Supplyant

Affiliate marketing is a highly measurable way to drive targeted traffic to your site in a scalable, pay as you go way (CPA). As with all aspects of internet retailing though it is open to abuse from individuals that want to bend the rules for their own benefit.

We manage the affiliate programme for a client and noticed that one unknown Affiliate was out earning top sites such as My Voucher Codes, which seemed highly suspicious. After running a few reports in Hitwise it became clear the Affiliate was bidding on the name to hijack the brand which people naturally search for. This is against Affiliate practice and was excluded from the Publisher set of rules.

Using the brand name, he paid Adwords to place his link at the top of searches made, which people naturally clicked on. When someone clicked on the Adword it set a cookie on the viewer’s PC and immediately redirected to our clients site. You’d never notice.

Managing the Adwords account for the same client, the Affiliate recognised that we would see his rogue Adword links. His work around was to exclude his Adwords from being presented in the geographic locations of the Agency, the Client and the Publisher to make himself invisible to us.

This neat work around netted him thousands of pounds in Affiliate fees. Our client didn’t loose out completely as the business still converted in to sales but the cost of acquiring the sale went up.

When we looked through the data again it was clear that it wasn’t just our client that was being stung. There were some big names in there and this guy was doing the rounds.
It’s not unusual for Affiliate payouts to be huge. Search online and you’ll see plenty of Google AdSense cheques for over a million dollars but when it comes down to making your own business grow make sure you keep your eye on the ball. We cancelled this account and regularly check for similar anomalies. It’s important you do to.

How do I get to #1 on Google must be among the most common questions for anybody who works with the internet. Its an obsession but is it the right thing to obsess about?

Getting great positions on search engines for popular terms isn’t free. It can take an enormous amount of effort building links, writing content and fine tuning pages that don’t necessarily convert as well as ppc based sites because they have to be search engine friendly. With SEO and Google it doesn’t happen overnight so be prepared to wait months to hit the front page.

If you believed what people tell you nobody ever clicks Google adwords. We had a great opportunity to test something we have believed in for a while, that Google adwords traffic generates more sales than traffic from the normal search engines.

Look at this google result for K&N’s (the worlds leading manufacturer of performance air filters)

The two results of interest are:

Performance-filters.co.uk

A shop we use and promote only via adwords. This was forced on us as the previous domain name (kandnshop.co.uk) was asked to be taken down by the manufacturer. We’ve spent a lot of time optimising the adwords that we use so as to get the maximum number of clicks.

filterpower.co.uk

A domain we purchased because it was the #1 result for K&N but the existing owners had ceased trading. We knew it had traffic and the price was right so we threw a duplicate site on but retained the title and description tags so we could retain the #3 position.

Both sites are exactly the same except for a different colour top banner and logo.

The differences – Ive rounded the monthly numbers to keep it simple.

Traffic to adwords site: 15,000 visits
Traffic to #1 shop: 2,500 visits

Revenue from adwords site: £24,000
Revenue from #1 shop: £1,700

Each visitor generated from adwords site: £1.60
Each visitor generated from natural site: £0.68

Action points

• What is clear (in this situation) is people who click on PPC buy more than visitors to the organic results. People do click adwords in much higher numbers than most would tell you.
• The highly targeted text in the adwords campaign allows you to tick the emotional boxes that make customers want to click them.
• If time is short, I would be hitting adwords harder as a priority rather than working on search engine traffic because its easier to buy this position and as long as the price is right for the adwords then it is going to make you more money quicker.
• Getting people onto the site is one element but the better and more targeted the page you send them to the better.  The gains in sales from fine tuning these pages let you turn poorly converting adword campains into winners.
• Getting to #1 in Google is not free, SEO is expensive and time consuming.

Nobody likes paying for adwords compared to the free traffic from the organic listings but these are great reasons why you should.

Our friends over at Bath Empire are growing fast and needed to recruit a bunch of new guys for the warehouse to cope with demand. Improving customer conversion rates  is big priority as part of the work we do with them, but sometimes your website can have interesting effects in other ways.

What happened when they went recruiting proved to be a great example of  the content on the website having a direct effect on the quality of staff they recruited.

