Affiliate Marketing Blog - a Traffic Junction Blog

For $3.1 billion, Google acquired advertising solutions provider DoubleClick. Google has been stirring the online advertisng pot for a while now and coming up with various concoctions— while all the while getting closer to near absolute control of worldwide online advertising [well, it looks like Google is out to control not just the online ad scenario but any known form of advertising — albeit, leveraging the Internet to do so].

Organizing the world’s information is the company’s stated goal, but everything the company seems to be announcing these days seems to be about getting control of the advertising options available when presenting that information.

Just a month ago, Google had announced its plans to enter the PPA market; with the DoubleClick acquisition, Google may have made further headway into the affiliate marketing space since the former’s affiliate marketing unit “Performics” is part of the deal. What exactly Google does with Performics will be very interesting.

Will there be a conflict of interest now between between different units of the same company? Google is known to be pretty hard with affiliate marketers, who have found it pretty challenging with their search engine marketing efforts on Google [both organic and paid]. Will this change ? Obviously, we can expect Google to say that everything is controlled by their powerful algorithms and everybody gets equal treatment—- but can everybody continue to buy into that without any doubts whatsoever?

Another thing to look out for in the next few weeks and months is the moves by Yahoo & Microsoft and what they do with some of the other big ad networks. We can be pretty certain those two companies will not surrender in the battle for advertising supremacy without a decent fight—- though from the look of it, there seems to be only one winner.

“The 2007 Search Attitudes Report, commissioned by search marketing firm Tamar, indicates that consumers lack trust in paid search and are turning overwhelmingly to natural search results when making purchase decisions.
2007 Search Attitudes Report,” says a report on Netimperative (emphasis mine).

If that were indeed the case, how does one explain the continuing growth of paid search? It is fairly obvious that more advertisers seem to be channeling money into paid search now more than ever, and this trend cannot be out of sync with the search user’s behaviour. Such a statement makes me sceptical and distrust the study that is being reported; particularly since we rely on paid search marketing to a great extent for our own business.

Two aspects of the study might still be of interest to affiliate marketers: (a) consumers depend natural search results more — I think this is more due to where/ how the results appear rather than any distrust in paid search results and (b) consumers are influenced by negative views appearing in search results.

For a), the obvious action for affiliates is to put more effort in getting organic search traffic; but that decision depends on the affiliates’ overall marketing strategy and priorities. For far too many affiliates, depending on the search engine’s algorithms to drive traffic may be too much of a long wait. Also, being used to absolutely measurable results, many affiliates do not like the “cost of uncertainty” associated with organic search traffic and choose to ignore this option altogether (despite the knowledge that SEO will have “long-term” benefits).

Affiliates as agents of online reputation management

There is an indirect (”rather convoluted) benefit of affiliates doing more with their SEO efforts—- assuming the affiliate sites do begin to get visibilty, they are decreasing the probability of customers getting influenced by the “negative publicty”. In fact, committed affiliates are potentially a powerful tool for a merchant’s “online reputation management”, which is certainly not easy to control. While merchants will have to focus on their end-users to ensure a great reputation, affiliates have a part to play in building and projecting that reputation— be it by creating excellent content, generating their own “user-generated” content or using techinques like blogging.

2006 was a bumper year for UKonline advertising, surging by over 41% from the previous year, according to data released by the UK Internet Advertising Bureau. The internet now accounts for over 11% of all ad spend in the UK.

Some of the key details from the report are excerpted below:
“The results reveal that expenditure on the internet overtook advertising in national newspapers, which last year recorded growth of 0.2% to £1.9 billion and a market share of 10.9%. In 2006, the internet was just over half the size of the TV advertising market, which experienced a fall of 4.7% to £3.9 billion.

In 2006, online display advertising (including banners, skyscrapers and online sponsorships) rose 35% year-on-year to £453.7 million.

Traditional advertising formats, such as banners, were reinvigorated by an increase in the use of rich media, which includes graphics, audio, video or animation. Once again online display advertising is experiencing growth far greater than any other display medium.

The growth of paid-for search (sponsored listings that advertisers pay for when a consumer clicks through to their site) was sustained, increasing by 52% to £1.2 billion of total online ad spend or a 57.8% share.

Online classified advertising was also up 45% to £379 million, a share of 18.8%. This is in contrast to traditional press classified advertising, which experienced a significant decrease of 7.8% year-on-year. “

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The increase in online advertising spend can be correlated to the increasing penetration of broadband Internet in the country, with more than 50% of the country’s adult population now having access. According to a report on Netimperative, based on the Digitial Progress Report by Ofcom, “more than 13 million UK homes and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are now connected to broadband, compared with 9.9 million a year earlier and 330,000 in 2001. “

Both of the above news augur well for affiliate/ performance marketers who depend for the most part on online traffic for sustaining and growing their businesses.

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Meanwhile TradeDoubler, which has been in the news for various reasons, has had some changes in its top management. In the UK, the company has appointed Mike Glegg as its UK Sales Director to “to drive new business across multiple programmes, to further expand the UK sales team, and to build on TradeDoubler’s UK achievements to date, which have seen the company ranked as the 24^th fastest growing digital media company in the UK* with an impressive 284% revenue growth over two years.” This follows William Cooper taking over as President and CEO of the company towards the end of last month.