All posts by: Chris
Merry Christmas from Existem!
It has been a very busy 12 months for all of us at Existem, and what a year it has been!
Within the last year we have launched the very successful a4uexpo Conference & Exhibition at ExCeL London, made Affiliate Marketing ’social’ with our new affiliates4u website, introduced the inaugural a4uAwards and launched our second cashback website Cashback Junction, whilst keeping all our other sites functioning!
Thanks to all who have liaised with Existem throughout the year, including our a4uexpo speakers, merchants, affiliates4u members, networks and agencies!
A big thank you to all who have encouraged and supported us throughout the year. We look forward to building on our relationships in 2008! - We have a feeling its going to be an awesome year!
Wishing you a Merry Christmas, and a prosperous New Year!
The Content Unit Showdown
As many of you know, at Existem we operate two cashback sites, and just in case you didn’t - they are FreeFivers and CashbackJunction. In keeping with the flurry of activity that we see at this time of the year, I decided to make a ‘gift wizard’ which in its simplistic form is a drop down menu of content units, each one program specific.
How hard can it be!? Well…
Three things that I need (only three!) to be able to add a content unit to FreeFivers are:
- A Maximum Width (to fit into our template)
- The HTML (or JavaScript if needs be)
- EPI tracking for each link (we are a cashback site, so a basic affiliate link is not enough, and in adding a basic link would most
likely cause support issues to rise, and my sanity to decline)
So, with that in mind - here are my thoughts on the network content generator tool thingys that I have been working with. I have not used all networks, as some don’t have the capability and some i don’t like :)
Here’s the Gift Wizard page:
Affiliate Window - using NOT their ShopWindow API etc, but instead using the Content Widgets secion. Setting up the template initially was pretty easy, however the flexibility of the template itself was restricted, and had to choose a teamplate that was the most suitable. The actual process of picking the program and products was available in JavaScript and also a PHP include. You can also put the EPI data into the generation process, and it adds this to every link. - 8/10
Buy.at - Using the ContentEngine, overall I found it very ‘fiddly’. Had some trouble in actually getting some products to show on the screen - for example - I changed the program selction to ‘All Approved Programmes’ (which is a lot!), the program category to Boys’ Fashion, and the search category to jumpers. I received a message saying ‘Your search returned no results - you could try: Selecting a broad range of programmes, use less search terms, use generic search terms’ (!) I’m still confused to this day! When I did manage to get some results I found the choice of fonts limited, and initially it was hard to tag my template style sheet onto it to make it look more appealing. - 5/10
Paid on Results - Using the Content Creator. Creating the template was a breeze, adding/selecting the programs and categories was also simple and speedy. EPI data was automatically added, and took aroudn 3 minutes to add a content unit to FreeFivers. Only problem I encountered was locating the best sellers for each program, as they are hard to find within the categories. A way round this is to sort the products by sales rank. Definitely the best - 9/10
Tradedoubler - Using AdTool - I was pretty shocked initially at the lack of retailers! A huge network and very limited retailers. Cummon guys! A nice touch on the AdTool is the ability to create your own personal template that wraps around the content. This could be used a lot more by myself to wrap a gift wizard design around it, but it hardly seems worth it with the lack of retailers! Good to see some retailers on here have adapted their own content units with more branding, which improves the look and feel. Simple yet effective. EPI data added easily through their JavaScript link. Please get more retailers on board! - 7/10
Webgains - AdCreator - Quite simple to prepare, however the design as a whole is pretty basic. Had problems with their EPI tracking through their JavaScript link, which took a while to sort - but thanks to Sachin for pestering his tech team - it did the trick and works well now. The selection of retailers is good, and the best seller option is a bonus in creating an appealing Content Unit from them. - 7/10
OMG - I noticed that OMG had launched their new beta ‘Content Module Designer’ - so I thought i’d give it a try. Designing the template went well and got through pretty quickly, however i was actually unable to complete a unit as every time i tried to select the colour of the text it would stall the page, and would then load up Access Denied problems! It could be a firefox error, so this may well be a heads up for you OMG tech guys!
All done! Apologies for the essay - but i feel like a fountain of knowledge when it comes to Content Units these days!
GMTV feature Cashback Websites as Money Saving Opportunities.
No, I wasn’t Skiving!
