Tag Archives: Maor

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King

Jul
23

[Note: I titled this post from the book “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. The book is completely unrelated to affiliate marketing, so take that in mind if you go out to buy the book later on today ;-)]

Maor Sadra here! The online advertising world is a jungle today (cue monkey sounds). There are so many sites, blogs, affiliates, publishers, media networks, etc. The more you spend online, the more likely your ads are being placed on thousands of sites.   This is generally good news, but can marketers control their spending and optimize the results in this chaos?

If an advertiser is working with a blind network, there isn’t much they can do to track results by site or affiliate.  You can never really predict results as you don’t control which affiliates or sites are running your offers. So what should advertisers do? 

The two remaining options: transparent, or half-transparent (or half-blind, depending on how you look at it), will support an advertiser’s efforts to do better business, but only one of these really comes through for the advertiser.

On completely transparent networks, an advertiser can view a list of publishers running their offers and find out which publishers or sites are bringing them the most impressions & clicks. But it’s very possible that only 1/10 of the sites actually generate the results from beyond the click.  Many networks and publishers prefer that the advertiser will not know this, fearing that the advertiser will optimize the campaign by limiting it to the best performing sites (which creates more work for the network employees to do, and leads to less revenue for the network…).   When networks do this, they are ignoring the simple fact that the advertiser will drop the network entirely if the results are generally not good…

Some advertisers still choose to go with a transparent network without the ability to track results by site.  I ask you: Why? Does it help the advertiser to know that an expert PPC affiliate called: “expertPPCaff1982” is running their campaign, if they won’t know how good the long term results are from this affiliate?
I recommend that an online advertiser today use a sort of modified transparent network, which allows them to independently track a few parameters. While the name of the network can remain static, other parameters should be dynamic.  A good example of this is tracking the performance by site or affiliate in an independent system.

Sounds like a lot of data? It is.

Sounds like a lot of work? It’s not really.

By tracking results per site/affiliate, advertisers can periodically analyze data to optimize and improve the results of the campaign over time.

Using this dynamic method of tracking will allow advertisers to find sites/affiliates within the network where there’s a high potential for quality traffic, and as every advertiser knows, finding quality sources is like finding gold! For these strong performers, advertisers can raise payouts or create customized marketing material or landing pages to increase the level of quality traffic. The opposite is also true; tracking also allows advertisers to spot which sites or affiliates drive lower quality traffic and make one of two calls: drop the site/affiliate from the campaign or optimize the creatives/landing pages to improve the results. 

I always recommend that advertisers use a simple numeric site/affiliate ID, enough to get control over the results of their campaigns, and I encourage advertisers to identify sites or affiliates that drive quality traffic, which leads to a solid, trusting, relationship and mutual success. A true “win-win” situation.

I admit, for the advertiser it’s sometimes a hassle to manage a large advertising budget online on multiple channels with multiple CPA /ROI targets, but it the long run it’s worth it!

So my tip this time is pretty simple: It’s better to have at least one eye to see the true results than being totally blind. You don’t want to miss out on the amazing things you’ll stumble upon!  

Making a pool out of a puddle: advice for Advertisers

Jun
21

Maor Sadra here with a tip for Advertisers:

Advertisers measure their return on investment (ROI) by calculating how much money they spent to generate a new lead/sale and comparing it to the lifetime value of the user. In today’s online advertising world, everything can be tracked and measured to measure ROI, so why do so many Advertisers limit their use of marketing tools and splash around in the same tiny puddle they are used to?!

Why not dig in deeper and create yourself a nice pool?

I used to work at a place where almost 80% of the online media budget went to Email Marketing. Over time, this limited our abilities to increase sales, as while Email Marketing is a highly effective method, you can easily saturate a market and even damage your brand name.
So while results were great in the short run, we soon got stuck with no ability to grow as we were recycling the same media again and again… and making our little puddle quite muddy.

