The problem of brand bidding or trademark bidding has been affecting the market for a long time – a couple of years ago an Adthena study showed that up to one third of all queries now experience brand bidding, driven in part, by 50% of advertisers who engage in competitive bidding on pure brand terms. Now brands have learned to fight it more effectively, but according to The Search Monitor 12% of your clicks are lost to competitors who advertise on your branded search keywords.

Brand Auditor, an ad fraud monitoring tool by Admitad, shares insights on the most harmful types of brand bidding, and ways to counteract them, based on its work with more than 2,500 brands.

What types of brand bidding can hurt your brand?

There are several main reasons ‌why someone uses your brand name or other branded keywords in their contextual advertising campaigns or on their websites. In recent years, Brand Auditor has been continually detecting, tracking and blocking harmful attempts in the following categories of brand bidding:

• Unauthorised brand usage. Your competitors know that people searching for your products are likely to buy their product too. This is an easy-to-do and successful way for them to capture the attention of the “hottest” audience – your own.
• Direct brand bidding. Unscrupulous or inattentive partners are interested in easy money. They, as well as your competitors, know that users who use the name of your brand or products in their search query are ready to make a purchase. It’s a simple way for others to get higher conversions at lower prices, at a cost to your brand. 
• Landing page brand bidding, including coupon aggregators and showcase websites. Partners use coupons or promo code pages to lure valuable traffic away from your resources and directly to theirs. 
• Unauthorised brand usage through CPA. CPA partners can also partake in unfair and fraudulent activities by using your brand keywords to siphon off already-interested buyers into their own affiliate programmes. 

Brand bidding ads often end up among the first links that Google shows to a user. Statistically, the first ad on a Google search results page has an 8% click-through rate. The first non-ad link has an even higher CTR – over 30%. 

If a user has specifically searched for your brand, it’s unlikely that they will pay attention to whether a result is an ad link or an organic link – they’ll click it anyway. 

Therefore, up to 30% of organic traffic searching for your brand or product risks either getting to your site through brand bidding (for which you’ll undeservedly pay a reward), or being channelled to a competitor’s store. 

Why is it crucial to monitor brand bidding?

The only way to effectively respond to and prevent brand bidding is to receive timely, real-time notifications that it’s happening. Therefore, monitoring services such as Brand Auditor have become an essential part of a business’s online marketing strategy. 

For Admitad, the issue of monitoring brand bidding and preserving high-quality traffic is an acute one. Brand Auditor, a tool that was developed for this exact purpose, has been carefully monitoring, filtering and blocking forbidden brand mentions in contextual campaigns and on websites – by both partners and competitors – for many years now. 

Due to an ever-growing demand for such services, by both Admitad customers and companies outside of our ecosystem, it was decided to launch a brand new, cutting-edge version of Brand Auditor.

Our new version of Brand Auditor will be released as a stand-alone product – available to Admitad advertisers as well as any brand around the world who wants to protect themselves from brand bidding.

This is a key point in our new offering. While other monitoring services are restricted by location, Brand Auditor is available universally – in every country, all around the world. 

Brand Auditor has shown that the approach of limiting brand bidding services to monitor only in countries that traditionally produced the bulk of contextual traffic – countries such as the US, UK, Germany, etc – is outdated.

Other regions like India and Brazil are rapidly increasing the volume of their contextual advertising, and their problems with brand bidding are no less acute. That is why our service now monitors globally, so as not to miss a single use of a branded keyword without the brand’s full knowledge.

How can you counteract brand bidding?

The threats ad fraud poses to your brand, business and income are very real. Over the years, Brand Auditor has sought out and blocked brand bidding violations for more than 2,500 advertisers globally. 

Intelligent brand bidding monitoring has enabled advertisers to filter out hundreds of thousands of orders, protecting their marketing budgets by stopping them from paying undeserved rewards. 

Also, by constantly monitoring competitors for any illegal or malicious activity, many brands working with Brand Auditor have been able to successfully launch their own branded contextual counter-campaigns, protecting their legitimate organic traffic from any encroachments.

Upon being alerted to suspected brand bidding, Brand Auditor offers several options for dealing with it, depending on its category type and circumstances:

• If there is a violation by a partner – the partner network will be alerted. If they find out the partner used your banned keywords intentionally, they will be removed from your affiliate programme. 
• If your branded words are used by a competitor – you can set up a counter ad campaign targeting them yourself, knocking them out of the competition. Usually, it costs you less to use your own keywords, so resistance will be short-lived. 
• If you have a registered trademark for your brand name and a competitor uses that word in the text or image of an ad – Brand Auditor will locate, track and document the content of the ad, enabling you to launch a formal complaint and take legal action against your competitor.