While ‘administrating’ morning e-mails (sectioning your [spam]; the ones that still go through your filter into your inbox - even though your filter has marked it as spam…) I received a text message from a friend, telling me that some guy was on GMTV talking about Cashback Sites.
Being based at work, where the analogue should be digital and the digital should be accessible(!), we’ve struggled to get a TV working in the office as of yet. However by visiting the GMTV website I saw that ’some guy’ was in fact Martin Lewis from Money Saving Expert fame. That’s a good start! This guy is probably the most neutral person you could ask for sitting with Kate ‘I Can’t Dance’ Garraway and Ben Sheppard regarding an overview of Cashback Sites.
Apparently Martin’s interview today was to enlighten the viewer on how to save money around the Christmas period. While I missed the actual interview, I did find Martin’s ‘Money Matters’ page on the GMTV website.;
Cashback Sites. If you’re about to buy something online or get a financial product; check out a cashback website first. These are advertising sites, paid for by providing leads to retailers or financial product providers, to encourage traffic; yet they split some of their revenue with you in the form of cashback. You can get 2%-10% back on your shopping and up to £100 cashback per financial product. Read Martin’s full Top Cashback Sites article to find the best paying sites
The link takes you through to Martin’s review of Cashback Websites and lucky enough for me lists FreeFivers on that page. Call it coincidence if you’d like, but I have been checking the sign up’s to FreeFivers all day, and they have more than threefolded yesterdays total of sign ups.
With Cashback Sites now being featured on ITV and BBC (The One Show), the timing is great for the Christmas rush, where we’re left converting our new users into loyal shoppers. What media is next for Cashback Sites!? Either way, It’s great to see!
The Existem Pumpkin
Getting into the spirit of Halloween, I spent part of the morning yesterday creating our Existem Pumpkin.
A thread has been started over at affiliates4u.com where users are posting pictures of their pumpkins, if you have one in your office today, why not upload it for all to see.
Furthermore, imagine my shock when I log into my FreeFivers account today to see that I have 666 FreeFiver points! Aaargh!
PC World Drop Cashback Sites
Received an e-mail from PC World yesterday @ 16.15:
“PC World would like to thank you for all you hard work to date.
PC World has made the decision to withdraw working with Cashback & Loyalty sites. We want to make sure our consumers are clear on our prices. We have web exclusive deals and in store prices, adding additional cashback etc has caused some customer service issues.
We are working closely with our brand teams to bring cashback and loyalty sites back onto the program in the future. So please look out for upcoming announcements to the program.
This will be effective as of Friday 23rd February.
Once again thanks for your support and we look forward to working with you again shortly.”
Thanks for the notice. Have been speaking to a fellow cashback site employee, who infact made contact with me over this issue. How many times have we seen this before, on other networks, with other programs? Fair enough there may have been problems with the activity on the program, however nothing was discussed with either of us and whats more providing us with 8 hours notice to remove links, offers, creatives and provide an explanation to users is not good enough.
Where is the harm in calling top cashback sites into a meeting, where problems such as this can be discussed? As has been said many many times before ‘this industry is based on relationships’ - why are reputable cashback sites subjected to such poor communication, and ultimately a decreasing relationship with merchants? There has been no improvement over a long period of time, and something needs to be done.
One Page, One Commission Structure?
It’s not easy sifting through countless e-mails from over 10 networks, trying to find the latest deals, programme closures, and even changes in commission structures - Fact!
What i’m sure will be echoed from all the big players in the Incentive sites area is that these e-mails arrive in bulk every day, especially for the likes of Tradedoubler and Buy.at affiliates, where each program has a ’solus’ mailshot stating each and every change made to your account - which is handy, but not overly practical.
Running an incentive site will usually see a rise in sales of certain programs during different times of the year, even without promotion. This usually causes us to move up a tier for the next month, which we have to change in the system when notified. Imagine hundreds of programs doing the same, the e-mails keep coming and you are constantly changing offers on your site. The problems arise if we drop down in the next month, and miss notification, or indeed aren’t notified.
Sensing my logic - can’t we have a program list of all our approved programs, followed by the current commission structure? A simple page can allow us to check the programs without having to sift through e-mails for changes, ensuring they are correct on our sites. This can be checked monthly to ensure correct commission amounts are added to our user accounts - Happy Days…
This issue has been spoken about before, where other incentive sites have posted through the A4uForum.
Let’s see some advances with this, eh networks!?
