Adam Jewell – Search & Affiliate Marketing

According to Marketwatch, there will be no Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! because Microsoft cannot meet Yahoo’s economic demands.

Who out there besides Microsoft ever though this acquisition made any sense? From the get-go Yahoo! didn’t seem interested in being swallowed or dismantled by Microsoft. The whole thing seemed rediculous and it seems that Microsoft’s desparation to do something, anything to catch up to Google online is starting to show. I’d sum it up like this:

This is like a high school cross-country race. Google wins at each meet, Yahoo! comes in second and once in a while MSFT has someone that manages to finish the race while wearing downhill ski boots.

Google goes on to win every race as usual, the Google ski team also wins since Microsoft and Yahoo! have sustained injuries that put them out for the ski season.

What Microsoft needs is a fresh perspective. They have brilliant people there. They have the best service of any search advertising provider in the industry. They just don’t have what people want – consumers or advertisers. They can’t buy what they need, they need to develop it, hire some smart Internet people (not software people).

From a consumer (or search results and search advertising) perspective, all I can say is thank-god the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal is going nowhere (at least for now). We’ll still have more than 2 search advertising options, we’ll still have more than 2 unique companies that serve up search results and that is a good thing.

So the last time I spoke at Search Engine Strategies was in Toronto in 2006, I believe. That panel was on shopping engines (yawn!). Sure, there are some things you can do with shopping engines. You can try all the different ones, spend lots of money on them, pay their ever-increasing cost per click rates and sometimes generate a decent ROI. For the most part, you just send them a feed of your products, enable people to do price comparisons, and generate smaller average order values than other online marketing vehicles tend to generate.

This time around I’ll be on the “Dealing With Affiliates” panel. It seems that maybe affiliates have a bad reputation in the Internet Marketing industry. When the panel is called “Dealing With Affiliates“, it kind of gives it a negative connotation – kind of like dealing with a clogged toilet, not very pleasant.

To some degree, affiliate marketing deserves this negative connotation because of some of the early aggressive tactics used by affiliates over the years. Spyware and cookie stuffing have been problems over the years that gave affiliate marketing a bad name in the past. Affiliates have frequently spammed the search engines so merchants don’t have to do it themselves so that probably makes some affiliates evil in the eyes of Google.

One problem the affiliate industry has is that few people really understand it. In traditional sales and marketing terms, an affiliate is really just a contract sales person who doesn’t get paid anything unless they generate sales. An easy way for the average online marketer to think about affiliate marketing, is that the affiliate does the same thing you do, except they generate sales much more efficiently and at a much lower cost of marketing than the average online marketer. The affiliate has one goal – sales.

Affiliates tend to be small companies or individuals who don’t have to with the organizational issues associated with most organizations. They find what works and do it. They adjust their promotion methods to maximize sales and profits. They don’t get paid for fancy ads or aggressive bidding unless it makes money. Good affiliates may have big egos but they run tight, smart, profitable online marketing efforts.

Most of the issues around search and affiliates are only issues because companies have a lot of things that distract them from making money. They focus on things that really aren’t that important. Is the affiliate out bidding us on “our” keywords? If “our keywords” are anything but the company’s brand terms, the company should be happy that the affiliate is promoting them and not another company.

When it comes to paid search, many companies prohibit affiliates from using their display URL in PPC ads and linking directly to the merchants website. Sometimes there may be good reasons or this. If the merchant has a really, really good internal PPC program, opening up use of the display URL may not be advantageous. Lots of in-house or 3rd party run PPC search programs suck and as such could use some affiliate involvement to make more money and get better coverage. This is always a hot topic and is sure to lead to heated discussions on the panel. It did at CJU 2007 in Santa Barbara and definitely will at SES.

One company sent me an email today about their affiliate program with the headline:

Company XXX Search Marketing Allowed! Please review

Hmmm, I must have joined this program at some point but never did anything with it. I probably never will. Search marketing is allowed with the following restrictions:

Strike One – Affiliates can NEVER under any circumstances use the company display URL in a search ad.

Strike Two – Affiliates must never use company brand names in search copy regardless of the keyword searched. hmmm..is that paid, organic or both?

Strike Three – Affiliates must NOT serve ads that appear in a higher position than our ads. hmmm…so if the affiliate can write search copy and link the ad to their own website, this merchant is going to tell the affiliate to stop bidding on the term or get the (CTR*bid price) down below the ads run b the company.

So they do permit search marketing, but you can’t mention the company you are promoting in “search copy” whatever that means, you can’t link direct from PPC ads and you can’t appear above the merchant in the search results on any keyword.

This is exactly how you encourage any search affiliate to promote the competition if the industry has any opportunities for affiliates. This company either has amazing search programs going, has a lot off ego, or doesn’t put much value in the affiliate channel.

See ya in Chicago for a lively affiliate session!

The list of Pay Per Click (PPC) bid management systems in the marketplace today is rather large. When you want a system that works and you don’t want to spend your whole advertising budget on the management system, go with KeywordMax!

