Improving Online Business Affiliate programs with Adwords
Content Content... 2 Introduction... 3 Overview... 3 How to get started... 4 Setting up your affiliate account as a keyword trader... 5 Finding Advertisers... 5 Start generating traffic... 7 Product links or deep links... 7 Editorial... 8 How to find products that sell... 8 Test, test and test... 8 Evaluate and find more opportunities... 9 EPI identifier... 12 rey markets and cross country linking...15 Risks...15
Introduction In this document you will learn how to make money online by referring quality traffic to TradeDoubler advertisers from Google. We will start with a brief overview about affiliate marketing and traffic trading. Then go into details. If you are familiar with TradeDoubler and affiliate marketing you can go directly to Setting up your affiliate account as a keyword trader. Overview Affiliate marketing allows almost any website to refer traffic to an advertiser. The referring site is remunerated for the volume and quality of the traffic it delivers. The quality is measured as the relation between clicks and actual sales. Affiliate providers are able to measure the conversion rate from websites to advertisers and use this to measure traffic quality. In affiliate marketing, the website forms a partnership with the merchant and is called affiliate or simply partner, in some networks the word publisher is also used. Amazon, who receives about 20% of all its sales through its affiliate network, pioneered this marketing method in large scale. Today affiliate marketing is a must have and all serious online merchants have an affiliate program. If you have a website you can refer traffic through affiliate programs and earn revenues through your links. The only limit to the amount of money you can make is the volume of traffic and the CR you have. Hence, traffic is the key to success for you as an affiliate. Figure 1.1 There are three partners in an affiliate network, the affiliate site, the affiliate provider and the advertiser. Affiliate provider pays ommission to the Affiliate Affiliate provider invoices the Advertiser based on the quality of the Add your CV at! Visitor Affiliate Affiliate provider Adverti Visitor visits the Affiliate.. and clicks through.... to the advertisers site With the arrival of search marketing you can easily increase the volume of traffic and increase your revenues through affiliate programs. By using your creativity you can ensure that you earn more on the traffic you deliver, than what you pay for it. This means that search marketing can help you earn much more through your affiliate business than you currently do.
Figure 1.2 The normal clickflow, from Google to the affiliate site and then to the Advertiser Google Affiliate website Advertiser With modern affiliate programs it is even possible to deliver traffic directly to the affiliate advertiser, not even passing by your site. You do this by inserting the affiliate link directly into Google. This way you can buy traffic at one price, and directly sell it a higher price becoming a traffic broker. Figure 1.3 Advanced clickflow, directly from Google to the Advertiser, not passing the affiliate site Google Advertiser Why would advertisers allow you to do this? Why don t they buy Adwords themselves? Well, many advertisers buy Adwords themselves. They have in-house people that work solely with this. However, there are so many words, so many situations, and so many languages, that they can never come up with all the combinations that will actually lead visitors to a sale. That s way they are willing to give away a commission to you, so that you can help them get more sales. Also, there are other advertisers that think it is wiser to outsource this whole process to affiliates. Affiliates will only get paid when they deliver results, but they also have the ingenuity to find new sources of traffic and increase sales for advertisers continuously. Affiliates are in reality expanding the marketing budget for the advertiser. Ensuring that ads are placed in more spaces than if without affiliates. Also, since advertisers are only allowed to have one ad shown for each Google query, more can be shown through affiliates that act as third parties. All in all, from an advertiser perspective the advantages with allowing affiliates to also deliver traffic through Google outweigh the drawbacks. This traffic trading business is very young, but growing fast and today thousands of people earn their living through trading with Adwords combined with affiliate networks. How to get started We will now go into details. You will learn how to set up an affiliate account as a keyword trader, to find and apply to relevant advertising programs, and become accepted as an affiliate. The last section describes how you can evaluate performance and minimize risks.