The Bath Empire meet the team page:

10 people were brought in for interviews for a job in the warehouse. I was amazed to find out that when it came to interview day 7 of the potential candidates turned up in white shirts and blue ties.

It was fantastic to see that the recruits took the time to look at the site and look for an affinity with the existing team.

Simply, its proof that your websites quality has a direct effect on more than just sales.

So what next?

Take the time to considered how you can improve the quality of your team page. Im off to fill the Supplyant team page with bikini clad lovelies and see what happens at our next set of interviews

It’s your birthday and I’ve just given you a present.

You open the small box to reveal a guitar pick.

“Great. Just what I wanted”

I can tell you are lying, but I appreciate your vague attempt at gratitude.

So I start to explain that this is no ordinary pick. Oh, no. Far from it in fact.

This is the pick that Jimmy Page threw into the crowd during the recent Led Zeppelin reunion gig.

Enlightened with this knowledge you’re now viewing your gift in a whole different light. But it’s still the same nondescript pick you dismissed 2 minutes ago. So what’s changed?

It’s simple. This small, flat piece of plastic now has a story. It has been given a character. It’s become far more than the object itself.

And because of that, you won’t forget about it. You won’t leave it to gather dust at the back of a shelf. You won’t let your kids play with it. It’s also highly likely you will tell your friends all about it.

By giving an object a story you will, in turn, give it a character and people would much rather buy stories and characters over objects any day.

So what stories do your products have?

Photo credit to Aidan Jones

I was speaking to somebody the other day about the pro’s and cons of particular couriers.  I gave my opinion on a courier called Home Delivery Network. I thought might be a good fit for the products they were shipping as they had a reputation for low delivery damage.

At the next meeting I was told  “we’ve done some research online and found out that HDNL are rubbish”

I searched for “Home Delivery Network Reviews” and came up with this truly awful review.

So I use DHL for our internal deliveries… how did they fare?

So what about ParcelForce the preferred carrier of the person I was speaking to.

So were do we go from here.

Management of online reviews is set to become a hot topic in the next few years.  Strong brands can get away with bad reviews to a certain extent, but a bad review can signal the death of a weak product or service.

Equally as a consumer, to state the obvious,  make sure you look at similar products before jumping to bad review conclusions.

As the saying goes “Everybody shouts if your drains smell but nobody takes the time to tell you your drains smell great”

Whats the best review you have ever seen?

The new year is always a great time to refocus your efforts and polish up your marketing plan. I spent a lot of time over Christmas pondering what e-tailers must do in order to have a successful project. Here’s my thoughts:

Do every one of these 4 things well and you cannot fail

• Have a truly great product,  unique service,  or a notable offer (the last resort is lowest price).
• Provide good quality listings and a simple checkout. Good enough to not put people off.
• Get found. Don’t wait for customers, go and find them.
• Provide awesome customer service whatever the cost.

To be clear, if you mess up any one of these you will fail. Do these right and you will win.

Are you covering each of these rules?

Sometimes when your really involved in a project its easy to get stuck in “cant see the wood for the trees syndrome”. In this zone its easy to become obsessed by adding new features, new site designs and continual revisions to copy that you feel are going to improve your sales enormously.

On the wall next to my desk I have a piece of paper with my simple rules of e-commerce which I always revisit to remind myself whats really important.

Here’s my 5 simple rules:

Rule 1:  Its not about you, its about them

Its wrong to use your site to tell people how great you are and how great your products are. Its been proven a million times before that talking in terms of your customer works better. Look at your site or the products and ask “Whats in it for me?”

Rule 2: What is remarkable?

What are you really good at? Can you offer the best delivery times in your market, the latest ordering, best returns policy, cheapest prices, latest products. What do you do well enough that somebody would write about you on another website or tell friends.

Rule 3: Get found.

I spoke to somebody the other day who proudly claimed to be “Northampton’s best kept secret”. What an idiot i thought, you don’t get rich by being a secret. Get out and about, speak to people, promote. If you have rule 2 sorted properly then shout about it as loudly as you can.

I ordered an item just last week from a really ugly site, just because it was the only one I could find that sold what I wanted.