The monitoring, detecting and combating of brand bidding is a highly-nuanced field. For every brand or business, an individual approach is important. 

If you’d like expert advice on these issues, contact the Brand Auditor specialists at support@admitad.com or through request form on Brand Auditor product page. Their experts will be happy to provide you with all the information and expertise you need.

The post The Very Real Dangers of Brand Bidding and How Brands Can Fight It appeared first on PerformanceIN.

It’s clear to see we’re facing challenging times- what do you think the affiliate marketing industry can expect from the end of 2022 going into 2023?

Right now, every business head can mention something like “high-level fortune telling using coffee grounds” as a professional skill on their CV. We can only expect marketing budgets to be allocated more wisely and meticulously!

I’m sure brands will start calculating their marketing costs more precisely, and finding out exactly what their ROI is won’t be done for fun anymore: the numbers speak for themselves even louder in times of economic instability!

I don’t think there will be any high-risk campaigns launched in the future. Having said that, I strongly believe affiliate marketing will attract more attention from brands again – it’s hardly possible to overpay while working on a CPA model.

The partner and affiliate marketing industries have been developing for a couple decades already, and watching them grow and open to new business segments is riveting. Every year it adds more value for advertisers and publishers: the ever-developing trend of “one-window access to services” doesn’t spoil. Being able to manage all your campaigns from one account – even the ones run in different affiliate networks – is no longer a practical necessity, but a privilege.

Why is affiliate marketing a good choice for all businesses of all different sizes and scales, including SMEs?

The current trend for lowering the threshold for different-sized businesses, including SMB (small and medium businesses), is more relevant today than ever before: equal opportunities for all ambitious companies! Affiliate networks offer special financial conditions for publishers and provide advertisers with agency-type services covering all their possible needs via the affiliate channel. 

For small and medium businesses, working with affiliate networks is, first of all, about saving money – it’s unbearably expensive for such companies to launch their own partner networks, even if they outsource the tracking services. It might not be clear at first glance, but using affiliate marketing channels is purely about constant development: affiliate networks are always tuned into novelties and trends, so they come up with new collaboration models and mechanics while being eager to maximise the efficiency of their channel for both brands and partners.

It’s necessary to acknowledge that, in the end, affiliate networks, brands, and publishers are in the same boat: the more attractive your offer is, the more relevant traffic publishers will bring. The higher a publisher’s commission is, the more affiliate networks earn and can spend on hi-tech tools and further development. It’s a clear win-win-win scenario.

For SMB-segment clients, affiliate marketing provides an opportunity to test the channel itself and increase its reach to customers, all while keeping ad costs at a relatively low level (subscription fee + commission for the completed sale). Some clients still live with this wrong perception of the affiliate channel as a magic “HIGH SALES” button, but you need to work with this marketing channel as much as any others. This is also true for small and medium businesses, who may even need to invest more effort compared to the big e-commerce giants. It’s worth it though.

Getting the hint is vital: you “sell” your product to publishers first, before they sell it to the end consumer. Persuading someone to buy your unknown craft lemonade instead of the well-known Coke is far from easy! It will take time, effort, and discussions with the affiliate network about how to better launch the affiliate programme or which traffic sources to allow. I honestly recommend listening to the professionals in this space – they’re in the same boat as you, aiming for the same goals.

Lots of people are making career changes this year – why do you think doing the opposite and staying in the same company for many years is a win?

I’m of the opinion that when you stop learning and developing within a company, or lose trust – it‘s time to leave. None of that has happened to me yet! As long as I’m motivated to leave no stone unturned to help the company grow – I’m in.

At Admitad, we constantly adjust our corporate structure to make sure the whole company works as one organism – thanks to the transformational studies provided by the Adizes Institute. These changes give us the opportunity to look at the company development from different angles: it might seem like we’re coming back to something we’ve done before – but keeping the spiral development model in mind, you understand that it’s just a higher helix level.

You manage nine teams across the globe – how do you manage them successfully whilst keeping cultural differences in mind?

It might sound trivial, but what truly helps is to travel a lot and actively engage with different cultures. Managing a team spread around the world (Poland, Germany, Brazil, India, USA, and other countries) with different languages and their own unique culture isn’t a piece of cake. It’s important to teach your colleagues to work together, regardless of distance, time zones, and cultural differences.

The advice that I can give here is as old as the world: we’re all human, and our behaviour can always be grounded. You might not agree with certain actions, but it helps to maintain tolerance and accept our differences!