Setting up your affiliate account as a keyword trader The process of registering as an affiliate is simple and straightforward and you have probably already done it. Go to the homepage of the provider and click become publisher / affiliate. It is important to enter as much information and as accurately as possible. All accounts are screened manually, and omitting information may limit your success of being accepted by large advertisers. If you do not have a website, then explain this in the description about the site that you have to entered. Ensure that your website has its own domain, and doesn t look amateurish. When your account is setup, we recommend that you send an email to support and inform them about your intention to work with Google Adwords from this account and ask for specific information if available to guide you to specific Advertisers. Give a few days of answer time; if you do not get a response via email then call the provider. Not all advertisers will accept keyword marketing. Finding Advertisers The strategic choices you make when starting to run affiliate programs involves; Affiliate program and selection of products (for example, Dell and notebooks ) Geographical focus (for example, UK) Support and tools offered by the affiliate program Finding Advertisers that will accept you and also perform for you is an art that you will soon will be able to master. However, you must start with trial and error. You have to put your toe in the water before you jump in. Wait with the big advertisers until you master the game. Start small and grow. Since most advertisers only pay you when you deliver a sale there are a few things you should look for when choosing advertisers. The end product must be attractive both when it comes to brand, price and shipping. The site must be easy to navigate and have a simple buying process. Then you must look at what you will get paid, this is called tariffs in the affiliate world. Lastly, you have to ensure that the tracking parameters are attractive.
The tracking parameters (see below) are the rules that ensure that a sale delivered by you, will actually be attributed to you. Different advertisers have different tracking parameters. It is very important that these are attractive and ensures that all traffic you send will be credited to you. Tracking parameters are closely related to the tariff structure, since good tracking parameters can make up for low tariffs. Tracking parameters and tariff structures All affiliate programs have different commission structures and tracking parameters. The reason for this is the different business models advertisers have. For example an online bank might need several weeks to see if someone is eligible for a loan, a CD shop might sell thousands of CDs with very low margins, a travel agency might have a lot of cancellations. This all adds up to a need for different tracking and commission structures and these will of course affect your ability to earn revenues on your traffic to these advertisers. Tracking parameters Generous Adword policy? Allows deep linking? Have tariff segments for top performers? Recurring events for tracking multiple sales? * Cookie duration at or above 30 days? * Live trackback (No batch, which takes a long time) * Well-known brand? Easy sales process with many payment alternatives? Competitive pricing and quick delivery? Score * Explanation of terms (the others are find in the chapter text): Recurring events mean that you get credited for additional sales that are made by the customer after the first sale has occurred. Cookie duration means the time after the click that a sale will be recorded, 30 days means that a sale taking place 30 days after a click has been made will be recorded and credited to the affiliate. Batch processing means that the advertiser is reporting back to the affiliate provider what is sold, instead of the provider recording this in real-time based on the tracking parameters. Real-time tracking is more accurate. Some of these parameters are easy to find, other you might have to look up yourself, or ask the affiliate manager for the program. For advertisers where all the answers to the above questions are Yes you should spend most of your time. For others you could should evaluate and work with the ones who give you the best score. Eventually, it is only testing that will show you which ones work best for you. The best score gives you the highest probability of success. Identify a couple of smaller advertisers with generous tariffs. Ensure that they have good tracking parameters. See if they have a keyword / Adword policy, this dictates the rules for using their brand in search engines. Also, try to look at yourself from the advertiser perspective. The only thing they will see is the information you have provided. Will they accept you as an affiliate? There is a large chance they will, most advertisers are generous in accepting affiliates. Click the Apply button. Maybe about 50% of the advertisers will accept you, so you better apply to a couple of programs when you are at it. The evaluation period to approve or decline your application is usually a few days, but some do it in hours, and others takes weeks. You will receive an email with your status.
When you have been accepted as an affiliate it is time to do business. If you start with big brands and do not deliver results you might lose your status as an accepted affiliate to the advertiser. A lost status as accepted is difficult to recoup. Once you have started to master this trading business it is time to move up to the bigger advertisers. When they see the results you are providing to others, they will surely accept you as a partner. Start generating traffic Go to the TradeDoubler website and login. Look up the advertiser you have been accepted to. There is a shortcut under Your Programs. Find the place where you generate links, and read about how to create your own links. You find this under Graphical Elements or Link Matrix. Figure 1.4 Copy and paste the tracking code Take the highlighted tracking link (in the format of http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?...) and paste it into your destination URL in the Google edit ad interface. See figure 1.4 above. Product links or deep links You get the best effect by using Product links, or deep links that it is sometimes called. This means that when someone clicks on your URL at Google they will be linked directly to the page for the specific product at the advertiser site. This increases the likelihood of a sale or conversion. Look for products that are good sellers, some advertisers inform about this. Some networks, have detailed sales reports that can give you hints. Read more about this research process in the info box how to find products that sell.
