Where the focus is everything about online marketing, including key business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising techniques, emerging advertising trends in technology and much more.
Searching for light at the end of the click fraud tunnel.
Sometimes a click isn't really a click. Sometimes the person knocking on a website's door is really a wolf in shopper's clothing, perpetrating a fraud that wastes marketers' advertising dollars or steals commissions.
Skip Pratt says his Web hosting company BAPort.com was being defrauded on 20 percent of its clicks. He was so frustrated by the problem that he developed a click fraud analy ... Continue with the Cover Story By John Gartner
Online marketers adopting new technologies such as blogging find that being on the cutting edge is a distinct advantage.
Online marketers and merchants are quickly adopting new technologies such as blogging to help drive traffic and sell products.
Buzz Bruggeman, founder and CEO of ActiveWords, says his company has spent just $600 to advertise it... More By Lisa Picarille
The path to affiliate success is filled with booby traps disguised as words of wisdom.
There are many myths regarding affiliate marketing that ought to be tucked away where you keep the collected works of the Brothers Grimm, Aesop and Mother Goose. They may be fun to read, but they are disastrous to any affiliate marketing campaign. There are hund... More By Jay Conrad Levinson
Combating click fraud is not about others protecting you. It's about protecting yourself.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" That's what the Chicken Littles of the world would have you believe when they discuss how click fraud will doom the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Of course, some Chicken Littles have a vested interest in ra... More By Mary O'Brien
Search giants are adding new tools and services in order to boost their mass appeal.
It doesn't take Edwin Hubble to recognize that the search universe is expanding. Instead of studying faraway galaxies to see the shifts in the cosmos, it only takes a glance at the home page of any major search engine to realize that search is moving at light spee... More By John Gartner
Local search is experiencing explosive growth, and both merchants and marketers are getting vocal about going local.
If you are looking for help with your water heater in Plano, Texas, Harvey West is your man. Type in "water heater plano texas" on Yahoo and this ad will come up as the top sponsored result: Harvey West Plumbing Company: Water Heate... More By Diane Anderson
Affiliates need cookies to get commissions, but users fear they are linked to spyware, and that's causing lots of angst on both sides.
Cookies will drive you nuts. As you know, cookies - or very small files that recognize you as uniquely you to particular websites - are kind of the backbone of affiliate marketing. If the cookie didn't exist, there... More By Eric Reyes
Big Brands are spending more money online, and traditional ad agencies have to adapt or wither.
Traditional Madison Avenue advertising agencies have taken their share of lumps lately. More companies are spending bigger bucks to advertise online than ever before. Overall spending on advertising is expected to reach $279 billion this year.
That's a... More By Lisa Picarille
It's not easy being clean. Just ask affiliate managers.
You're thinking of working with a merchant, but you don't want to be involved in any program that includes affiliates using questionable, if not illegal, practices. But how can you know for sure whose program is squeaky clean and whose is not?
It's not easy to tell which merchants have clean... More By Lisa Picarille
Pedro Sostre is all about art and good design. And he's not afraid to voice his opinions on either subject.
"Most websites suck in terms of design," he says, though he also admits there are many design-oriented sites that are extremely well-done and that he'd be hard-pressed to single out just a handful of them.
When it comes to art, he's fond of... More By Lisa Picarille
Web analytics polishes its customer-winning game and helps boost affiliate revenue.
Affiliates are capitalizing on the predictable behavioral patterns of consumers by using Web analytics tools to decode customers' habits and boost revenue.
So if you're a publisher and want to know who exactly is visiting your site, how different types of visitors... More By Jennifer D. Meacham
The line between performance and traditional advertising has been breached, and the best days of affiliate marketing are ahead.
Years before the Nasdaq tanked and banner advertising died, e-commerce pioneers like Amazon.com and CDNow began partnering with topic-centric websites to drive revenues, paying a commission for each sale referred. The pra... More By Greg Shepard
Exercising control over your affiliates is a good way to keep your program from spinning out of control as your business grows.
Over the past two years, the online real estate traffic volume has increased exponentially. Part of this dramatic growth is driven by the low interest rate environment, but a bigger reason for the increase is the rapid sh... More By Marie Nilsson
Affiliate marketers shouldn't use potential click fraud as an excuse not to try pay-per-click advertising.
Click fraud is a potentially serious problem faced by any affiliate marketer who uses pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising to market their sites.
One study estimated that between 10 and 20 percent of a PPC advertiser's budget is los... More By Rosalind Gardner
LinkShare sold to one of Japan's biggest e-commerce players and becomes key to U.S. expansion.
The last of the big independent affiliate and performance marketing networks was finally swallowed up by another large international conglomerate.
In early September, Japanese e-commerce portal Rakuten took its first step into the U.S. market by agreein... More By Lisa Picarille
If denial doesn't work, concoct a conspiracy theory to divert attention.
I'm a big fan of the deny everything rule. I've invoked it many times in the past with stellar results. It's worked well on significant others, family, bosses as well as the authorities - sometimes. But even I'm dumbfounded by the growing list of people that are engaged in ve... More By The Spider
