Inside Affiliate

Posts Tagged ‘Campaigns’

Have you ever been testing out a new PPV campaign with a budget of $25 a day and found that it’s all used up before 5pm?  This is one area that PPC withGoogle AdWords has spoiled us: you can choose whether you want Standard or Accelerated ad spend, and with Standard it will evenly price out your clicks through out the day.  Most PPV networks do not do this.

Today I noticed that with Zango you can actually do day parting, which is choosing which hours of the day you want your ads to be displayed.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend turning this on right away if you are testing a new campaign, but it certainly is handy if you are blowing through your daily budget without getting any conversions.  In many verticals, it is not until the evening hours that they really start converting.  People are home from work, kids are home from school, people are surfing the net without worrying about the boss looking over their shoulder.  Besides, it’s more likely that the home computer is where the AdWare client is installed anyway.

To do this in Zango, just login to your account, click on the campaign name you want to add day parting to and click Edit Campaign.  Right above the Save Changes button you will see a new link called Advanced Options.  Click this and it will pop up a window with all the different days of the week and hours of the day.  You can also turn specific days of the week off, like if you only wanted to run your ads during the weekend.

Along with day parting, there are also Campaign Caps on this menu.  This will let you set a daily budget for specific days which overrides the Campaign-level daily budget.  This is great if you are finding that certain days provide a large amount of conversions, and you want to crank up the ad spend to take advantage.

It may not seem like much, but little tools like this can really help you optimize your campaigns and squeeze every last bit of ROI out of your PPV traffic.

Since HasOffers released their affiliate network tracking platform, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the company and the product.  Most of it has been stirred up either by DirectTrack competitors or people that use DirectTrack other platforms.  I thought I would pitch in my 2 cents worth since I have been using HasOffers everyday for about 4 months now.  This is not a paid post, and there are no affiliate links in this post.

Campaign Setup

A lot of a network’s time is spent setting up campaigns.  Besides checking Stats, it’s the one activity that I do on a very regular basis, often daily.  Since I’ve started using HasOffers they have updated the Campaign Setup a couple of times and added new features, but it is still very clean and to the point.  You put in the name, description, tracking link, set your prices, geo-targeting, etc. and you are good to go.  There are some unique features such as browser targeting (even including mobile browsers), Campaign Groups for geo-targeting multiple offers, and allowing campaigns to convert multiple times.  Most of the time I don’t use these features but it is nice to have the option.  Once you have it set up and hit submit, it takes you to the pixel where you can copy & paste it to send to the advertiser, or you can just click once and have it emailed to them automatically, which is very cool.  Also, it creates a test link for you which saves a lot of time.

Tracking

Tracking is probably the most important aspect of a network platform.  Does it track?  In a word, yes.  HasOffers is very accurate in tracking conversions.  The default pixel type is an iFrame pixel, which seems to work better than the Script pixels that most other platforms use.  It supports 3rd party pixels for Affiliates, and on my network I have it setup so that affiliates can place these themselves with automatic approval.  Also, you can choose whether you want HasOffers to track All Clicks that come through an affiliate link, or just Unique Clicks.  I have mine set to All, since affiliates always complain that their clicks aren’t tracking otherwise.

Creatives

The File Manager is where you upload creatives for your offers.  It runs on a CDN server, and they host all your creatives so you don’t need to have a gallery somewhere else.  It supports Image Banners, HTML Creatives, Flash Banners, and Offer Thumbnails (so that a picture appears next to the offer name in the interface, similar to LinkTrust).  I particularly like the Flash Banner setup, it is super simple.  All you need to do is upload your SWF file, tell it what the height and width are, and it does the rest.  I’ve used some other setups that are a royal pain for Flash.

Reporting

I really, really like the reporting in HasOffers.  First of all, it’s fast.  I can tell it exactly what information I want to see, and it displays it quickly.  Coming off of using DirectTrack, the difference is night and day.  I used to spend a good hour or two a day just waiting for DirectTrack to load reports.  I like it better than LinkTrust’s reporting as well, which I’ve always found a bit cumbersome to use.  On the affiliate side, the reporting allows them to pass a “source” variable (such as Google or Yahoo) as well as 5 separate sub id variables if they choose, and they actually work.  The #1 reason that affiliates login to a network is to check their stats, and this is one area that HasOffers really shines.

Affiliate Interface

HasOffers looks and feels very different than LinkTrust or DirectTrack.  Both of those systems have been around for a while, and they are starting to show their age.  On the contrary, HasOffers has a decidedly Web 2.0 feel to it, with soft edges and animated bar graphs for revenue and total leads generated right on the home page when affiliates log in.  It looks great right out of the box, but network owners can use their own custom CSS & logos to give it their own look.  Also, a new feature was added recently to select from a variety of different Themes to change up the look with one click.  I have received quite a few compliments from affiliates who are logging in for the first time, it just looks a lot fresher than the other platforms.

Last Word

I think that a lot of the venom that has been spewed at HasOffers is due to the fact that they are offering their entry-level product for free.  This means that the barrier of entry to creating a network has been lowered to almost nothing.  I think there is some truth to this as well as some exaggeration.  A network is based on trust and relationships above all else.  It doesn’t matter what software they are using.  Anybody who spends a lot of time and money promoting offers from an affiliate network that just popped up yesterday and has no reputation in the industry is just asking to get ripped off.  Do your homework, run with people that you trust and you will have much less risk of things going wrong.

You may have heard that HasOffers’ parent company, Adapp Solutions, is owned by the owners of Tatto Media affiliate network.  This is true.  Does it mean that Tatto is going to steal all of your data?  If you are using any 3rd party tracking platform at all, the security of your data is a concern, but the fact is that a large part of the networks in the industry are powered by them.  These service providers all put a lot of work into making sure that your data is secure, and HasOffers is no exception.

I have used both DirectTrack and LinkTrust extensively, and I like HasOffers better, hands down.

Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT.  Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202.  Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time.  Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.

The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202.  With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy.  Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.

The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it”’’s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools.  What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network.  By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202.  When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:

yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=

You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”.   You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.

First, download John Hasson”’’s JAH Simple PPC tool.  It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:

It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs.  Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC.  Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations.  Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.

With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form.  Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form.  Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form.  The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name.  Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).

Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go!  If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form.  Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.

Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5