In this constantly evolving industry, it is often too easy to become complacent when it comes to finding the best offers to keep the cash flowing. With so many opportunities, it’s important to understand why you are profitable. Spend some extra time understanding your tests, asking yourself detailed questions as you analyze each offer. Once you’ve gotten into this habit, you’ll find how easy it is to scale and replicate a successful test across other offers, or to turn an unsuccessful test into a success.

1)  Statistics: Understand your target metrics.

Before promoting any campaign you should already know what metric (EPC, eCPM, revenue amount, etc.) you need to hit to be profitable. Use this as a starting point to analyze your offer performance for both successful and unsuccessful tests. If a test was successful, how do the stats compare to where you need to be? Did the offer crush your target metric or did it just make the cut-off? As you scale, are you still meeting those same metrics? For an unsuccessful test, how far off were you from meeting the required metrics? How many more conversions would you need to see, on the same number of clicks, for success? Are you close enough to your target metric where a simple tweak would get you where you need to be?

2)  Creatives/Landing Pages: Consistency leads to increased conversion rates.
Set yourself up with the top performing creative available from the start. Affiliate managers can often make suggestions on what’s performing best – email creatives, ad copy, landing pages, etc., and can be a great resource to you. Take a look at the transition from offer promotion to landing page. Is your ad copy and landing page consistent with the offer you’re promoting?

3)  Understand which placements perform best.

Strive for long term success by identifying new sources and placement opportunities. Each vertical will have a tendency to perform better on certain placements. Understand what placements perform best for the offers you’re promoting and always be on the lookout for new opportunities. Test your offers on multiple placements! As a new placement proves to be successful, ask yourself why. Use that knowledge to scale and replicate across similar placements to maximize performance. On the flip side, when an offer doesn’t perform, evaluate the ‘why’ again for optimization opportunities.

4)  Targeting/Demographics: Understand your audience.
Identify and breakdown who your current audience is and how you can segment that information into performance groups. When you’re promoting an offer you want to learn as much as possible from the conversion data so that success can be replicated. Gender, age range, socioeconomic status, and education levels are all factors to consider in evaluating conversion data. Use those variables to help you understand your target audience. When an offer is successful, use that knowledge to understand why the offer converted well and look for more opportunities to reach that core group. If an initial test appears unsuccessful, evaluate those same variables to determine if a slight adjustment can re-position you for success.

5)  Analyze the Competition

When you’re constantly seeing the same campaigns in the space, you know that your competition is profitable. This could be you! Position yourself to understand what your competition is doing differently, and why those differences may be leading them to success. Whether you’re scouting out page designs and ad copy across various placements, or checking seed accounts for inboxing trends, keep an eye out for the common variable across your competition. Critiquing your own competition not only helps you understand the market as a whole, but identifies which variables will set you up for your next successful test.

Written by Jennifer Eggers, Affiliate Strategist for Clickbooth

Google has rolled out a new beta program within its “communication extensions” program.  This will allow adwords advertisers to collect email addresses directly from their adwords ads.

At first this sounds like an amazing opportunity for any leadgen advertiser; however, this could potentially spell trouble…particularly for affiliate leadgen advertisers.  Lets take a look at a beta program document release to learn more about the program:

Looks pretty great right?  Well, again, this could potentially spell the beginning of the end for some affiliate leadgen advertisers.  PPCBlog.com makes some really great points about the potential destruction this could do to leadgen advertisers by allowing google to get into the lead arbitrage business themselves.

Check out the full article over at PPCBlog.com because it’s fantastic, but basically, here is a potential way for Google to really become a lead arbitrager and boost their revenues…they could simply place one button at the top of the results and allow searchers to request quotes from all advertisers.  Game over for leadgen affiliates pretty much:

Seem unlikely that Google would take this approach?  In the PPCBlog article they point out a harsh reality as to how far Google has gone to monetize their search results.  Take a look at how much real estate they take up with ads now on this local search for dentists.  Ouch!

So, should you try out the beta program?  You will have to be the ultimate judge, just be aware that how Google starts the program might not be how Google finishes the program.

