Is this Google’s first April Fools joke? (it’s April 1st in Australia)…or is the joke on them?
Netimperative reports today that TradeDoubler has acquired Advertigo, a company founded last year that has reportedly developed contextual & pay per call advertising platforms.
It will be interesting to see how TradeDoubler integrates the technology/service offerings from Advertigo into its programs, and what kind of value such integration will offer to the merchants and publishers. Is Advertigo’s technology really so powerful so as to be able to create a dent in a market that, at least on the face of it, does not seem to offer any room for displacing the couple of well-entrenched, powerful players? If the answer is yes, then the acquisition could well be a steal at the reported purchase price of about £740,000.
Anyway, TradeDoubler is probably flush with cash to fund such acquisitions, having gone public towards the end of last year. We expected some major mergers and acquisitions and some kind of consolidation in the pay-for-performance marketing area this year. While this one is not really big, it may well be the beginning of many more such announcements.
One of the questions that some affiliates that operate using a portal mode is the extent of development effort to be invested on on-site search. By its very definition, a portal portrays an aggregation of large amount of content from various sources. However, well organized the site is, users almost always expect a search engine to help them in their decision making process. Which explains the continuing growth of comparison shopping.
If users see a search box on a site (and usually the search option is placed very prominently) they are more than likely to immediately use it. Here’s the problem: search is a reasonably complicated and expensive feature to develop and maintain, if we want to continue to provide users with the most relevant search results. Since free text search is the simplest and most preferred option for users, the site owner’s challenge is predicting how users will search and ensuring the search engine is good enough to throw up the kind of results that users expect.
Are some results better than no results? It is dicey choice to make.
When I have to address this puzzle, I ask myself questions whether a) Is on-site search really necessary for the site being developed? b) If yes, am I willing to invest in keeping track of user search behaviour and using that knowledge to enhance the search engine? c) If the answer to the second question is no, I have two choices. Forget about the on-site search and focus on structuring the site such that the search function is not required (it is a challenge, believe me!) or consider integrating a third-party search engine on to the site (for eg. Google’s search box). The latter option is not without its pitfalls, but one can draw consolation from the fact that the searchers recognize and trust search results from an engine that they are familiar with.
Want 60-days worth of free advertising (don’t ask how many people your ad will actually reach!)? The search engine dumbfind recently announced a ‘tagvertising’ product Adsonomy, which combines the new tagging fad with advertising, and is currently allowing advertisers to try out upto 20 ads per account.
Here’s what they say on how this works:
“Dumbfind has technology to automatically assign tags to URLs in its index. When you do a search on Dumbfind, these tags are automatically pulled up with the results and displayed on the left hand side. Before, these tags were used only to help people refine their queries, but Dumbfind is now sending them to our adservers to be analyzed. The adserver analyzes the tags and determines which ads to serve. It’s a pretty simple idea, but very powerful.”
Will tagvertising really work? Two factors affecting relevance of the ads shown to the searcher remain: the accuracy and power of the tagging technology for websites used by the engine and secondly the appropriateness of the tags used by the advertiser. Nevertheless, avail the free trial and check it for yourself.
(Disclaimer: I have no other interest in this company or product other than trying out the free advertising at some point)
Google launched its web page creation and hosting tool, and promptly closed registrations due to “heavy demand”. But we all now know of the existence of this tool and that it will be out sooner rather than later.
Free web site hosting services, despite the popularity that they enjoyed a few years ago, are not really on everyone’s must have lists. Most people who can don’t really opt for such sites; but these are definitely good for amateurs and personal pages. Yet, Googlepages may get better attention, because it comes from the Google stable.
From a business perspective, will these be beneficial? I am sceptical.
It seems that creating this website is tied to your Gmail account; which gives me the impression that at this point, a user cannot have multiple websites using the free service. That doesn’t really help professional affiliates (who in any case may want to have pages with their own domain name).
But it certainly opens some possibilities for personal sites and amateur affiliates, who could set up a website without too much hassle and put in a few affiliate links.
It also has the potential to boost AdSense revenues as the number of amateur publishers increase significantly. I am not sure if Google is allowing AdSense on these pages yet; but my instinct is that they will at some point. While we don’t begrudge publishers earning revenues from the program, to what extent the increased distribution of AdSense will affect the quality of the traffic that will be generated is an important question that Pay-per-click advertisers will have to bear in mind. Until next time, Ben Flux
There was this question posed on Shawn Collins’ website by an affiliate on whether owning a website was more profitable than simply leveraging PPC arbitrage. Most professional affiliates have probably gone through this dilemma sometime in their affiliate marketing adventure; like many other questions, this probably doesn’t have a black-and-white answer to it.
PPC arbitrage is akin to instant gratification; in many ways, capitalizing on PPC arbitrage is no different from a stock trader selling short. Undoubtedly, if you are good at it, the rewards can be great and immediate, but if you don’t do it well there are direct risks as well as the risk of lost opportunity.
Nurturing a website is like a long-term investment in your most prized stocks– you hold on to it through some periodic ups and downs and continue to invest in it and develop your portfolio.
The good thing is that both of these approaches aren’t mutually exclusive; at the same time, both strategies don’t have to be used simultaneously. Point is, each game is a new one…
Affiliate marketers, by the nature of our role as lead generators for others’ wares, are bound to continuously face newer challenges — be it restrictions on PPC, use of the methods we use, the unpredictable nature of how search engines view us and list us in their indexes etc.
In many ways, affiliate marketers face the ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t syndrome; but it’s not without its fun, thrill and rewards.
I doubt if you’ll ever hear of serious affiliate marketers worrying about keeping their brain cells fertile; the exciting opportunities that keep coming up laced with newer constraints and challenges ensure there’s always something interesting round the corner.
Until next time,
Ben Flux
You are currently browsing the Affiliate Marketing Blog - a Traffic Junction weblog archives for March, 2006.