An example from my life: long ago, I started reading “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer to try to get a grip on different cultural behavioural patterns. Trying to remember all the scales mentioned in the book and visualise them wasn’t easy, and at some point I called it a day. I opted to concentrate on gaining my own experience: practice makes perfect! I decided to reread the same book a couple of years later and found proof of my practical observations. That’s when the puzzle took its final shape.

What trends have you noticed so far this year?

The list of affiliate marketing trends this year is really long, but I’ll try to name my favourite ones. 

• Marketing tools are being unified under one platform. This trend will stay with us for a long time; the pool of techniques and approaches is so wide and diverse, it gets extremely difficult to control all of the channels simultaneously. The combination of tools will be based on either traffic channels or business segments, but it’s hard to narrow it down right away. I see different scenarios.

• Further growth of websites with discount coupons/promo codes, loyalty programs as well as price comparison platforms: inflation is going to keep increasing worldwide, the economic recession will negatively impact the buying power of consumers all over the globe – and people will look at every potential opportunity to optimise their purchases and get more while spending less.

• Financial products and BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) services will be on the rise too – a logical outcome of the economic crises. 

• Online sellers/brands will look more at developing countries where internet consumption is still growing, because the competition to enter the e-commerce markets and get a big piece of the pie isn’t that high yet.

Do you think the impending recession will affect Q4 sales?

It definitely depends on a number of factors, I’d say, mostly on the market(s) where affiliate networks operate. I do not expect the same growth as last year – most likely it will be much slower, but the affiliate market is growing organically every year, (approximately +50% for the past five years), and by the beginning of 2023 it is likely to hit the $15 billion mark.

The competition among the existing affiliate networks and newcomers to this market is getting brutal, that’s true. How to win the race? Just find out what your clients and partners truly want – and provide them with these solutions. To me affiliate marketing is like a beauty contest: all participants are worthy, but only the one who exceeds the expectations and finds a key to the heart of the judges will win.

The post The End of High Risk Campaigns? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Earlier this year, Petal Search, a mobile search engine by Huawei, honoured Admitad with its Partner of the Year award. Together, the two companies ran profitable joint campaigns that created additional revenue streams for Petal Search. The amount of GMV generated by Petal Search users making online purchases through Admitad advertisers’ stores doubled in H1 of 2022. With the full, worldwide coverage their expanded collaboration will bring and the autumn sales season fast approaching, both sides expect to see even more explosive growth throughout the second half of the year. 

Having recently celebrated its second year anniversary in June, Petal Search continues to nurture partnerships with over 3,000 brands. So far, Admitad has connected Petal Search with more than 800 advertisers and is eager to spark even more new collaborations in the near future. Since the geography of their cooperation now spans the entire world, Petal Search will be able to select partners from a full list of more than 30,000 brands and merchants across the globe. 

Despite being relatively “young”, Petal Search has already secured a place within the top five of mobile search engines in 25 countries. Through PetalSearch, Admitad’s advertisers gain exclusive access to the 40 million monthly active users of Huawei Petal Search across 170 countries, and more than 28 million monthly active users of Petal Maps in 160 countries. 

The team behind Petal Search has the ambition of taking their rightful place among the world’s top-tier search engines, shaking the market dominance of the likes of Google and Bing. Dr. Jaime Gonzalo, VP Huawei Mobile Services Europe explains that the current monopolies currently present within the text ads market, especially in Europe, are likely to play in detriment of the absolutely necessary healthy competition, critical for any market’s continued evolution, and ultimately to ensure the best experience for the end users.  

“Currently, the ads environment is configured in a way that not a single new search engine can survive without the support of these major dominant players. That’s not good. This is one of the reasons we decided to team up with Admitad. They provide our solution with additional monetisation options and an alternative way to develop our text ads service – through partnerships and direct collaborations with brands of all grades. Due to their level of flexibility and agility, we treat Admitad as an essential partner in our product innovation”, explains Jaime Gonzalo.

CEO and founder of Admitad, Alexander Bachmann, notes the success of the current cooperation between the two companies – in the last six months, the total GMV of purchases attracted by Petal Search has grown by 121%, and the number of monthly clicks on advertisers’ sites often ran into the tens of millions. These results have been achieved through the use of various tools, including MonetizeSearch, a tailored solution for search engines and browsers. It enables the displaying of brand logos listed in organic search results, attracting greater user attention to their offers. 

“Our teams are working closely together, experimenting and selecting the most effective mechanisms. We are thrilled to support the birth of a new “supernova” in the search engine market. The Petal Search team is actively trying out new approaches, harnessing the expertise of Admitad managers and, as a result, users have a really positive perception of customised ads. This is confirmed by their willingness to spend more – the AOV of Huawei customers is around $33, which is higher than the current average of $30 in partner marketing,” said Alexander Bachmann.