Create a link directly to the product page for the product you have identified. Create the tracking URL according to the guidelines setup by your affiliate network. Below is a guideline: How to construct your own URL at TradeDoubler http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?p=15657&a=407311&url=target_url Replace TARGET_URL with the full URL to the product page you want to link to. The different parameters in the URL mean: P = program id, equals the advertiser id A = affiliate id, identifies your site G = optional, identifies a graphical element or other type of link EPI = optional, see below, unique identifier that is reported back to you if a sale or lead occurs. URL = optional, an override URL that the traffic should be sent to. Must be in the same domain as the standard URL. Try to use a landing page that is focused on encouraging some kind of action, instead of the first page. You find the parameters on the right hand side on the program page for each advertiser. Now, take this link and paste it into the Destination URL on Google. Editorial The text you write in your ad is vital for success and takes time to master. Use the advertisers URL as the visible URL on Google. Sometimes you have to add the word affil. or affiliate to the ad. But we recommend you wait until Google notifies you of this, since it disturbs the ad and takes valuable space. How to find products that sell When you start to work actively with Adword and traffic trading, your mind will start to look for hot selling products or products that are advertised on TV or similar. Look for new product launches, new artists giving out new records, new movies, authors that receive prices, etc. If a company is advertising for something on TV, people will search for it on Google. If a product is mentioned on a show, people will search for it. Buy the Adwords that relate to these products, you can even buy the whole product name. After a while you will start to understand how to analyse things in happening around you in order to maximize your return on investment online. Test, test and test When you feel comfortable about the links, editorial and Adwords, it is time to do a test campaign. You must receive at least 1000 clicks over a period of 30-40 days before you can do a proper evaluation. This means that it takes time and you should probably run a couple of campaigns simultaneously to get up to speed faster. Think about this when you setup your budget in Google. Once you have affiliate links setup and live at Google, you must test them. This is a must, URLs tend to become more complicated and it is easy to mess them up. You will probably find that they don t work the first time, at least this always happen to me. Then you have to go back and see where the problem is. First test the link you created to the advertiser. Test it by pasting it
directly into your browser. Does it work? Ok, then you have to look for errors when you put it into Google. Sometimes long URLs with foreign characters do not work well. In these cases you must ensure that the URL is URL encoded. If you do not know what this is, then search in Google for URL encoded and you will get an answer. Evaluate and find more opportunities It is not until you get a couple of campaigns working that the real opportunities arises. We will now go through the different tools you can use to evaluate performance and how you can spot new opportunities. When you have a couple of campaigns going with 5-10 advertisers, it is time to start working on evaluation and return on investment measurement (ROI). You have to make sure that you benefit from the campaigns that work best, and shut down those that don t work. The ones that work best can give you further ideas on how to find more Adwords that can deliver results. Your primary report on TradeDoubler is of course the Overview report. Run this in parallel to your Google reports for the same time period to compare results. Figure 1.5 Screenshot from Google Overview report This is the first report you get when logging on to Google Adwords administrative interface, you have seen this in earlier chapters. Here you can see that in this example you have spent SEK 49.22 today.
Then you log on to TradeDoubler (do this in another window so that you can have both open simultaneously) and load the Overview report for the same date. Figure 1.6 TradeDoubler Overview report The Overview report shows the advertisers performance in a chosen period. Imp means impressions, since you are making your own links and letting Google to the Adserving you will not be able to see this metric through TradeDoubler. UV means unique visitors, and is the same as clicks in Google. CTR is not applicable since impressions are not counted. Leads are for affiliate programs that measure this instead of sales. LR (leadrate) or CR conversion rate shows you the conversion from click to sale. Total com shows you have much you have earned in commission on the different programs. In the this report you can see that in total commission during this time period you have earned SEK 886. Hence the preliminary profit you have made this day is 886 49.22 = 836.78. SEK 836.78 is not bad at all! The overview report gives you an overview, and is used to show you that everything is going well. You cannot draw any conclusions from it; we need other reports for that.