I know that we have been covering a ton of mobile marketing information here on the blog recently, but it’s for good reason.  Mobile marketing innovations are currently exploding, resulting in countless new opportunities for affiliate marketers.

Another new opportunity has “jumped up” in local mobile marketing which will specifically provide local retail businesses with a new and deadly mobile marketing weapon through Jumptap.

Utilizing the new found benefits of a data partner; PlaceIQ, Jumptap will be providing advertisers with the ability to market down to the city block level.  That’s right, hyper-local targeting down to the city block level!

Talk about powerful advertising for any affiliate or service provider working for local retail businesses!  Here is more from Jumptap on this recent development:

In the second half of 2011, Jumptap brought unique third-party data partnerships to market, which began to pay off for advertisers in the retail vertical and in other prominent categories. To further enhance its offerings, Jumptap has inked a partnership with hyper-local data leader PlaceIQ.

The data provider transforms ‘location into context’ by ingesting large amounts of unstructured, unrelated, anonymous location-based data types such as photos, place, event, digital, social and more. After cleansing and normalizing vast amounts of data, PlaceIQ then extracts patterns, trends, intelligence and context. The resulting hyper-local ‘location profiles’ (down to a city block) suggest the likely context and behavior of an anonymous user, or device.

When coupled with time and location, these anonymous profiles can provide powerful targeting opportunities. The Jumptap-PlaceIQ offering will make it easier for advertisers to reach precise grids that are most likely to contain people at work, luxury shoppers, tourists, students, travelers, and more.

This approach is privacy-friendly, as PlaceIQ profiles locations not users, and no personally identifiable information is gathered, stored or used. As smartphones proliferate, retailers are recognizing the power of location awareness to drive foot traffic and in-store behaviors. The Jumptap-PlaceIQ partnership is squarely aimed at delivering on this promise for retailers.

“Jumptap’s retail business experienced explosive growth in 2011, and retailers who leveraged our unique third-party data to target specific audience segments during the holiday season saw significant performance uplift,” said Todd Anderman, Chief Media and Revenue Officer, Jumptap. “Matthew’s retail expertise combined with our retail insights, existing third-party data relationships, and the addition of PlaceIQ’s hyper-location data will help our retail partners further integrate targeted mobile advertising into their overall media mix and increase sales.

Now that Valentine’s Day is over, do you feel like you’ve capitalized on the holiday, or do you think you could have strategized better and come out of the holiday more profitable? Seasonal advertising takes a great deal of planning in order to be successful, but more importantly it requires a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and purchasing trends.

1.     Research consumer shopping trends months in advance.

In our industry, it’s always important to keep abreast of not only trends within the affiliate marketing industry, but also to understand consumer trends and purchasing habits. For example, home improvement products and services experience a boom in the spring because of “spring cleaning.” And just because you may not be in college anymore doesn’t mean you can ignore the fact that millions of college students around the country are going on exotic spring break vacations, making the month of March one of the busiest travel times throughout the year. Putting the time in to research consumer purchasing trends throughout the year and understanding when certain products and services experience highs and lows will help your bottom line.

Holidays/Occasions/Trends for Spring – March through May
⁃    Swimsuit season (dieting)
⁃    Tax season
⁃    Spring Break (travel)
⁃    Allergies & pet care
⁃    Spring Cleaning (home improvement)
⁃    Refinance/mortgage
⁃    Easter
⁃    Test preparation/tutoring
⁃    Graduation
⁃    Mother’s Day
⁃    Memorial Day

2.     Map out these holidays on a calendar and come up with a marketing plan of attack.



Mapping out important holidays and consumer trends on a calendar will allow you to get a head start on your spring marketing, ensuring a successful start to your marketing plan. Affiliate marketers are very careful with their budgets, but it’s important to spend your money in the right place. If you plan out your marketing budget across the season in advance, you won’t end up low on funds later on in any of the key areas you’re planning to target.