To solve this problem, we began expanding our reach into different channels: PPC, Banners and Lead Generation, and found that our ROI was not the same for every channel, even when using the same CPA rates. We needed to adjust the target CPA by channel, thus working on 8 markets x 4 channels = 32 different CPA targets.
As complex as this sounded, using a pool of marketing tools and not just one helped the company expand, appeal to new users that were entirely unaware of the brand, and reach a steady positive ROI overall.

Today, I run across too many advertisers which refuse to run on specific media types, since they’ve tested it using the same target CPA they have for their best performing media type. One thing I always ask is: “Why limit your reach when you can simply adjust your rates to compensate for your ROI targets?”
With the variety of marketing tools available online today: Banners, Email, SEO, PPC, Behavioral Targeting, Social Media and more… the potential is as limitless as the combinations! After you multiply these different channels by the amount of countries Advertisers sometimes cover and the amount of different media companies Advertisers work with, you realize you should be working with hundreds of different CPA targets!

With that said, my tip for the day, and every day, is: Test Everything! Measure your ROI by channel and re-adjust your rates to allow a steady positive ROI. A major side effect of this approach is that in the long run, the more channels you run on, the more affiliates will run your offers. One of my favorite parts of affiliate marketing is that what works for the advertiser, works for the affiliates!

So, when it comes to choosing an online ad strategy, why splash around in that dirty little puddle when you could be lounging in your pool (complete with waterfall), drinking a Jamaican Smile with a paper umbrella sticking out of it?


King of the Obvious – A Tip for More Conversions

Jun
09

My name is Maor Sadra, Director of Sales at Adsmarket. This is my first (of many) blog posts to the Adsmarket blog. I welcome any comments you have!

I’ve been working in online advertising for the past 7 years, and while I always think that I know enough to get around in this dynamic industry, I always find that sometimes it’s good to listen to the people around me who may come up with the best “King of the Obvious” solution.

“King of the Obvious” is a term set by one of my former managers. This manager had a lot of experience in online advertising, but no technical experience whatsoever and needed some help with certain accounts.
Being young (oh, the hunger of youth!), tech-oriented and motivated to show that my technical skills can bridge any issue, I took on projects with Advertisers which included some programming.

One sunny day I received a spec for a new campaign that we were going to launch. My mind started all the geeky wheels in motion and I brain-stormed with myself the entire day trying to figure out how to setup this campaign.
If you’ve ever banged your head on the table trying to figure out how to solve something, you know exactly how I felt that day. And as you probably know, the banging doesn’t help.

After a long day of misery, I told my manager: “I can’t find any way of doing it…”.
He didn’t react at first, just looked at me strangely and asked: “Why are you thinking of the longest route from A to B when A is only 1 centimeter away from B?”
I was amazed. It was just like in Star Wars: Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is trying to… okay, whoa, I’m showing my geek colors a little too much. Let’s just say that because I was overthinking it, I had turned a simple solution into a very complex riddle that I was unable to solve.

When I asked my manager, “Why didn’t I see that?!” he explained: “Sometimes you need to take a step back to become King of the Obvious.”

When I think of this case, I always remember a gem of advice for conversion funnels from Jared M. Spool about how a small change in a web form helped an eCommerce company increase their revenues by $300,000,000 in the first year. It’s explained in this famous article that after a few weeks of learning the user flow of the site, a small repositioning of the “proceed to checkout” button made such a huge improvement in the conversion funnel that it completely changed the user experience and led to many many more conversions.
The change itself? Allowing users to proceed to checkout without creating an account with the eCommerce site. We can all agree that allowing users to create an account would be helpful in the long term, allowing them make their purchase faster; however, let’s look at it from the customer’s perspective. When you go to a store and you want to buy a phone, or anything for that matter, do you want to enter a long term relationship with the store clerk, or do you want to select it, pay for it and go on with your life?

My tip for the day is: When you build your landing page, sometime you think of all the information you want from your users when asking them to sign up. Take a step back, become the King and think – what information does the customer want to give me, and do I really NEED all this other information? A clear, short registration form is the key to success with user retention.

King of the Obvious. Think about it.

Cheers,
Maor Sadra (maor.s@adsmarket.com)
Director of Sales