Performance Marketing Prognostication - Additional Content
This article is a RevenueToday.com Exclusive follow up article, to view the related article click here.
WEB EXTRAS: November/December 2006 Issue
We asked a wide range of industry gurus, experts, affiliates, consultants, program managers and industry watchers four seemingly simple questions about the state of online marketing.
1. Looking back, what do you think were among the most significant themes to emerge in 2006 in the performance marketing space?
2. What will be the big thing that we can expect to happen in 2007 in online marketing?
3. What are the major challenges in the performance marketing space moving forward?
4. What's the one word you would use to describe the current state of online marketing?
Here's a look at what each one of them had to say, in no particular order:
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Joshua Sloan, director of online marketing, 1and1.com
1. New trends such as the use of video and advertainment continued to grow in 2006 but pose challenges for strict ROI/CPA advertisers.
2. More offline ad channels (print/radio/TV) will wake up to the growing importance and measurability of online advertising while more online advertisers will wake up to the branding potential of online marketing despite confusion and difficulties with performance tracking.
3. Fighting over trademark PPC bidding continued and continues to keep advertisers and affiliates on their toes. What's legal in one country isn't necessarily so in others. Ethical and legal dilemmas for companies and affiliates still exist. Click fraud and other forms of online fraud do not seem to be getting better.
4. Exciting.
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Shawn Collins, president, Shawn Collins Consulting
1. Affiliate 2.0, the next generation of affiliate marketing tactics and technologies, was a predominate theme in 2006.
2. The emergence of mobile phone marketing in the U.S. It's just a matter of time before affiliates worldwide are able to promote affiliate links via digital and print signage. Consumers will then utilize their video-capable mobile phones to transact with merchants.
3. Self-regulation is key in 2007. It's not in our best interest to have the federal government legislate issues for us. Instead, we must band together and squash the bad actors.
4. Evolving.
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Adam Viener, president, imwave.com
1. Clearly 2006 will be marked by what some are calling "The Affiliate Massacre of 2006" where Google updated their quality score rankings in Adwords and started placing penalties on affiliate landing pages. In many cases this caused minimum cost-per-click fees to go from 10 cents to $5 or $10 on many keywords. This effectively shut down PPC advertising for many affiliate landing pages. This change is causing many merchant advertisers to rethink their policies for PPC marketing since publishers who were running large-scale campaigns and linking directly to the merchant's site using the merchant display URL and an affiliate link were largely unaffected by the recent change.
2. I think the launch of Microsoft Vista may change the landscape of search marketing and make Microsoft AdCenter more important than it is today. I also think that Yahoo's Panama project will be a big shift for search marketers. There will be a lot of adjustments as platforms change and traffic starts flowing more toward Microsoft.
3. From the affiliate's perspective, performance marketing companies are maturing, and dealing with the growth of the business while keeping up with the constant changes in the marketplace will continue to provide major challenges for performance marketing entrepreneurs.
Setting the right policies for their programs that will enable them to continue to attract the talented performers who can make a difference in their campaigns. To do this a good affiliate manager needs to understand the numbers, the cost per acquisition of a new customer or sale from ALL of their channels, and craft policies that will enable the company to maximize sales at the best possible cost. In today's market the old decisions to not allow affiliates to use the company's display URL in search engine ads needs to be reanalyzed.
4. Important.
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Rob Key, founder and CEO, Converseon
1. Performance marketing is growing up and morphing, although perhaps a bit too slowly. LinkShare's vision, ValueClick's growth and Google's new forays demonstrate that performance marketing is going mainstream and can no longer be seen as a stepchild of the overall media efforts. Performance marketing has always meant accountability. We're seeing our approaches becoming increasingly adopted by more mainstream media entities. The issue for the traditional affiliate marketing world is how to play with the more mainstream media, and how to get a seat at the table so that it's taken as seriously as possible to ensure integrated efforts and minimize channel cannibalization. Affiliates has to become fully integrated with search strategies, word-of-mouth initiatives and CPM media buys. With a few exceptions, the big media entities are still slow to embrace affiliate marketing as part of their mix. Part of this is simply terminology and lexicon. It's time that affiliate and media started speaking more of the same language.
2. Social media marketing strategies that spawn, leverage and influence consumer-generated media are the hot thing at the moment. They're also the strategies that many companies are grappling with most. Consumers want to hear from consumers, not traditional marketers. Businesses want to hear from other businesses. Companies and affiliates that create environments where their target audiences can gather, share useful information - and don't overtly interfere with the experience - are those that will be the most successful. But this world is moving fast. Discrete content communities, social networks, blogs and other CGM venues are emerging daily. These venues are becoming micro-media properties, and like much media, those that get the audience first and provide ongoing compelling content, will be difficult to dislodge. I expect a land grab for these long tail communities by companies and affiliates alike. Both have equal opportunity to spawn these communities. The question is, who will be the quickest and most effective?
Essential to success here is the ability to listen and map to this consumer-generated media conversation. New technologies, like Converseon's Conversation Miner that scour and analyze this CGM conversation, are becoming essential elements to any online marketing campaign. After all, if you can't understand the landscape and listen, as well as talk, you're going to be talking past audiences, and perhaps overlook the most important constituents. Companies will indeed have to "join the conversation."
3. Affiliate marketing has historically been successful because it provided services and capabilities that companies themselves were either unable, unwilling or ill-prepared to tackle. But as merchants becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially with natural and paid search strategies (including long tail search, the affiliate industry can no longer rely on arbitraged search traffic. It's a diminishing resource. Instead, it's absolutely incumbent that smart affiliates morph rapidly into the new frontier of online marketing - word of mouth, viral, social media, blogging and other consumer-generated approaches that companies are only now beginning to grapple with. These online strategies are where search marketing was two to three years ago. Continued on Page 2...
This article is a RevenueToday.com Exclusive follow up article, to view the related article click here.
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