3.    Segment and identify your target audience(s) & demographic.

Different trends attract different groups of people, so it’s important to determine who your target audiences are before you begin marketing. This includes identifying your target age, gender, race, socioeconomic background, geographic region, occupation, religion, etc for every product or service you’re marketing. Certain traffic types are also conducive to certain demographics as well, and most ad networks allow affiliates to target as broad or narrow as they would like.

4.     Find out which promotion methods your competitors will be using.

Let’s face it. Many of us in this industry are friends on Facebook and LinkedIn, and we all frequent the same forums and affiliate marketing newsletters. Knowing your competition and their approach is important, whether you’re an affiliate, an advertiser or an affiliate manager. While keeping up with your competition is essential, it’s even more important to be creative and find a way to set yourself apart from the competition. We’re in an industry that values creativity over almost anything else, but it still often appears that many people become complacent and keep to the status quo. Push the envelope with your landing pages, creatives and ad copy, suggest new subject lines and brainstorm options that will give you the edge over your competitors.

5.     Be flexible and keep testing!



Once you’re in the action stage of your marketing plan, it’s equally as important to be flexible and able to tweak and change things that may not be working. If you’re an affiliate, communication with your AM is essential because they have a bird’s eye view of the industry. If something is not working for you, there’s probably an alternate approach or some modification that your affiliate manager can recommend based on what they have seen to be successful. Testing is always one of the most important parts of this process – testing new offers, new creatives or new ad copy. Never get frustrated if something is not working for you, because that’s part of the learning process. The most successful accomplishments are often obtained through those learning experiences.

This Article brought to you by:  Meredith Reilly, Affiliate Strategist for Clickbooth

***
Meredith Reilly graduated from the University of Miami (FL) with a Bachelor degree in Media Management and Economics. As an Affiliate Strategist and experienced member of the Clickbooth Publishing team, Meredith specializes in media buying and social traffic. In her free time, she plays 3rd base for the Clickbooth kickball team, the CB Kick Ballazzzz.
***

Another piece of news on the mobile marketing front…and once again another opportunity to potentially cash in huge.

According to the Financial Times, Facebook is set to launch advertising on mobile devices.  This comes as no surprise for a few reasons:

1 – Facebook is looking to increase revenues any way possible for the IPO

2 – Over 50% of Facebook access is now on mobile devices (thus they are effectively losing out on almost half of their potential revenue)

3 – They are currently not monetizing mobile as they should be

 The Financial Times said that, “Several people familiar with Facebook’s planning say that it has already discussed proposals with advertising agencies for displaying what it calls “featured stories” in the news feed seen by users on the site with a launch likely in early March ahead of its initial public offering, which is expected in May.”

It looks like they definitely plan to offer featured stories and I’m sure there will be other forms of ads.  Lets take a look at some possibilities you might want to prepare for…although it’s likely they will roll out different ad types slowly and deliberately to ensure user acceptance.

Sponsored Stories

To be able to run a sponsored story, your business must have a facebook page and “Likes”.  So in order to prepare for sponsored stories advertising make sure that you have a facebook presense and get some Likes!

Banner Ads

It’s likely that Facebook will attempt to monetize with display inventory of some type.  Don’t expect your average top and bottom mobile banner placement from facebook.  I would put money on Facebook creating some proprietary ad sizes and placements for their display inventory.

Be prepared to adapt your mobile display banners…and jump on things early while everyone else tries to catch up.

Localized Ads

I would expect Facebook will tap into local targeting capabilities and pass this option on to its advertisers.  This is extremely powerful for brick and mortar local businesses but could potentially be “exploited” by creative affiliates…especially in the beginning when competition is likely to be low.

So here we have yet another mobile marketing opportunity that could potentially be the biggest one yet.  Keep an eye out on this, prepare ahead of time, and get in early!

Recently, admob made an announcement that they are changing the AdMob auction for their CPC ads.  Checkout their official announcement:

 To ensure that we deliver the most effective mobile ads marketplace to our customers we are changing the AdMob auction for all cost-per-click (CPC) ads.

Effective February 15, 2012, AdMob will move to an AdWords-style auction, where the winning price is determined by the quality of the ad and the other bids on that impression; the price we charge will never exceed the advertiser’s bid. In addition, we’re removing minimum bids and targeting fees to allow AdMob CPC advertisers to compete for inventory under the natural forces of supply and demand.