The second report you should look at is the Event breakdown report. This report shows you what is probably the most important information. What are you selling? Are you selling the products you expected to sell, are you selling others things? Maybe you can get ideas on new product specific Adwords to use from this report. Figure 1.7 Screenshot event breakdown report Event in the report above shows you the merchant specific event that was triggered. This is usually nothing to care about. The Order value shows you the value of the order you delivered. The Product number and product name is reported by some advertisers and give you valuable information. Not all advertisers have implemented this tracking feature.
EPI identifier In order to track the ROI of each campaign, you can inset an identifier into each tracking URL. In TradeDoubler it is called EPI, which is short for Enhanced Publisher Integration. How does it work? Once your account has been enabled by TradeDoubler, you can add an extra parameter to the tracker link called "Epi" and then assign any value you wish to each tracker link. The parameter can be both letters and numbers or any combination thereof. The parameter can at the most include 64 characters. The tracker link The Epi parameter can only be implemented for links that you generate yourself, so it not possible for you to download them directly from the TradeDoubler interface. The link looks like this (this is an example link and does NOT contain your site ID): http://tracker.tradedoubler.com/click?p=123&a=654321&epi=yourcode Instead of YOURCODE you can for example write adword_nokia3110 if you are running a campaign for this phone. You can either use your EPI parameter to identify traffic from ad groups on Google, or as an override on specific keywords by using advanced settings, such as below: Figure 1.8 Google power posting The number in the above box is optional and gives you the possibility to set a manual maximum price on specific keywords.
The results from using the EPI parameter can be seen in two useful reports on TradeDoubler. The simplest one is called EPI report and shows you the sales or leads that have been generated through your EPI links. Figure 1.9 Screenshot EPI report The second more advanced and useful report is called Keyword report. To access this report you must inform TradeDoubler by email that you want this report, it is free and anyone can get access to it just by asking. Figure 1.10 Screenshot Keyword report The dedicated keyword report at TradeDoubler is designed to give you feedback on the specific keywords you buy, what the conversion to sales. Another great benefit of this report is that you
can also see the exact phrase that was entered. These phrases might contain other keywords, which might give you ideas on other keywords you could buy. If you use the EPI parameter to reflect your campaign groups it is easier to find what campaigns are actually delivering sales in this report. Moving up in the world: tariff segments Most advertisers have different tariff segments for different affiliate categories. This means that they usually pay more to affiliates that deliver high volumes of traffic with really good quality. Advertisers pay these affiliates more since they do not want to loose them to the competition. This means that when you become better and deliver better results, you should contact your affiliate manager (the person who is managing the affiliate program) and ask for a better segment, if available. EPC report Figure 1.11 Screenshot EPC report The report shows you earnings per 100 clicks and is a good metric to ensure that you on average have higher revenue from every click, that what you pay for it at Google.
rey markets and cross country linking When you have a winning formula you need a source. You might discover that some Adwords work very well, but that they do not deliver the volumes you want. Then you have to find more sources. Either you can try the same word in different languages, or you should start to find other search engines. When you do this, you become an advanced traffic broker. Risks Buying and selling is not without risk. In every business there is a risk that the things you have bought are not sold, or that the one you are selling to do not pay you on time. But where there is risk, there are also opportunities. You take a risk, which the advertiser is not willing to take. You do it since you have better knowledge about your area, language, or the marketplace in general. The risk you take can be rewarding if you manage to deliver good quality traffic. This is easier than you might think, as you have seen from some of the screenshots in this chapter. All screenshots are taken from actual tests that the authors have done. You do this at your own risk and we want to warn you. You might invest in traffic, and in the end not get paid for it due to several reasons. It could be as simple as tracking problems with an advertiser, or that you enter the wrong URL. We recommend you to limit your budget and spending the first months and slowly increase once you understand how everything works. Today we know that a couple of hundred persons in Europe work like this for their living. You could be next!