I know that this has been in testing since 2007 but I’ve been seeing it more & more often recently.

What happens is that you search for a product & when the results are displayed you see the normal adwords ads, but one of them (this can be above the results or on the right hand side) will have a hidden div & the text “Show products from RETAILER for SEARCHTERM” it might look like this (at the top):-

or like this (on the right):-

& when expended, they look like this :-

& this :-

Now I’m sure you’ll agree that this is quite cool – & if you can ever get any control over it, it could improve conversions. The data is being pulled from a google products account so this will be more something for merchants than affiliates though.

Oh, one final thing, All of the above screenshots are from a search for 32″ tv amazon. Do Tesco (& eBuyer, Dixons, Money Supermarket, Revoo, Nextag etc. really think I want to see their ad when I’ve specified Amazon?

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

Unfortunately, I’ve been completely snowed under at work recently & have been neglecting this blog.
I have a list of things I want to write about but haven’t yet managed to….

Here’s the list :-

• ChannelAdvisor – what it does & how I use it
• Recommended WordPress Plugins
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s crap
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s great
• CJ Datafeeds – why I don’t like them
• Excel trickery – cleaning datafeeds & timesavers
• Expensive Chocolate – how I built it in less than 2 hours
• 3M Select – relaunching the affiliate program

I think I’ll probably get around to writing all of the above at some stage, but if you would like one or more of them sooner rather than later, please let me know in the comments below.

EDIT : posted this as a poll on A4U if you’d rather use that…..

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

Anyway -- onto the video….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8nJTlusQY

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

Any twitterers out there may have seen some twitter based competitions, @johnchow & @shoemoney are a couple that spring to mind.

It’s an interesting idea – basically to enter you need to follow them on twitter & send a tweet to all your followers that you’ve entered by following them & they can do the same.

I guess the aim is to gain 10′s of thousands of followers – but the question is why?

Is it vanity – a chance to say look how great I am because I have 20k followers on twitter?, or is it just stupid?

I’d like to hope that they have some grand plan to monetise all these followers. Maybe they plan to drive traffic to their own blogs ( http://www.johnchow.com & http://www.shoemoney.com respectively ).

So – whaddaya think? Vanity, Insanity or Genius?

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

You may remember, I posted an SEO friendly theme for wordpress a while ago. I’ve been using it for this blog in all it’s ugly unstyled glory since then & I’ve spotted some interesting results. I posted about Spotify Registration being opened up to UK users the other day & almost instantly I found myself in the number one spot on google for spotify registration. That’s quite impressive given that I have no pagerank & pretty much no backlinks! Now if only they had an affiliate scheme….

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

I’m fairly pissed off today.

We’ve always done very well in natural search on google (well, at least since a couple of weeks after launch).
Today however, we’ve noticed that natural traffic has slowed to a crawl. I had a quick look around & although we do very well for some terms (command strips, mpro 110 for example) some of the terms we used to rank very highly for seem to have taken a beating. We used to fluctuate between 1st, 2nd & third for 3m, now we’re on page 2. We used to be around 7th or 8th for computer accessories, now we’re nowhere to be seen.

I dug into webmaster tools to see if I could see what was happening & discovered that we’ve suddenly got an awful lot of inbound links from crappy spammy sites, here’s a screenshot showing a selection (click for larger version):-

a selection of dodgy inbound links

I can’t think for a minute that this isn’t malicious – I mean WTF are these sites for? some of them I couldn’t even view as our internal systems blocked them due to ‘malicious’ content. Anyway I’d love to hear your thoughts on how I should deal with this. Oh – & there’ll be a crate of Guinness for the first person to send me the name & address of the guilty party.

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

They’re available in 3 sizes – Standard (£14.99), Deluxe (£19.95) & Super Deluxe (£29.95).
They’re also available in both ‘for him’ & ‘for her’ flavours.

You’ll save upto £15.00 on the normal value of the contents (all currently available on the site seperately at full price).

And…… If you buy before christmas – you might just find the keys to a £1000 Ego Electric Street Scoota in your box

Try it now!

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

In a nutshell, the agreement is that I will resolve any queries within 30 days of them being raised or they will auto-approve. Now I don’t have an issue with the 30 day timeframe, but it did make me think about whether or not cashback sites in general add any value.

This has no doubt been discussed ad nauseum, but here’s my take on it.

I used to use cashback sites myself – The process went something along the likes of this :-

1. Decide to buy something online
2. Log in to a couple of cashback sites to see if cashback was available
3. If cashback is available – clickthrough & buy
4. If cashback was not available – go back to the site & buy.