Advertisers will benefit from more efficient pricing and could receive cheaper clicks depending on the inventory on which they bid.  High quality ads will be rewarded with an improved chance at winning the auction.

This change will occur for all CPC auctions globally on Feb 15th. There are no changes to non-CPC campaigns at this time. Advertisers should monitor their bids to see the effect on their particular campaigns, and be prepared to adjust bids & budgets to ensure they are meeting their volume & ROI goals.

We look forward to bringing AdWords auction components that have been refined over the years to the AdMob platform to benefit advertisers, users, and publishers.

So what does this mean for you?  What this means is that your ad quality is of much greater importance now than it was before.  Similar to adwords, the quality of your ad can make a big difference on the price you pay for your clicks and if your ad gets shown.

Why are they doing this?  Well, it’s basically to help rid the CPC platform of what Google calls “low quality” ads.  Just like they have done with adwords.

This means that it’s extremely important that you create high quality ads to ensure that your click cost is low and you are getting the maximum amount of inventory.

Affiliates with high quality and high click-through ads are going to be rewarded handsomely for a while as many advertisers get slapped and try to scramble to regain their inventory.

You can take advantage of this if you are able to create high click-through ads.  So jump in and create some campaigns with “high quality” ads…and you’re very likely to see a TON of cheap traffic while other advertisers blow up around you in mass confusion.

Happy cheap mobile traffic while it lasts!!!

At this point you should have a basic demographic profile of the type of person you are looking to get your ad and offer in front of.  You should have information like:  gender, age, race, education, income, etc.

After my last post, I got a ton of questions about the basics of demographic targeting and exactly what info we are looking for and how we are going to use it.  So I’m going to take a step back here in post #2 to provide a clearer picture as to what we’re trying to accomplish and how it will directly impact our cash profits.

The goal in building out a demographic model is to utilize demo information to get the opportunity to scale your sales and conversions in a much larger way than you would be able to if you didn’t build out a demographic profile.  What do I mean by this?

Well let’s take a look at an example.  Let’s say that you are promoting a zip submit offer for a Mac Cosmetics gift card.  If you limit yourself to buying traffic of people that are specifically looking for Mac Cosmetics, you’re only tapping into a tiny fraction of the potential leads that could be interested in a Mac Cosmetics gift card.

Once you have tapped out all of the very specific traffic of people that are directly searching for Mac Cosmetics, Mac Cosmetic specific products, or are browsing a mac-specific site…you’re profits are capped.

We don’t want to cap out our profits!  Hence the need for putting together a demographic profile and getting your ad and offer in front of a much larger, but still relevant audience.

So let me break this down step by step for you.  We’re going to pick an offer through the Offervault offer search and then begin to gather the information necessary to make our demographic profile.

Step 1 – Pick the Offer

As I mentioned previously, we are going to choose the Mac Cosmetics gift card offer which is a zip submit that is paying $1.85.  After a quick Offervault search for “Mac Cosmetics” I found the below offer.

Now it’s time to figure out the audience we need to target to get conversions.  But not just the very specific and smaller Mac Cosmetics audience…we want to make a LARGE amount of money with this offer.  In order to do that, we need to get the demographics for the typical person that would be interested in this offer.

Step 2 – Research: Quantcast, Alexa, Ad Planner

I normally start with Ad Planner and quantcast.  No specific reason, it’s just the way I work.  So I’m going to head over to both Ad Planner and quantcast and do a search for maccosmetics.com and begin there.

The goal is to gather a few pieces of key data:

1 – Basic demographics

2 – Related categories of interest with high affinity

3 – Related Sites

4 – Related Keywords

Step 3 – Spy Tools

After I start to build out a decent list of the above information I’ll then head over to some of my favorite spy tools to begin planning and building out the actual campaigns.  I always assume that the traffic sources and campaign types I need to build out are going to be:  PPC, Display buys, and CPV.  There are of course other types of traffic and sources, but these are the bread and butter of most top affiliates.

