As more marketing budgets move to a performance model, it’s incumbent upon advertisers to optimize their creatives for delivery and their landing pages for conversions.  This becomes a necessity because ultimately it is up to the publisher to best monetize their traffic- be it banner impressions, mailing lists, social media application inventory, search clicks, etc… Publishers will gravitate to the campaigns, regardless of flair and name recognition, that convert the best on an eCPM (earnings per thousand: IMPs/records delivered) or EPC (Earnings Per Click).

I spend a lot of time these days talking with our clients on ways to best design their landing pages.

The sign of a great architect is not what he can add, but rather what he is able to take away.

We address things like: Where do you put the form, which words (paragraphs often!) can you cut out to make the page more concise and funnel the user to the action you want them to take?  Which colors are appealing?  Which images will put the user in the right frame of mind to take action?  What type of users are you aiming at?  Is that realistic?  Do you know what your average customer profile looks like?

We also talk about deliverability from an email perspective.  There are certain best practices that can greatly increase chances of reaching that new customer and gaining their attention.  This can be anything from the naming of alt tags and proper HTML (close those tags kids) to what type of words get picked up by filters and what colors are most appealing to your customer target.

At the end of the day it’s a win-win for the advertiser and publisher.  The advertiser is able to secure more leads or sales as a result of optimized creatives.  The publisher was able to provide access to more inventory to the advertiser because their campaign appealed to the user base and yielded a higher return for their content.

-Matt Dutremble

Just kidding, I didn’t even see that many pocket protectors there actually… Internet advertisers, publishers, networks, mailers, providers, and more descended on the city by the bay this past week for the 2009 ad:tech conference.  Intela exhibited at the show and sent along CEO Jim ‘Go Blue’ Mansfield, affiliate managers Loren ‘Showtime’ Zimmerman and Nicole ‘Rain-dance’ Aranda, and account manager Jay ‘Funny Man’ Andrews to represent the team. 

Many of Intela’s partners were either exhibiting or had attendees there to meet with. The team got the chance to meet and speak with many of their existing clients and made new acquaintances to explore options with.  The result of the show will be some great new business in the second quarter; new clients, new offers, and expanding our work with existing partners. ad:tech was only two days but the time flew by with so many people stopping by to talk shop.

The weather couldn’t have been more perfect for the conference; sunny skies and 70 degrees was the norm for the four days Intela was in San Fran. Rumor has it that the California Alcoholic Beverage Control even declared a state of emergency due to severe shortages in the downtown San Francisco area. Not quite sure why…

…At least that’s the trend in affiliate marketing these days – Online marketers want to be in the company of the advertiser.  Affiliates and networks form a ladder that leads up to the advertiser; each rung down means less of a payout for the affiliate.  Everyone is scrambling to get to the top of the ladder, to get cozy with the advertiser, and trying to grab the exclusive relationship as the agency-of-record.  It recalls images of Indiana Jones as he hangs from a broken rope bridge in the climax of Temple of Doom.  Jones et al dangle from the bridge remains over gator-infested waters below; first to make it to the top wins.  It’s not unlike the environment that has developed in affiliate marketing: be at the top of the food chain – or perish.

The advertiser pays a certain amount per action, whether it be a sale or a lead.  Networks work with their affiliates in order to generate a good volume of actions for the advertiser’s campaign.  Those affiliates work with sub-affiliates and so on until you have a long line of publishers running the campaign.  Each one takes a margin as they pass the offer down the ladder until the offer isn’t worth the payout and the ladder ends. 

In the performance-based world, it pays to be on top, literally.  The higher up the chain one is, the higher your cost-per-action and subsequent profits.  Networks who take a margin, live and die by this.  The old adage, ‘nature hates a middle man’ might not really be that old, but it definitely holds true.  In this increasingly connected industry, everyone knows everyone else, so why shouldn’t your publisher be on the same rung of the ladder as you – and get the same amount of money as you?  Being at the top means that companies better have their own campaigns, their own lead buyers, and their own creative teams if they wish to remain successful at the top.  Just make sure that Indiana Jones doesn’t dislodge your foothold on his way up the ladder like he did to many a hapless henchman.

We created Intela LeadGen back in 2008 for precisely this purpose.  In the months since, LeadGen has created a stable of Intela exclusives that we can offer to our network on the first rung of the ladder.  The team rolled out Intela’s UK and Australian paths, RewardsToday and Aussie Prizes, and have built out some great email lead campaigns alongside them.  The anti-aging health and beauty market has never been hotter and Intela’s work on Natural Botox in the US and UK has resulted in a top performing exclusive.  Collateral Exchange is another exciting offer that Intela offers exclusively for top payouts.  This is a short term loan campaign that allows consumers to exchange jewelry or other valuables for the cash they need while being able to get their collateral back!  Stay tuned as LeadGen has many more exciting projects ready to roll out in 2009.

Social media sites are a kind of a community in which individuals can customize their pages and information for only the people they accept to view or for everyone to view. These community networks are quite useful in personal and business relationships as you can be as specific (via email or instant messenger) or as vague (status updates, wall posts, etc.) with someone as you’d like.

The new trend is the online marketing opportunities on social media sites. These sites are able to use your information to allow advertisers to target and market to specific groups. Advertisers have the option to pay per impression or per click so they can reach a massive amount of people quickly and cheaply.

Some social media sites are stricter than others as far as what advertisements can be placed on their site. MySpace has become a haven for all kinds of ads and looks quite cluttered on some pages. Facebook has stricter guidelines because they care more about not bothering or offending the user than being an advertising forum.

Social media sites are also a sort of viral marketing in that one person of a certain age group and interest will be friends with another individual of a similar age group and similar interests and that person will be friends with another similar interest individual and so on. This makes the target audience advertisers are looking for much easier to find.

So next time you get on Facebook to update your status, those ads on the right could have been placed by Intela. Because we’re always on the forefront of new trends to make our company one step ahead of everyone else.

Normally this is a good thing for the ski mountains so they can begin getting dumped on by snow which brings the skiers and boarders out.  This year things have been down a bit as the economy rears its ugly head.   People are holding back spending on big ticket items and stashing away disposable income.  They’re looking for value, deals, areas where they can save some money, redeem loyalty points for xmas presents (if you haven’t, this is an easy way to knock out some gifts!)- anything that adds value to their lives.

Promotional campaigns present a good opportunity for advertisers to give a little and consumers get a little.  They are easy forms to complete and attractive promotions.  Rewards Today has been giving away 100GBP every Friday in our Christmas promotion!  Great for email, display/social media, search and text links.

Off the internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. Viral Makreting is here to stay. You might as well start up today or be the last one in the pack.

In the past, we’d create different versions of landing pages and data collection forms in effort to improve conversions. The problem was, however, that we’d send one list to one version of an offer, and another list to a different version. We weren’t able to rule out the possibility of the traffic source being the variable affecting performance. Was it the creative changes or the characteristics of the different list of users that made one version convert better than the other?

We’ve recently taken steps to minimize the impact of this variable by employing a “traffic splitter”. This is a simple block of code that takes incoming traffic and diverts 50% to one version of the offer and 50% to another.

We’re then able to make small, incremental changes to creative, copy, and form presentation to better isolate which of those changes impact the offer’s conversion rate.

Voila! Ever-better landing pages.

The show was a great success for our entire team. It also was educational for our newest UK team member, Thuy Pham, to take part in the Intela exhibiting experience. Jim and Jen and the rest of the team met a lot of new clients and made really great connections.

Thanks to all that made this a worthy show and we look forward to seeing you all at other shows around the globe!