Both companies have high hopes for the second half of the year, especially Q4. By that time, the search engine will be able to start partnerships with hundreds of selected brands throughout many new regions. Also, it is a period of major sales – such as 11.11 (Singles Day), Black Friday and the New Year and Christmas sales season. Huawei and Admitad expect an explosive growth of GMV during these “hot” winter months.

Another revenue-boosting factor will be a line of new search engine monetisation tools that Admitad will roll out in the near future, including features inspired by their cooperation with Huawei. 

Current plans include MonetizeSuggest, a tool for providing users research suggestions with embedded partner links, features based on data from various coupon and product feeds, and other useful options for search market players. Each new tool will also be adapted for the monetisation of mobile apps. These tools will bring a significant increase in traffic to Admitad advertisers and ‌diversify the profits of search engines (including Petal Search) and other types of partners by creating more additional revenue sources. 

The post Admitad Wins Huawei Partner of the Year, Taking Collaboration to the Next Level appeared first on PerformanceIN.

A wide range of advertisers, vast variety of monetisation products, and lightning-fast technologies are the main advantages of the product. Moreover, Monetize Network solutions are immune to the impact of any upcoming regulatory changes in the data protection field.

“We keep improving our technology to stay ahead of the game. We develop solutions tailored to the needs of different customer segments, taking into consideration the specifics of their industries and business structures. The digital environment is generating more and more unique projects that are not fully compatible with standard products. Monetize Network is able to combine solutions adapting the monetisation processes to needs and strategies of our clients. We stay on the lookout for innovative ways to launch new revenue streams for platforms, digital projects, and apps,” – states Alexander Bachmann, founder and CEO of Admitad.

The platform includes a set of ready-made solutions for multiple client segments, including owners of content projects, forums, mobile applications, browsers and browser extensions, and other types of projects. The Monetize API will be introduced in mid-2022, enabling the clients to create their own custom monetisation products. 

A manageable and transparent monetisation solution

Admitad has already invested more than $2 million in the development of Monetize Network and is planning to put an additional $1.5 million in its growth in 2022. The new platform has grown off Adgoal, which Admitad acquired in 2019, and developed further since. Due to the acquisition, Admitad now has a stronger position in the key markets of Europe, the United States, and Canada. At the same time, it allows the Monetize Network team to look at monetisation from a webmaster’s point of view and focus on the needs and profits of partners. 

In 2021, Admitad team, led by newly appointed Head of Monetization Services Viacheslav Mezentsev, rebuilt the entire tech structure of the platform basically from scratch, created a new version of user space, revived existing solutions and developed new ones. Mr Mezentsev has been involved in several business rollouts connected to monetise technologies for the last seven years within Admitad. His plans remain ambitious: in the near future, all customers of Monetize Network will be connected to this updated version of the platform combining fast running and thus efficient processes, convenient and functional user interface and seamless integration.

In 2021, Admitad team, led by newly appointed Head of Monetisation Services Viacheslav Mezentsev, rebuilt the entire tech structure of the platform basically from scratch, created a new version of user space, revived existing solutions and developed new ones. His plans remain ambitious: in the near future, all customers of Monetize Network will be connected to this updated version of the platform combining fast running and thus efficient processes, convenient and functional user interface and seamless integration.

“Technologies are key; partnerships are another part of the entire puzzle. We have built these  with leading affiliate and advertising networks all over the world – and offer access to more than 50,000 advertisers who use CPC and CPA revenue models,” says Monetize Network Head, Viacheslav Mezentsev, and adds: “We are also successfully meeting the ever-growing demand of content projects for new monetisation tools as our solutions are immune to the impact of any upcoming regulatory changes in the data protection field”.

The revenue made by digital projects during the beta stage of Monetize Network increased by 90% last year. In 2022, the platform plans to reach $20 million in payouts for partners and intends to strengthen its position in Europe, the UK, and the US, as well as enter markets in India, Brazil, Poland, and France.

The post Admitad Launches Monetisation Platform for Content Projects, Mobile Apps and Browser Extensions appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Obviously, if your goal is to get an instant result, you can find your way. However, you should be aware: these methods have side effects, such as an increased cost of developing your CPA channel and your personal involvement in this process. But if you are ready for that, let’s dig into it! Below, you can find five methods to boost your affiliate programme and get some immediate results.