Step 4 – Run the Campaigns

It’s not time to run the campaigns and enjoy the fruits of your scaling!

If you have not watched the video for this post, it is highly recommended as there is a lot more information contained in the video than what I could possibly type in a single post.  Be sure to check it out.

To quickly summarize:

1 – Choose Your Offer

2 – Do the research required to pull out:  basic demographics, categories, sites, and keywords

3 – Use the basic demographics, categories, sites, and keywords you found in your research to build out the campaigns utilizing the spy tools

4 – Run the campaign and make a LOT more profit

As affiliate marketers, we have to make significant investments on promoting our campaigns on advertising platforms such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Each platform has its own way of determining how ads are ranked as well as determining the user profile so that the ads delivered are as contextually sensitive given the users current Internet surfing activities.

Have you noticed that key Internet search properties are now matching users with the more specific advertisements? Most of these firms use psychographic mapping to produce advertising results in line with content delivery.

Psychographic profiles are used in market segmentation as well in advertising to better manage user activity, interest, and opinion (AIOs), user attitudes, and user values. Of all three areas, the one affiliates often capture most often is the AIO’s because those are keyword driven. But how does one capture the attitudes and user values. This is where strategic placement and profiling your campaign is critical.

Let’s assume you are looking to promote an affiliate campaign focusing on Candy. Who and when would you promote a campaign on candy? Two possibilities are Valentines Day and Halloween. An alternate answer is not focusing on seasonality but on what activity is related to candy such as Couponing. Using Offervault, you would complete a search on the word “Candy.” The result set that would come up is:

As one can see from above, the results set either points to seasonal opt-in offers (submits) or offers that require a user to regularly go to a Website for downloading of coupons and provide a customer profile. Both of these items are forms of permission-based marketing (PMB). Clearly, the more information that is provided in a submit or a profile, the greater the contextual marketing is for the end user after agreeing to the opt-in. But determining how to get the user to click on the advertisement let alone give you permission to send further mailings out is the real challenge.

Let’s take a look at the campaigns that are associated with Couponing campaigns titled “Coupon Alert.” As an affiliate, we don’t want to spend more money scaling campaigns than we have to. So here are some things to consider:

• Do your research on who actually are the heaviest users of coupons.
• Focus your target market area;  will be exclusively on campaigns in the US and the UK.
• Next determine what promotion methods the offer allows. This is critical to ensure you aren’t wasting money promoting a campaign that will yield bogus leads.
• Form factors are critical for retaining and having customers return back to continue their transactions. Will a user stay on a site once they submit the information or will they exit? For example, smartphones are quick-response platforms so to assume a user will stay on a page for minutes is foolish. This may be the case for tablets, but not for smart phones. So for this kind of campaign – smartphone targeting is out.
• Third, understand your competition and review other sites that provide couponing relevant content. Who and what is the target?
  Finally, focusing in on an ultra-tight theme requires developing the psychographic profile. Determining where you will promote the advertising is secondary. Questions you would ask yourself include:
  • Would you promote an affiliate campaign for couponing on LinkedIn  – probably not because it’s a professional services platform and most users that go to LinkedIn are not looking to save money, they are looking to make money.
  • Would you promote an affiliate campaign for couponing on Facebook – absolutely! Why? You can do ultra-tight contextual targeting. One can profile the users based on geography, age, gender, income, interest, and even products. But, is this type of campaign useful for mobile? No, because Facebook doesn’t offer mobile psychographic advertising functionality just yet for feature and smartphones. So if the goal is to develop a campaign for mobile – Facebook is not the place to focus ones energies.
  • Would you promote an affiliate campaign for couponing on Bing, Google, or Yahoo and scale it for Internet and Mobile. You sure will and can. Question is, how?

