Affiliate Marketing Blog - a Traffic Junction Blog

Last week, the hot news was about Google launching its PPA program {limited edition beta}. One aspect that didnot get much attention in that was the option for in-text advertising.

Today, Amazon affiliates received communication announcing their own in-text advertising option, which they call “Context Links”. Even this one is supposedly a “beta” launch, but an “open” beta launch. With this, affiliates that create content have the opportunity to have relevant words hyperlinked to appropriate pages on Amazon.com and earn commissions for successful transactions.

While in-text advertising has been around for a few years now, there has been considerable debate on whether such advertising is right or if it was too much of a nuisance to the user, unlike traditional contextual text advertising. The answer seems to be a resounding yes– this form of advertising is here to stay and user-resistance is breaking down.

All in all, I think this is a positive move from Amazon that “content” affiliates will welcome.

For almost 2 years now, speculation has been rife about Google’s entry into the “affiliate marketing” arena as we commonly know it [granted Adsense is an affiliate program, which is never viewed that way]. With the latest announcement of the pay-per-action option (beta) in Adwords, Google’s arrival into this space is formally confirmed. Not unsurprisingly, there’s considerable buzz about this development on the major affiliate marketing portals / blogs.

As always, one of the first questions being asked is: does this kill affiliates? On the contrary, I think this could serve to be an opportunity for affiliates. Here’s why. Currently many professional affiliates stay away from using Google’s AdSense program, simply because the CPA programs they promote provide a much better return per conversion than what one could hope to make from AdSense [in general; i know there may be some segments where CPC revenues might be quite attractive]. With the PPA [or CPA] program from Google, these affiliates can now begin to use the AdSense program as well.

We don’t know yet what kind of criteria Google is going to set for advertisers to sign up for this program when it is made public, but I’d think it will offer a much bigger pool of advertisers/ merchants than what most affiliate networks currently provide. Therein lies another opportunity for affiliates.

Two audiences could feel the heat at some stage: a) the networks: how will this move affect the marketing strategy of their current crop of advertisers and what will their reaction be? (b) the large number of AdSense publishers who thrive on the CPC model— I’m not sure if Google will move completely with a CPA model for AdSense [as the company has quite a bit at stake], but if the CPA trial works out well, there might be changes to the way AdSense is run {of course, it is pure speculation}.

Nevertheless, we will be waiting to see the (domino) effect of this announcement.

According to a report on Clickz that quotes statistics from IAB, online marketers spent close to $600 million in acquiring leads in the first half of 2006, using various lead generation techniques. Yet, there have been questions on the effectiveness of this spend, mainly because of the uncertainty in the quality of leads generated.

Therefore the IAB has come up with a quality ranking system for evaluating the quality of leads, to help marketers/ advertisers decide where to put their dollars. The quality ranking system proposed takes into account five aspects: origination of the lead, lead exclusivity, lead age, customer motivation and validation/ verfication of the lead manually and third parties.

One of the challenges of this kind of a scoring mechanism, unlike defining something such as page impressions, user sessions, ad formats etc. which the IAB is involved with, is that it cannot be applied as an absolute standard and has to take into account factors such as the industry and the advertiser’s objectives. The onus is therefore very much on the marketer to accurately define the relative weightage of the above parameters as applicable to that advertiser’s objective and come up with an appropriate score when trying to compare various lead generation sources.

From a lead generator’s perspective, I think very often the “problem” is that marketers [or lead buyers] themselves don’t have a concrete idea of the exact kind of leads that they are looking for. Since they run the risk of identifying their prospect base too narrowly, there is a tendency to be quite broad with their specifications of what is considered a lead — and then we get into this discussion of lead quality. Obviously, the tighter the definition, greater will be the premium for the lead.

In today’s “long tail” world, may be marketers are willing to make compromises there and hope to widen the net with the hope of converting a few more of those “low quality” leads…