Spoiler alert: if all of these ways do not work for you, and you are ready to work for long-term results, we have prepared for you a list of useful tips. They will help you build sustainable partnerships with advertising platforms and achieve constant growth of your CPA sales.

Method #1. Raising rates

If you want to gain leadership as an advertiser and become an all-time favourite for publishers, there is one simple and obvious way to achieve this. Just raise your commission rates. The higher the reward in your affiliate programme, the more attractive it is for partners. Therefore, you get a better chance of attracting active partners with a large amount of traffic.

Nevertheless, the disadvantages of this method are quite obvious. You might attract a lot of partners who are interested in high rates only, but not in your product. In this case, you might spend a lot on CPA and be disappointed with the result.

To avoid this scenario and negative consequences, we recommend using a technique that will not give you instant results but will help build stable, mutually beneficial relationships with partners. Create a bonus programme for those who work with online traffic. Meaning, you have to raise rates in a reasonable amount for those advertising platforms that bring an impressive number of orders. You can increase rates gradually – for example, you can increase the basic commission rate by a few percent after 50, 100 and 200 confirmed orders. As a result, you reward only those who provide high-quality traffic in large volumes. And for your business, it will bring an increase in the number of sales.

Another way to improve your relations with publishers and the quality of traffic they drive is to enable dual-channel attribution. Opening and closing sales channels work in different ways, but both help to make the sale happen. The opening channel is responsible for the first contact. It is usually provided by influencers, information websites, forums, price comparison sites, social media accounts, targeting and contextual advertising. They introduce your products and services to the user. The closing channel (cashback services, coupon sites, loyalty programmes, landing pages for sales) helps users to save some money and make their purchases more profitable. 

With dual-channel attribution, sites from different channels don’t have to compete for the audience and rewards, but they can complement each other, making advertising even more effective. Thus, you can optimise costs for different types of traffic and motivate content creators to attract new users. With this method, you won’t be able to see results right away, but it will help you develop the programme further, improving the result of CPA work in the long run.

Method #2. Allow all types of traffic

Each traffic channel has its own peculiarities of work. Sometimes advertisers do not allow certain types of placements. This can be understood when it comes to competing with the marketing activities that are held by the company on its own (for example, when it comes to banning so-called brand-biding, simply put – targeting paid search ads to branded keywords).

However, sometimes advertisers simply do not want to cooperate with certain advertising platforms (for example, with cashback services that make the purchase more profitable, or targeted advertising). Meanwhile, the practice has shown that the more different traffic channels cooperate with you, the more exciting results you can get and the higher the sales figures become. Therefore, make sure to give it a try and test out the effectiveness of certain traffic types before deciding to forbid them.

Method #3. Individual approach

As you might have noticed in life, the individual approach works in any situation. Not only do different types of placements have different special needs and aspects, but also the partners themselves. If you want to build a sustainable basement for long-term cooperation and attract partners to work with your affiliate programme, try delving into the functional details of each advertising platform. Answer their questions and explain what makes you reject some actions they drive. Another benefit of personal communication with your top publishers is the ability to find out key downsides of your affiliate programme and fix them quickly.

Method #4. Exclusive promo codes and thematic marketing activities

Not so long ago, all Instagram users, regardless of their number of followers, got the opportunity to share links to their stories. This update has simplified the Instagram monetisation process a lot. However, even before this feature appeared on the market, affiliate programmes had a solution for this problem – exclusive promo codes. They retained the attribution of the order, regardless of the traffic source.

Exclusive promo codes are a good way to increase the loyalty of publishers and stimulate sales. Landing pages with special offers or any thematic promotions for holidays and events work in a similar way. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween — whatever you do, try to take the advantage of an upcoming event in your own way and invite publishers to use this activity

Method #5. Promote your affiliate programme

Have you already tried out all well-known techniques? You still have one more option available – promote your affiliate programme within the affiliate network. The official blog, forum, newsletters for partners, and posts on social networks are the most obvious channels to make your programme popular. However, you can go further.

Do you want to tell partners how to make your cooperation more profitable and effective? Are there any specific details about your programme that should be considered? Host a webinar and share this valuable information with publishers.

Did you manage to achieve some good results? Share your success story with external online media and get even more interested partners.

Participate in marathons and festivals hosted by the network, explore all the available opportunities and do not hesitate to try them out. For instance, the Admitad Affiliate network offers its advertisers several types of promo activities at once to make your programme popular among publishers.

Bonus tips for those who are ready to wait for results

Of course, the sooner you can see the result, the better, but sometimes it is worth considering long-term marketing investments.