Using the US consumer as an example, here are tactics to use in building an affiliate campaign for traditional Internet and mobile Internet. Concepts to consider when writing your ad copy:

• It is common that women use coupons far more than men to shop.
• Women who have children use coupons more than women who are not parents or married.  Women who are single or do not have children often use coupons for beauty products.
• The average woman who uses a coupon is between the ages of 25-40.
• Women in large cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami) are not as likely to go to a grocery store and use a coupon. Think about how people use their times. City living is equated to hectic lifestyle. Couponing is often a suburban mom activity. Think smaller metropolitan cities and suburbia.
• Women whose average gross household income is less than $75,000 often use coupons.
• The most common products that women use couponing for are beauty/bathroom products and baby products. Why? Because these two product classes have the most impact on a families budget.

If you can answer those questions and get to that level of data granularity, you have yourself a solid understanding of how to develop a psychographic profile and strong affiliate advertising copy.

Let’s now translate this visually assuming the user is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma and has two children aged 6 months and 2 years old where the family income is $50,000 per year:

If you look above, there is no way for the typical affiliate to know most of those details. A typical affiliate would promote purely on keywords or use location in the context of their advertisements. Search engines; however, do know more about the users than you think. For example, if you have a Gmail account and are searching Google, your email is actually analyzed as well as your search history (location of search, how long you searched, what you searched for, your conversations among friends, what links you clicked from Google search) to paint a picture of the user associated with their email account. Similarly, Facebook allows for targeting of campaigns based on the things you like, the words you put in your statuses, your life events, and the advertisements you click.

In our example above, we can easily pair down the search parameters to a very focused target. Even though there is an estimated 800 million users on Facebook, there is no reason to target all 800 million users. In fact, you can target a very small user base. Using the data above, the Facebook campaign has been scaled using the psychographic factors. The result: a target of 1340 potential Facebook users.

A combination of all the factors described plus other psychographic terms associated with the description above yields this very targeted campaign where quality clicks and user conversion are more likely than if you use broad concepts and cast a very wide net to target users for your affiliate campaigns.

Bottom line: psychographic research is critical to deploying effective affiliate campaigns. The more contextual your PPC copy is or the more granular one can get with their audience targeting, the greater the chance will be to get solid click-thrus and conversions.

In the expansive world of internet marketing, making connections with strong partners and utilizing all of the resources available is key in running a successful business.  If you are working with a network, one of those invaluable resources is your affiliate manager or advertising rep.  These professionals have extensive training and their career path is focused on understanding the entire scope of affiliate marketing.  When it comes to developing and executing your business plan, your affiliate manager is an invaluable resource and you should definitely be taking advantage of their knowledge and insight into the affiliate space.

In order to be successful in this ever changing industry, it’s important to remain flexible and be able to adjust marketing strategies and techniques accordingly.  Testing is vital and an essential element in optimization.  You should constantly be testing new things and looking for the next innovative idea that you can capitalize on to increase your margins and profitability. Use your affiliate manager as your guide.  With their bird’s eye view, they are going to know what is and what isn’t working well in the industry.  Affiliate managers have access to information gathered by market research teams that identify trends and can help you adapt your promotion methods and offers accordingly. Whether it is trying new sources or modifying your banners and landing pages, your affiliate manager is going to be your best resource.  Take advantage of their knowledge of the industry and the additional resources that they have at their disposal.

Consider your affiliate manager your business partner.  Your success is their success.  It is your affiliate manager’s main focus and duty to help you develop a business plan and execute it.  Affiliate managers understand the entire scope of the industry and have your best interests in mind.  Their goal is to help you succeed not only at the moment, but help you build your business to achieve long term success.  Remember, they want what is best for you.  A great manager will go above and beyond to help you reach the next level.

Work with an affiliate manager that you can trust.  Be mindful of those who may share your ideas, strategies, or marketing methods with other individuals or other affiliates, or those that may benefit directly in applying your strategies to their internal practices, thus creating a direct competitor.  Once you’ve established a relationship with an affiliate manager you can trust, transparency is key. While it is vital for them to be open and honest with you, it is just as crucial that you are open and honest with them.  Just like any relationship, it can only flourish if both individuals are giving 100% and are open and honest.  If either party is holding back, then there is potential for your business’ growth to be hindered.  Open the doors of communication.  Find a reputable network.  If the network has a good reputation, then their employees will be a reflection of that.

