So I found myself in London, at the Excel exhibition center at the suburb of London, about 30 minutes by the tube from the center of London.
The Excel exhibition center is a nice place but is located in an area that you don’t want to get stuck at night, at least not me. There is nothing around but docks and few hotels. The transportation to the center of London is so easy, so the decision to book a hotel at the heart of London definitely proved itself as the right one.

The show itself was well organized. It’s not in the scale of the affiliate summit. I would say that close to 1,000 people attend for this show.

In the exhibition hall most of the exhibitors were local companies. This is good because that was the main reason for my visit. There were some local affiliate networks along with some local merchants. I found some new business opportunities. It’s early to talk about the chance to succeed with them, but it’s a good start.

Although I didn’t have much spare time, but between one meeting to another, I took the opportunity to enter to some of the sessions. The sessions at the A4U, at least the one that I entered, were a bit different from what I’ve got used to so far: More information less people who try to sell their product or their name. However, most of the information deals with SEO rather with PPC and social networking. The sessions were less innovations but with deep saying.
I didn’t meet any “super affiliate” that managing huge amounts with PPC. However, I did meet some guys who own amazing websites with lots of organic traffic.

For me London is always a good place to visit at. I was lucky to meet a great weather: sunny but not hot!
You can’t (cont ) expect more from an affiliate week.

The A4U is relatively new event comparing to the Affiliate Summit. I believe that it will get better. See you next year at the A4U in London.

Today I would like to share with you my thoughts about this Google move. How affiliates marketers might get affected.

The display ads market is been controlled by several players like double-click (now own by Google), right media and others while the biggest Google competitor on that market is Yahoo.

The display ads market worth lots of money. The biggest companies in the world, big names like Amex, Coca-Cola, and GE are spending huge amount of money every month.

The PPC affiliate business model is based on arbitrage. We buy traffic, hopefully cheaper than what we get in return, whether it’s a CPA offer or revenue share.

When Coca-Cola advertises on the web they would like to keep the awareness for their brand. A brand campaign is different than a typical affiliate campaign. The goals are different and are been measured differently. Brands campaigns are known with their high budgets. And where the big money is, Google would like to be!

So after Google acquire double-click their next step was to integrate double-click inventory within their Google content network. Now Google enhancing their tracking system to meet the big firms brands campaigns. With the new feature that was lately released we can learn something about Google future intention, at least for the display ads market.

There is no doubt that this change will affect the affiliate industry:
1. More competition on every spot – in these case rich competitors
2. Brands campaigns, especially with the big names, includes huge budgets. This will increase the effective CPC (usually brands campaigns are been calculated by CPM).

If so far we got used to compete with performance based competitors, who are looking for a positive ROI, now we have to deal with a different players playing by a different rules.

I believe that this is only the start of a bigger move after the top advertisers on the web. The affiliate marketing industry is a major part of Google income but it’s also one of their top biggest headaches, caused by affiliates who use Google AdWords to promote gray products. At the ends of day Google is the one who need to deal with their users complains, maintaining support teams etc.

Google probably prefer to sale their inventory to the less choosy– Brands campiness. It’s not that Google have something against affiliate marketer, it’s just easier to work with big accounts rather with those who spend $100,000 per month (no it’s not a typo, Google will prefer account of $5,000,000 a month). As Google will fill those spots with Brand campaigns, more and more affiliate accounts will be banned and/or more restrictions will be added to AdWords policy. Either way, it’s not going to be easy for affiliate marketers, at least not at the Display Ads market.

I believe that during 2010 we are about to experience some major changes with the way Google treat affiliate marketers. In my opinion those who will play by Google (changing) rules will survive (Especially those who spend lots of money each month).

Affiliate marketers have ever been and will always be the smatters among the online advertising businesses. It’s something that no one will be able to take away from us. So keep your mind open and be ready to hear more from Google. I’m sure it will come soon.

In this post I would like to tell you about a real story: How a an affiliate marketer, my friend, left money on the table just because he was lazy to pay attention to the details.

I sat with my friend this week in a coffee shop. We do that from time to time, sharing with each other ideas. My friend showed me one of his new campaigns landing page that he has been working on in the last two months.

As a veteran affiliate, he did A/B testing with two versions of the landing page. He checked the effectiveness of his landing page in terms of click through – The percent of people who visit the merchant website via his website. But that’s the point where he stopped, because in his opinion the difference between the landing pages performance is negligible.
How negligible? 43% vs 37%

In this niche there is no doubt that 40% click through (CTR) rate is fairly acceptable and even a bit higher than the average. Probably this is why he was impassive about the A/B testing results, knowing that his campaign perfuming relatively well. That’s the problem with veteran and with newbie’s as well – we tend to forget where to put our effort in terms of time consuming.

Before you start struggle with your traffic make sure you did all in your power to improve your landing page performance (CTR). In this case the 6% difference worth more than $1,000 in net revenue per month!

But you will probably not get convinced, as my friend was not, until you will see the math behind it. So here we go:

The average daily clicks to his page is 600 (yep, it’s a small/mid campaign)
The conversion rate within the merchant website is 4%
The payout is $24

The gross sale for LP 1 is:
600 * 0.43 * 0.04 * 24 = $247.68

The gross sale for LP 2 is:
600 * 0.37 * 0.04 * 24 = $213.12

Since we are talking about the same traffic, with the same cost, the difference between these landing pages results is NET PROFIT.

So the total net profit will be
(247.68 – 213.12) * 30 = $1,036.8

With less than 5 minutes of work my friend will get an addition of ~$1,000 per month depends which landing page version he will choose.

Think that if you have 5-7 medium PPC campaign, 6% difference within your landing page can give you more than $5,000 per month.

More than that, to get the same addition net profit using the landing page with the low CTR you will need to raise your traffic by more than 16%!
(Assuming that the converting ratio will be kept for the new traffic as well)

Keep this in your mind next time you try to think how to increase your PPC campaigns performance.

The affiliate summit in NY was great. Although the Hilton convention center is less preferred than the Rio convention center (Vegas), the atmosphere in NY is perfect for doing business.

So I found myself jumping from one cocktail party to another. From one sky-high roof to another British style designed club. More and more networks started to adopt the private cocktails parties rather than having loud crowded parties. Its great change because you get the chance to meet people in a more comfortable environment, cut the deals, and then having fun dancing with your colleagues (only women for me )

Affiliate Summit can take all of your strengths easily. There are lots of business opportunities around you, much more than you can squeeze into a whole day. With your body loaded with adrenalin you don’t feel the tiredness, but when it’s all over and everyone back in their homes you barely can walk one step further. You feel every muscle in your body. I myself spent my time catching some sleep for almost 24 hours straight!

If you are in the affiliate business, affiliate summit is a must event for you, BUT…must be ready for it.

I already booked my flight and hotel for affiliate summit west 2010 in Vegas. Until then I have lots of work – converting the business talk to action.

In October this year I also intend to attend at the A4U in London. It will be my first time there (A4U not London ). I hope to get some new point of view about the affiliate marketing industry from the European networks rather the American oriented affiliate networks.
I heard that some of the “American” affiliate networks also considering taking part on this event as well, so in any case boring it will not be

Mazal Tov Yifat and Andrey