And finally, here are some tips for those who are ready to handle a longer wait for their anticipated changes:

• You will never see results if you don’t analyse the performance of your affiliate programme on a regular basis. Keep an eye on statistics, try different methods and make decisions based on your data. 
• Always stay connected with the manager from the affiliate network and your affiliates in order to exchange ideas, goals, and priorities. Teamwork and open discussion can spark new ideas.
• Share your plans and information about sales or special conditions with publishers in advance. And be prepared to invest fixed amounts to increase the programme’s visibility.
• Be open to testing out new ideas. Even if you’ve already worked with a business model that didn’t work with one partner, it might work with another.
• Diversify investments: don’t focus on one top partner, pay attention to small promising publishers, support them, give them bonuses.
• Having a long-term plan of promo activities while remaining flexible for new opportunities is your key to success in a modern world of ever-changing conditions.

The post Five Ways to See an Instant Change in Your Programme’s Productivity appeared first on PerformanceIN.

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According to the first estimations of experts, the volume of online sales this year on Black Friday itself slightly decreased – from $ 9 billion last year to $ 8.9 billion in 2021. This trend has a simple explanation, given that last year the sale took place during the lockdown in many countries, as a result, many buyers were forced to choose goods on the internet instead of shopping offline like they used to. This year, some users chose to return to their usual shopping process. In addition to that, many brands this year not only launched discounts early before the 26th of November, but also promised to extend them after the traditional Black Friday period. This distributes the buying activity over a much longer period.

At the same time, Admitad Affiliate states that the British increased the number of purchases this Black Friday by 72%, and the orders’ value – by 89%, compared to the regular period. The average online order value during the sales days grew by 10% and reached the mark of $46. More than half of the sales were made on various marketplaces. This year on Black Friday, 23% of online purchases in the country were made via smartphones.

The following categories of goods and services appeared to be the most popular with European buyers:

Several business industries were much more active this year and received more attention during the sale compared to 2020:

It is curious that almost all the fuses for buying goods for home and furniture were satisfied during the Singles Day Sale on the 11th of November. During Black Friday, this category did not even make it to the top list in terms of sales, although it took the top spot during the 11.11 Sale 2 weeks earlier. On the other hand, financial services came to the forefront, with the average order value growing significantly (from $13 on 11.11 to $46 this Friday).

A substantial part of users (29.7%) decided to buy on the recommendation of online media and Internet blogs. Another 26.8% of Europeans were motivated to shop on Black Friday by lucrative deals from cashback services. 14.3% of sales were driven by contextual advertising, affiliate shops (6.7%) and Facebook (4.7%). At the same time, the income of British Publishers on Black Friday in total grew by 81%.

For Europe, it is just the beginning of the sale period. Many brands still have Black Friday discounts continuing, moreover, Christmas sales and New Year’s Eve rush of buyers are around the corner. The period of increased demand will last until the very end of December. It is important for brands to use a variety of traffic channels during this hot period and not to forget about the technical stability of both the site itself and the mobile sales channel.

The post Black Friday 2021 Results: Shoppers Stocked up on Beauty Products and Have Fallen for Gaming appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The Singles’ Day sale became a notable competitor to Black Friday in terms of sales volume. Note: Alibaba Group alone (which includes AliExpress) managed to make global sales of $84.5 billion this year. At the same time, growth has slowed down compared to previous years – in 2020 the Chinese giant reported that the number of orders doubled, but this year it has grown by only 8.5%.

Meanwhile, the average order value didn’t change a lot over the year – typically, Brits were ready to spend $13.1 on one order from the Chinese marketplace during the sale. Their item preferences remained almost the same as in the previous year. Only several of the most popular product categories switched their positions:

• Home and Garden – 28.3%
• Jewellery and Accessories – 21.9%
• Apparel and Footwear – 11.2%
• Health and Beauty – 8.7%
• Electronics and Home Appliances – 8.6%
• Toys and Hobbies – 7.6%
• Sports and Entertainment – 4%
• Others – 9.7%

Brands should pay attention to these trends because another important period is just around the corner – Black Friday. And these categories are quite likely to get similar sales shares during the upcoming sale.

It is of no surprise that it was only brands that had a chance to increase their profits, but also publishers (those who work with an online audience and traffic experts), who earned a reward for every completed order. For example, Admitad Affiliate publishers in the UK just in three active days of the sale on 11-13th of November increased incomes by 3.3x.

Let’s see how effective were different traffic sources in terms of attracting European clients:

The Global Shopping Festival proves again that many users are ready to spend more during sales. But people have slightly changed their preferences regarding product categories. The influence of the COVID-trends stars to vanish and people get back to their established interests. 