Rule 4: Don’t give them a reason not to buy

How many times have you visited a site and it looked great and the prices were good only to find checkout was a pain and it wouldn’t tell you what the delivery price is until you log in. Show the site to some friends and see what they think when they use it. Have a look at these reasons why people leave you.

Rule 5: Remember that thing you did that worked really well on another site?

Its painful sometimes to keep doing the same things over and over again. But its less painful when your profits skyrocket because you stuck to something that’s proven to work.  I’m not advocating stopping new ideas here, but new development is expensive and time consuming. Better to start quick with an old idea than never get going with a new one.

In my opinion, if you follow these basics methods you cant go too far wrong.

Do you have any rules you follow? I’d love to hear them.

I remember first hearing about IKEA in the early 90′s. My friends were telling me about this great shop,  it had really cool cheap furniture with really stupid names.

On my first visit I was blown away, there was simply nothing else like it. How could the local store possibly compete with this furniture monster?

In those days IKEA were considered an overnight success but I read a very interesting article that gave some great facts about IKEA that confirm that if you keep at it and the ideas good it will happen.

Great facts from that article:

• The big idea came about because IKEA’s owner couldn’t fit the chair he brought in his car
• Its estimated that 1 in 10 babies were conceived on an IKEA bed.
• IKEA floundered for 30 YEARS before it found success overseas.

A great quote

The second great quote i came accross was from the founder of the LinkedIn business network:

‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’

I’m positive the first IKEA  flat pack chair wasn’t the best chair ever, but he got it out to market. This quote  shouldn’t give you an excuse for not giving your website everything you’ve got.

What I hope it re-inforces is that your site will never be finished. Testing and measuring the successful elements of your sites design as early as possible are the key to fine tuning it to your audience.

Got any great quotes or stories tell us about them here

I got sight of some interesting statistics last week showing that peoples use of the yellow pages is dwindling at its fastest ever rate.

The fact given was that the number of people using the book on a weekly basis has dropped by over 20% in the last 4 years.  Interestingly yellow pages advertising rates don’t appear to have changed.

So is it worth being in Yellow Pages?

As with every form of advertising it all depends on your return on investment. On that basis you shouldn’t do yellow pages unless:

• You monitor where your leads come from
• You monitor how many of these leads turn into customers
• You look at the lifetime value of those customers

Once you have an understanding of how much your yellow pages customers are worth to you its a far simpler decision.

What about Yell.com?

Yell.com is a good site for local search its worth appearing on there but:

• It will not give your own site any google friendly back links
• Its going to be under serious threat from Google Local which is free
• Its going to be under increasing pressure from other free providers

Despite this exactly the same rules apply its all about your return on investment. Spend a pound, get more than a pound back in profit then go for it.

Google local

Here’s an example of what google shows you if you search for decorator in Northampton.

This ones easy, its free, it gives you a really high position on google and its easy enough that you can do this yourself. You can do it here

Have you had any good or bad experiences with Yellow Pages. I would love to hear them, or you can tell us about them here

Just last night I was contacted by a potential customer.

I had never spoken to them; I had not heard of the company; I didn’t chase them around interrupting the persons day; I didn’t get his name from a list of prospects and call him out of the blue; I didnt spam them. They came to us asking for help.

What was unusual about this contact was that they found our site searching for “ASOS annual report”

At position 8 on google was this result:

The tricks that ASOS is using to get 100% growth | Supplyant

In my eyes ASOS stand out clearly as a company using a common sense, planned approach to rapid growth. ASOS’s recent annual report, gives a great insight …
www.supplyant.com/…/the-tricks-that-asos-is-using-to-get-100-growth/ –

They found the site despite the site not ranking for any of the traditional web design or web marketing type phrases (its just too new to do well for them yet)

It just so happened the person concerned was an ASOS shareholder looking for the report but thought that our page on google looked like it  offered something that might be of interest to him.

He also happened to be looking for help marketing his brand new website, and thought that based on what we had said we might fit the bill.

Better still he also gave us some feedback on how we could tweak our site to make it clearer for people like him. I’d like to thank him for this.

Every article you write, every comment you make on somebody elses site, every twitter, facebook or forum post you interact with may just generate you best customer ever.