference follows on from this, and so far an exciting agenda has been lined up for exhibitors and tradeshow visitors alike. Hot topic seminar sessions include:

-The Future of Content Monetization and Publishing

-Advanced Affiliate Program Management & Analysis

-Affiliate Marketing in the Age of Social Media

For more on the sessions at ASW check out http://www.affiliatesummit.com/12w-agenda/

What’s On in Las Vegas?

What’s not going on in Las Vegas is more to the point!

If you find yourself with an ounce of time at the end of your Affiliate Summit days you might be tempted to venture out of Caesars Palace and visit some of the larger than life hotels on the Vegas strip. Or perhaps a spectacular Cirque Du Soleil show will feature in your agenda. http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/destinations/las-vegas/home.aspx

Additionally there are many fabulous places to eat, shop and visit. You’ll be spoilt for choice in the city that bills itself as ‘The Entertainment Capital of the World’.

Must-have information

Matomy Media Group will be exhibiting at Affiliate Summit West, January 8-10, 2012.

You can find us at Meet Market table KK and in the conference hall, booth #237.

For more information or to arrange a meeting with us at the show contact events@matomy.com

Holidays 2011 Specials for Affiliates – Updated!

Matomy Market — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Here’s to the hardworking affiliates at Matomy Market! Instead of filling your stockings with cheap, breakable toys, or making you try on Auntie’s home-made bunny costume, we’re spoiling you with some great offers to run, just in time for the holidays!
We also have a full list of many more Matomy Market campaigns that are filled with holiday cheer!

ROASTe – Special Christmas Landing Page!
ROASTe is the one-stop shop for people who want the at-home gourmet coffee experience. Earn payouts for 120 days when your referred user shops at ROASTe! Enjoy our easy sales flow, attractive website, and special promotions.

URL: www.roaste.com
Category: eCommerce; Food & Groceries
Countries: USA
Rate: 15% for coffee items; 5% for non-coffee items
Average sale amount: ~$50
Tracking: Script pixel; 120-day cookie
Sample URL: homepage LP; Xmas promotion, see product feed under program 43771

iMesh, iLivid and BearShare – New Christmas Banners!

iMesh is one of the most popular P2P software with millions of monthly installs worldwide. iMesh offers its users unlimited access to more than 15 million songs and
videos, all for free. With iMesh you can socialize with millions of active
users, discover new artists, listen to DJ stations, sync with your iPod and
more.

Campaigns with holiday banners:

ID 24911 – iMesh International CPL (Server-to-Server)
ID 33571 – iLivid International CPL (Server-to-Server)
ID 24901 – BearShare International CPL (Server-to-Server)

Category: Downloads & Web Services
Countries: International
Rates: Up to $0.80, Tier based
Tracking: Server implementation, 45 day cookie
Sample URLs: iMesh, BearShare, iLivid

Affiliate Communication Best Practices

Matomy Market — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:53:00 +0000

When helping advertisers build their affiliate program, we often talk about how important it is to offer competitive rates, a straightforward user flow, an ample amount of creative materials, and a successful landing page. These are the building blocks of every affiliate program. This list of building blocks is missing one important point, though – communication. Your relationship with your affiliates is just that, a relationship, and like any relationship, it needs to be maintained. Think about it this way: if you have an amazing product and landing page but no one hears about it, does it really exist? Philosophical questions aside, let’s talk about the least-discussed yet easiest way to improve your affiliate program’s performance – improving your communication with your affiliates.

If you are an advertiser managing your entire affiliate program with Matomy Market, the platform allows you to contact your affiliates directly, which allows you to see what affiliates want and need in order to promote your product. From our experience, there’s a fine line between sending your affiliates just enough information to incentivize them to run your program and bombarding them with too many emails. Thankfully, we’ve been tracking affiliate response to our emails for years, and can give you the best recommendations that adhere to this fine line.

Recommendation 1: “Ahem (little wave). It’s me, your Advertiser”

I was shocked to learn what great performance increases my advertisers received simply for sending out a mass email to affiliates reminding them that the program exists. Many affiliates sign up to a program but need a little push in order to start running it. This little email does the trick, and with Matomy Market’s platform, all you need to do is click “Send.”

Recommendation 2: The Haves and the Have-Nots

It’s imperative to know who your top affiliates are, and it’s easy to identify them as well as high-potential affiliates with Matomy Market’s platform – you can see who’s been generating impressions/clicks to your program, and who made their first commission. I recommend sending out a separate mass email to each of these groups, ideally weekly. For affiliates who only generated impressions/clicks, you can find out what’s preventing them from monetizing their traffic. And for those who made their first commission, you’ll see what it takes to get them to increase their traffic. Tailoring your mass emails by publisher potential allows the affiliate to receive the personalized feedback he needs to build a long term partnership. Soon enough, he’ll be your affiliate for life.

Recommendation 3: The Latest and Greatest

Matomy Market saves you time by sending affiliates automatic updates about program restrictions, new campaigns, etc. It’s often helpful, though, to also send a personalized message telling your affiliates about new creatives, landing pages, and restriction changes. In a sea of emails, your personalized message will stand out, and show affiliates that you are committed to keeping them informed of any change in their programs.

I can’t stress enough how successful these simple emails are to affiliates. Communication is key, and with the account tools we’ve mentioned here, you’ll see all the information you need in order to target the right messages to the right affiliates quickly and easily.

Author May Flam manages advertiser affiliate programs as a member of the Affiliate Solutions Department at Matomy Market. You can contact her at may.f@matomy.com

The New Matomy Market Website

Matomy Market — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:04:23 +0000

For the last few months the Matomy Market Marketing Department brainthundered through all the elements that our clients and potential clients would want from our website. Easy navigation, tools to make daily business easier, and a crisp, clean look that makes browsing a breeze were all on our checklist when we mapped out the site, and we’re happy to see that it turned out better than we could have planned!

New Look

We upgraded the new Matomy Market website to feature a clean, modern feel with smooth navigation and an uncluttered look. Both advertisers and publishers that come to the site will immediately understand the different affiliate marketing solutions we offer, and where they fit in to our network. It’s easy to get to a registration page and sign up!

Special Offers

The Special Offers section, as well as a refurbished offers search page coming soon, allows publishers access to our vast inventory of high-quality affiliate programs and find out what we have to offer right on our site. It’s a time-saving tool that provides affiliates with answers to that ever-important question: “What offers do you have?” without having to ask around the web or even log in.

Improved Social Life

We have integrated the Matomy Market company blog into the new site to make it easier to browse the hundreds of affiliate marketing articles we’ve written since the blog was first launched over 3 years ago. As always, we invite our visitors to share our posts with others, leave comments and ask questions; we are listening!

Come Back Soon

Too often, a technology company’s website is simply a gateway to an account dashboard. The new Matomy Market site was designed to update, engage and educate our clients and partners with the news and tools they need to do business. From technology releases to training seminars, advertising exhibitions coverage to acquisitions, we have created a hub of activity that will not only draw advertisers and publishers in but will lead to greater business success for both.