The insights from the November 11-13 sale will help brands and marketing experts prepare for the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. The most important thing would be to choose effective traffic sources and ensure the technical stability of your websites.

The post 2021 Global Shopping Festival Insights: 4.5x Sales Growth in the UK and Top-Rated Products appeared first on PerformanceIN.

1.   Less cookies

Most modern browsers (except for Chrome) have already limited access to third-party cookies for known trackers – scripts that their developers marked as tracking user activity. Moreover, WebKit browser engine, used by Safari and iOS SDK, forbade using third-party cookies altogether. The price? Lower quality of data, less accurate targeting and higher online marketing costs. The impact will be the hardest on traffic arbitrage; content creators will hardly feel a thing – unless they use targeting to acquire audiences.

Third-party cookies can be replaced with first-party ones. Currently, there are three types – installed by a known tracker (lasting 24 hours), a website owner (lasting a week) and a server (not limited by the browser). A smaller attribution window means that a small percentage of orders may be lost.

Here at Admitad Affiliate, we use a mix of redirects, first-party cookies and server data to track orders, so this hazard will not hurt our customers. Alternatively, we have the Teleport technology to avoid the need for redirects.

2.   Limited access to IDFA

For their mobile platforms, Google and Apple have already implemented special IDs – Google Advertising ID (GAID) and IDentifier For Advertisers (IDFA). Just like cookies, they collect data on user interests – to target ads properly and to track campaigns efficiency.

However, as the data protection laws started to beef up, access to user data curbed as well. Starting from iOS 13, iPhone owners were free to deny access to IDFA for any app, but this freedom was hidden deep in the settings. With iOS 14.5, developers are obliged to request access to IDFA for their app. Moreover, there are strict guidelines for developers which regulate how the IDFA requests must look.

Sources estimate that the share of users who will allow access to IDFA will range from 10% to 36%. Mobile tracking platforms – for example Appsflyer, Adjust, Branch, Kochava –  are already seeking a roundabout. Fingerprint tracking might be the solution, even though not for long. 

Here at Admitad Affiliate, we are integrated with most mobile tracking platforms, so we are not alone in this fight and eager to cooperate with mobile tracking leaders to overcome the issue.

3.    Delays by SKAdNetwork

SKAdNetwork is a mobile algorithm to track in-app actions without breaking user privacy. Apple has been developing it for a few years, but it has only come to the forefront recently – with iOS 14.5.

What does it do?

1.     Actions are sent over to trackers with a random lag (two+ days) so that the advertiser cannot match the event on their servers with the conversion to mark specific users. Advertisers will also not know which publisher delivered the action – unless the winning ad network discloses the data. Apple promises to fix this in iOS 15, making data available to both the ad network and the advertiser.

2.     Eight-byte data limit. Apple suggests that companies use numbers from 0 to 63 to send over all the possible information about specific action. This seems barely enough, for exactly the same reasons as above.

3.     CPI attribution only. As of yet, SKAdNetwork can only track installations. Moreover, there are no deferred deep links – this means there is no way to launch a specific screen after installing the app.

 All of this means longer payout time, lower campaign efficiency, and an obvious need to change your integration (so that parameters fall within the limit). We cannot stop this, but we can mitigate the effect if we adapt quickly enough – so Admitad Affiliate is already on its way to register with SkadNetwork.

4.   IP masking

There are two features that mask user IPs in iOS 15 – Private Relay and Safari ITP.

Private Relay is the iCloud+ service for more secure browsing. It replaces user IP with another one from the same region to prevent websites from tracking user journeys, targeting ads and creating user profiles. However, it cannot harm your tracking if you collect only country-level data – which here at Admitad Affiliate we most certainly do.

The second feature to mask IPs is the notorious Intelligent Tracking Protection for Safari. It does not allow JS-codes of known trackers to record user IDs at all, so the affiliate networks will lose any control over geo targeting.

Admitad Affiliate has not been marked as a known tracker yet, but we have enough solutions to bypass the ITP: regular redirects with an affiliate link (to ad.admitad.com) and server integration with publishers in Admitad Teleport API.

5.   No more emails

But it’s not just IP addresses that Apple wants to conceal. The corporation has also developed a technology called Hide My Email that replaces your personal email address (say, mail@hotmail.com) when you log into Apple services. Other parties can only see a different, automatically generated email (say, ty-4587334984@privaterelay.appleid.com). Users can still receive emails to their personal inboxes, but targeting services have one less parameter to identify them. 

Theoretically, Hide My Email could hinder cross-device and cross-browser technologies that use email to match users with their actions. However, we believe that only a few people who worry more, and who create accounts anew each time they visit a website, will be able to take full advantage of the tool.