As search engine advertising gets more and more competitive and more and more advertisers wake up to the potential and opportunity that awaits, more and more technology solutions are developed to manage campaigns. If you are Target, Amazon, or Ebay, KeywordMax isn’t likely to be the tool for you. If you’re a mid sized, even fairly large company with thousands of keywords, KeywordMax may be just the system for you.

The beauty of KeywordMax is its simplicity. There are no redirects that may take hours and hours to generate, there is not fancy technology behind KeywordMax, it just works.

It tracks your bids, it tracks you match types, reports sales by keyword and engine and can track organic search traffic and other advertisements as well. It’s got the same bid rules at virtually all of the (often far) more expensive sysems from the industry heavyweights that often charge six to eighty times what KeywordMax charges. These bid rules are not particularly advanced but neither are the bid rules on most other systems. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of keywords to manage and even then, the additional cost for most other systems may be hard to justify.

KeywordMax charges based on actions which include bid updates, bid checks, tracking actions, clicks and other actions that the system tracks or initiates within the engines. With other systems you can pay up to $0.03 per click and probably won’t get below $0.01 per click. The cost per action on KeywordMax typically ranges between $0.00163 and $0.000125. In most cases, multiple actions will be associated with a click so the action & click process are not apples to apples comparisons, however in virtually all cases, especially for smaller advertisers, KeywordMax wins a price competition hands down.

With KeywordMax, you can track order IDs, you can automatically generate the tracking parameters needed to setup your campaigns and you can manage your campaigns from one central interface. What more do you need?

Well, generally not much but you also get a click auditor to help detect fraud traffic and if you’re an agency or SEM company you can get bulk accounts that can be private labeled so your clients will think they are using your in-house system.

When you want an inexpensive PPC bid management system with most of the features of the big names in the industry, go for KeywordMax. It just works.

Holy shit, this is huge!  There had been rumblings for the last few months that DoubleClick was on the block, talking to Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and maybe others about a potential sale.  Well, apparently on April 13th, 2007 Google won the bidding war and will be taking over DoubleClick.

3.1 billion seems like a bit of a premium for a company that reportedly made around 300 million last year but it may turn out to be a much better investment than the 1.6 billion Google paid for YouTube.com.  DoubleClick has tons of data as well and many coveted relationships with advertisers and publishers.  Not only does Google gain all this data and all these relationships but Microsoft loses the opportunity to acquire them.

Speaking of Microsoft, one wonders just what they are doing or thinking.    Microsoft was clearly asleep at the wheel while Google became a hundred billion dollar company in the area of web search.  When people think of Google they think of search. 

When people think of Microsoft, what do they think of? 

• Their most recent computer crash?
• The last virus that ripped through their computer?
• The new Windows Vista operating system that they have no need to go out and buy an upgrade for?
• Microsoft search?

It seems that Microsoft would like you to think of search when you think of Microsoft but first maybe Microsoft should think of search when Microsoft thinks of Microsoft.

What is Microsoft search?

• Is is MSN.com? – well there is certainly a lot more than search at MSN.com  IT should be pretty clear that the “portal approach” doesn’t work to well.  RIP Alta Vista & Yahoo!, well they aren’t exactly stealing marketshare from Google these days.
• Is it Live.com? - There is a search box there and maybe some people use it and the search results are ok but it doesn’t seem like many people use it.
• How about other MSN properties like MSN Money? – Well, when you go there, it steals the focus of your cursor and puts it in the stock quote search box.  How annoying, when I want to search I’ll determine when and where and I don’t want Microsoft to get in the way!

Look at the Microsoft Money forums. What kind of technology platform do they have that running on? There is tons of great content that search engines would eat up, good posters and moderators but it is so sloooooooooooooow to load and I probably built to keep search engines out.

So anyway, since it seems MSFT is having a hard time getting their own house in order, acquisitions may be their saving grace.  Right now Microsoft search, MSN, Live.com, whatever it is that is the Microsoft search offering has such a small amount of traffic that it does not command much attention from advertisers.  An acquisition like DoubleClick would have at least helped Microsoft get in the online advertising game, given them some data to play with and some relationships.  It would take a herculean effort to build something like DoubleClick from scratch today.

An Internet (or world) where one company is the gateway to the worlds information is no good for anyone, except maybe if you work at Google. 

If you are a web property, if you are a media company that has worked with DoubleClick, maybe you should take a step back and think.  Think about all the data that Google now has access to about your company.  Should you continue to work with DoubleClick.  You have to work with Google since they are the default search provider for such a large percentage of the population but there are other options for managing your paid search & media programs.  Maybe it’s time to start thinking about them.

Along with all of the technologies and data that come with DoubleClick, Google gets the Performics company that offers search and affiliate marketing services.  This gives Google more conversion data and insight into affiliate marketing. 

Hopefully Microsoft can get focused, can start to realize the value of assets in the online world.  They need to change their perspective and realize they can’t continue to do business the same way anymore.  Here’s hoping they can succeed.  Someone needs to give Google a run for the money but maybe it will have to be an unknown startup.