So, given the above, the sale would have happened anyway – the cashback sites added nothing (& potentially cost the merchant).

Never was I browsing the cashback site & saw that there was cashback available from retailer x & thought to myself – “bugger me I can earn 5% cashback if I buy something from that retailer I’m going to clickthrough & buy something”.

Conversely, I quite often found myself browsing (still do in fact) the likes of hotukdeals & the DVD Forums Bargains & regularly think “bugger me – that’s a great deal – I d0n’t really need it, but at that price, I’m going to buy it anyway”

It seems clear from the above, that the cashback sites are adding nothing & the bargain forums are adding plenty.

All that being said though, I have seen (& made) the argument that cashback might be just enough to sway a buyer who couldn’t quite justify the cost without cashback.
So – all in all, I’m really not sure what to do – on the one hand, it’s not a great deal of effort, on the other I’m not sure I like being dictated to & I’m not sure of the added value.

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

I had an issue the other day with sales appearing in the network account that I knew shouldn’t have been tracked.
The majority of these sales were staff members & a few were trade (account) orders that the telesales staff had keyed manually onto the site.

I investigated this further & discovered that the network was using the IP Address to track the sale.

With my affiliate hat on, this is all well & good, as it’s likely to minimise leakage, however once I delve a little deeper, it’s just plain wrong.

I work for a large multi national with 10′s of thousands of users who all have internet access through a central gateway – this gateway has 3 public facing IP Addresses. What happened in this case is that someone somewhere within our network (10′s of thousands of users remember) had clicked on an affiliate link (one of the big voucher code sites). Then a little while later, another one of the thousands of users made a purchase – the network tracked the sale & because they’d seen an affiliated click from the same IP attributed the commission to the large voucher code affiliate.

Now I’m not sure if the network consider the IP address as more important than a cookie, or if they only use the IP if there’s no cookie present, but this could lead to all sorts of problems.

Let’s imagine the following scenario (happening in this order) :-

1. Customer A (who is one of the thousands inside this network) clicks on affiliate 1′s link
2. Customer B (also inside the network) clicks on affiliate 2′s link
3. Customer A completes checkout
4. Customer B completes checkout
5. Customer C (also inside the network) completes checkout
6. Customer D (also inside the network) completes checkout

Who get’s what commission? What I think everyone agrees should happen is that Affiliate 1 will get commission for Customer A & Affiliate 2 will get commission for Customer B & Customers C & D don’t generate any commission. However, what would actually hapen is that Affiliate 2 would get all of the commission for Customers A, B, C, D.

Here’s another scenario:-

An affiliate who is within the network of thousands spends some of his lunchbreak working on his affiliate sites & during the course of checking links etc, he clicks on a couple of hundred of his own links to the networks top 200 programs. The network will then attribute all sales from that IP Address to the affiliate – even if the network are only using IP Tracking for sales where there is no cookie present, this could still amount to a huge amount of sales which the affiliate isn’t entitled to & the merchant shouldn’t be paying commission on.

It’s certainly food for thought…….

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.

Our special shopping event is TODAY ONLY – Friday November 28 from 00:00 GMT to 23:59 GMT Lots of gifts. 1 day not to miss. Get the season’s best prices on Mac, iPod and iPhone gifts!
Don’t miss out! Inform your customers today and upload special one-day shopping event banners now available.
Click here for the special 1 day Apple shopping event landing page to view all products and special prices offered: http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore?node=campaigns/black_friday
Post this link today!

Note: Correct URL structure must be used to ensure commission is tracked. Please use the URL’s provided in this mail in order to ensure revenue and commission is tracked. If you have any questions please contact your local TradeDoubler account manager to confirm correct URL structure.

Affiliate Assets:
Special 1 day Apple shopping event banners are NOW available in the TradeDoubler system in ALL categories.

Available in the following 7 formats: 120×120, 120×600, 200×200, 250×250, 468×60, 728×90, 300×250

Thank you for your partnership.
Apple Affiliation team

Now ignoring the really really short notice for a minute, let’s examine what they’re telling me to do.

Click here for the special 1 day Apple shopping event landing page to view all products and special prices offered: http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore?node=campaigns/black_friday
Post this link today!

OK – they’re telling me to post that link today.

Note: Correct URL structure must be used to ensure commission is tracked. Please use the URL’s provided in this mail in order to ensure revenue and commission is tracked.

Then they warn me that correct URL structure must be used in order for commissions to track.

So – it looks like I’m going to be paid commission for every visitor to http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore?node=campaigns/black_friday today – I suspect it will have a considerable amount of traffic – Thanks Tradedoubler

TTFN

BFG

You have been reading a post from BFG's Blog.