Sure, email is not the only parameter that cross-device tracking relies on. There is other data as well – such as hashed user IDs received from the advertiser or phone numbers. Processing both is still okay under GDPR and ePrivacy laws.

6.   More transparency for users

Finally, there is the App Privacy Report – a new section in settings where users can see all apps that collect data about their activity and what they do with it. Although it offers more freedom, it might build up customer’s anxiety and decrease chances that users grant apps access to IDFA.

This is not critical, but we cannot dodge this one – it will certainly influence most of us. For mobile marketers however, it means increasing the value of SKAdNetwork.

How bad is it?

We still have plenty of options left – both Admitad Affiliate and other marketers. 

First-party cookies will probably never go away, and server-to-server integration with advertisers is still reliable. If you are worried about regular redirects, Admitad Affiliate still has the Teleport feature to provide redirect-free tracking even under the circumstances.

Although we can observe the pressure such limitations exert on the industry, we still believe that proper regulation will lead us to a new, ethical online marketing landscape, so it is in our best interests to cooperate with software developers to work out a balanced solution. After all, it might just be advocating for business transparency that will save us all.

The post Six iOS Features That Will Obstruct Your Tracking – Or Will They? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

In the era of algorithm-powered marketplaces, sellers hardly pay any attention to promoting your particular brand. Don’t get this wrong – they do care for sales and income. It is just that they do not care specifically for you or your deluxe smartphone. Unless Big Data chooses to put you in the “hot!” section, your product is but one of the many.

That’s why affiliate networks have come up with a solution for just that – a bonus directly from vendors to ensure that publishers notice you and devote themselves to promoting exactly what you need.

Bonus per action

Say your retailer has an affiliate programme in a network, and you have none. They offer a 2.5% reward for each paid order, but no orders are piling up. To you, this means two things. Firstly, this company will be reluctant to purchase the next bulk order from you unless they get rid of their stock. Secondly, you will have to wait for the hot sales season to launch the product line as the HQ has planned. Your KPI is on the line. 

Instead, there is an opportunity to increase the publisher’s reward dramatically. Even 10% can make a difference when it comes to electronics or luxury apparel – to most types of goods, really. Such stakes can guarantee higher attention to your brand, product line, or even a specific model. Not a 100% guarantee, but still a much higher probability to overcome the rough low season without fear of wasting marketing budgets on bare impressions or clicks. After all, you only pay for orders that bring you real profit.

Traditional affiliate marketing 

If you, as a manufacturer, are eager to take the merchant’s path – namely, deal with B2C sales – then all the doors are open to you. Bloggers, media, review and coupon websites, dozens of large and thousands of small traffic dealers are at your command. They will be able to deliver you whatever audience you need, but that does not come free.

Firstly, classic affiliate marketing requires having loads of data to see what works and what does not. No amount of expertise can replace scientific method when it comes to the shifting sands of online sales. Any campaign has to come through certain stages of development.

Then comes the question of time and human resources. Even with an overseeing account manager, directing the programme will demand some of your time. And if you come to partner up with multiple networks? You will have to hire a manager just to keep track of your efficiency.

Finally, yes, it will cost you money. But in the base of affiliate marketing lies the cost-per-action model, where you pay only for the result you want, so wasting your budget on zero sales is not a threat. Still, it is crucial to offer proper, competitive rewards so that publishers want to team up with you. The network will also take its share (or a subscription fee) for enabling your partnership.

No Country for Affiliate Managers?

If you are a small enterprise (i.e. smaller than affiliate networks usually prefer), you will be pleased to know there are SME platforms just for you. They imply simpler control over affiliate programmes and more automated features, so that you do not have to fine-tune your media coverage. Such platforms require no extra affiliate marketing manager, but require certain experience – or self-awareness.

In most affiliate networks, however, the account managers perform a multitude of functions. Filling in the affiliate programme profile, updating rewards and offering additional promotions, assuring traffic quality, recruiting publishers and settling conflicts. If you do not wish to employ another person for all that, network subscription is a viable option.

Online marketing universe

Depending on the scale of your business and your preferences, you can test different tools and approaches, rewards and bonuses, taking matters into your own hands or paying others to do that for you. Do you have your own store launched? Use affiliate marketing. Want to keep the distance? Vendor bonus is your pick. Desire freedom from the burden of manual promotion? Rely on those who will distribute your goods all across the globe.

There is literally a tool for everything – and if there is not, we will be able to assemble it in no time.

The post How Suppliers and Manufacturers Can Make Use of the Affiliate Channel appeared first on PerformanceIN.