In an industry that is constantly changing and evolving, you must make the most of all the resources that are available to you.  One of the most valuable resources is an affiliate manager.  They are experts in the industry and their mission is your long term success in this industry.  Find a network and affiliate manager that you can trust, work with them to develop a business plan and watch your business thrive.

This Article Brought to you by Katie Rose ~ Affiliate Strategist ~ Clickbooth

About Clickbooth.com

Clickbooth is a world renowned performance-based online marketing company providing cutting-edge technologies alongside a commitment to creating powerful partnerships for Publishers and Advertisers in the industry. Since its inception in 2002, Clickbooth’s focus on quality and delivering unprecedented efficiency in the buying and selling of online advertising has been the company’s foundation for industry leading success.

Have you ever wondered how super affiliates are able to dominate their media landscape so effectively?  We certainly have too, and two years ago we set out to crack the mystery (at least parts of it).  Among other tricks, we’ve discovered that a properly built jump page will improve conversion rates and raise customer value, resulting in higher bounties and EPCs, which in turn allow you to buy more traffic.  The rich get richer.  As the President and co-founder of Media Magnetic, it’s my job to explore ways to improve the actions we send to our clients as well as find unique methods for our publishers to be more successful.  I’d like to share some of the success we’ve had with our jump pages, why we’ve had that success, and how we’ve leveraged the knowledge obtained to help our publishers.

For those who may not be familiar with it, a jump page is a simple interstitial page that goes between the ad click and the landing page of an ad campaign.  In the case of pop traffic it can often function as the page that gets popped.  Traditionally these pages can take on many different flavors: crazy eye-popping bombs of color, browser takeovers, interactive flash interstitials, you name it.  However we’ve found that for the purpose of improving click & conversion rate without sacrificing customer value, a simple graphic page mixed with refined messaging text is a happy medium.

 One of the most effective jump pages we’ve developed was for PurePlay, a social poker client of ours.  Over the course of four months we delivered over 80,000 clicks and 4,500 free joiners through PPV keyword buys.  Using ad messaging and keyword optimization alone we were able to improve the EPC on the campaign by six cents – hardly enough to scale a campaign to stratospheric levels.  However, once we got our designer involved who put some creative messaging down next to a sexy woman in a red dress, the campaign exploded.  EPC jumped from $0.75 to $1.15, and by the time we had delivered another couple thousand joiners the advertiser was on the phone raising the bounty by  45% for us and any partner who sent traffic through the jump page!  Over the course of a week we had revitalized the success of the campaign.  Once the page was a little more refined we slapped some PHP in the links and released it for our pubs to use on their own campaigns.

Why did this happen? Aside from the obvious benefits of capturing the user’s attention, the page also provides more time and space to educate the user on the product.  The added click helps to reaffirm the user’s interest in the product so once they land on the registration form they’re more likely to enter accurate information.  Those that aren’t interested in the product simply close out the jump page.  This finding was backed up by reviewing the data with the advertiser, who noted that customer value was significantly improved over those who went through his regular path.

This one simple jump page we built for PurePlay completely changed our perspective for in-house media buys on our campaigns.  Not only have we practically abandoned sending traffic directly to the landing page of a campaign, we’ve learned that when executed the right way, a jump page can improve both EPC for our publishers AND customer value for the advertiser. It’s a win-win.  While walking in the shoes of our media buying affiliates we’ve learned that it pays to invest in good design work for a jump page and as a network it has benefited us to open our landers up for our publishers to use.

This Article brought to you by Tim Wisner  http://www.mediamagnetic.com

Since 1999 Tim has made his mark on the online marketing world. Beginning his career in Search and Performance marketing at a small Seattle startup, he quickly learned the dynamics of the industry. Since then, Tim has built and sold an organic traffic network and worked for two local online agencies, Ascentium and Don’t Blink Media. As a board member of NWIAG, Tim maintains a close pulse on the local internet advertising scene. Along with his Partners, Tim was inspired to build Media Magnetic into the Premier Search Marketing Agency in the Northwest.