Rose Osprey Marketing: Cutting-Edge SEO, PPC, & Web Analytics

Find Your Brand’s Affiliates Using Web Analytics

Finding affiliates can be a pain. Many companies rely upon businesses contacting them with interest in their affiliate program. While this method produces many fine affiliates, there are much more proactive ways for a brand manager or marketing manager to find potential partners.

If you are stuck in the beginning phases of your affiliate marketing program, using your web analytics package might be the ticket to gathering all the “low-hanging-affiliate-fruit”. Assuming you have a website that represents your business (brick-n-mortar, or web-based, it doesn’t matter) as well as a web analytics package, keep reading.

The Web Referrals Report
Login to your analytics package. We are looking for a report called “referrals” or “web referrals by source” depending on your program. In google analytics, use the following sequence:
Traffic Sources> Referring Sites

Your report should look something like below: (clickable)

What Should I Look For In The Referral Report?
The referral report shows links and traffic to my site from other websites. It doesn’t show traffic from search engines, or emails; those are in different reports. If someone linked to your site on their site (and someone clicked that link) you’ll see that here. You can also see the different statistics comparing the quantity and quality of different sources. Click on the “ecommerce” tab if you are an ecommerce site to see which sites are bringing you traffic that results in sales. If you aren’t ecommerce, your tab will read “goals”.

That may help you select potential affiliates.

What Does Have To Do With Affiliates?
An Affiliate is someone that drives traffic to your site in exchange for a percentage of sales or a set amount per lead. These sites on this report are already doing that! You can see which sites are bringing traffic and sales. If they are bringing you 5 sales a day without trying, imagine how many sales they could bring if you offered them an incentive.

There are other benefits to using this report to help you find affiliates: if someone takes the time to link to your site, they are already aware of your brand. That will make contacting them, and “selling” your product easier. The fact that they have a link to your site also indicates that they thought their customers might be interested in your site. They are already sold.

Looking Closer at The Report
You should not just send out a blanket email to all the sites that link to you. You will have to click on their website and see why they linked to your site. There are a couple types of links that are common, but would not be appropriate for affiliate requests:

1) Directories
2) News stories
3) Links from professional acquaintances. (Don’t ask your lawyer to be an affiliate)
4) Employees’ myspace pages

It might not seem like there will be many links left. That will depend on the size of your site and how long it has been active. At the very least this will give you an idea how to approach improving your affiliate program.

Adwords Hack Works Around Current Missing Adwords Feature

One feature that is surprisingly missing in Google Adwords (as of 2010) is the ability to allocate a different daily spend to each day of the week. Imagine the following scenario:

An advertiser spends $100 every day of the week except for Wednesdays. On Wednesdays, the company spends $250. Currently Adwords does not allow you to easily account for this scenario. The closest they come is Google offers you the ability to bid a certain percentage higher or lower on certain days.
That is not what we want.

We could wake up at 12am on Wednesday and change the spend from $100 to $250 and then change it back at midnight. However that seems like a lot of work, with not enough return.
However, there is another way. An Adwords hack, if you will. It ads a lot of complexity to the account, so I only recommend this solution for advertisers that anticipate a great discrepancy in daily spending (based on the day of the week).

Here is how it works: (We will pretend you have an account with one campaign for simplicity sake.)

1) Turn off all spending on Wednesdays by bidding on keywords at 0% on Wednesdays.
2) In Google Adwords Editor copy the campaign and repaste it. Rename the new Campaign “Wednesdays”.
3) In the “Wednesdays” campaign, turn off spending on all days except Wednesday. Set the daily spend to $250.

The result is that campaign one will bid $100/day mon, tue, thur, fri, sat, sun. Your new “Wednesday” campaign will bid on the exact same keywords on Wednesdays but the daily spend will be $250 on Wednesdays.

You can repeat this process for multiple campaigns if you have more than one.

Ideally, this seems like a feature that would be should be addressed by Google’s people. Perhaps it could be added to the interface to save time and avoid confusion.
If you need help with this procedure contact me.

Conversion Rate Doesn’t Matter-For The Most Part

I was speaking with a client the other day about his site. He said he was fairly pleased with its performance as the conversion rate was 3%.
I paused and took a breath.
Did I really want to get into why that is a meaningless statistic? No: “I really don’t want to go into why that is a meaningless statistic, but yes your site has been performing better lately.” Luckily I have built up some level of trust to where it was okay to leave it at that.
What I mean to emphasize is that aggregate conversion rate tells you nothing about your website or business. However, it is a statistic that is commonly referred to as meaningful (especially the higher up the corporate ladder you go). Adding to the confusion, in the web world, I am not certain the definition of “conversion rate” has been uniformly established. Does it mean:
1) Total number of conversions/ Total number of visitors
2) Total number of conversions/ Total number of people who added items to the cart*
In my mind when we in the web world talk about conversion rate, most mean #1.

Why is Aggregate Conversion Rate not important?
Aggregate Conversion Rate is not important because you will always be willing to sacrifice your conversion rate for increased revenue.
For example:
Say you are paying $1/ visitor and converting at 5%. You get 100 visitors a day.
I tell you that there is a potential stream of traffic that you have not taken advantage of. This stream costs $.10/visitor and converts at 1%. (Both customers spend the same amount).
Would you want the traffic?
Would you be happy with increased revenue and decreased conversion rate?
Yes, of course. This would be great.
Could this ever happen? Yes, it happens all the time. Each revenue source (or channel) converts at a different rate and will change your aggregate conversion rate if you decide to incorporate that channel. The content network might convert at a different rate than the search network. As long as they are both profitable, they are worthwhile investments.
Never focus on the conversion rate, focus on profitability and maximizing conversions.

*Number #2 has something to do with abandonment rate. That is, conversion rate + abandonment rate will always add up to 1 (or 100%). We do not have a good term for conversion rate #2 (that I can think of) so we refer to its opposite term, the abandonment rate.

Should I Invest in SEO or PPC?

Companies trying search engine marketing for the first time may only have the money for SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per click) but not both.  While they are similar in that they both use the search engine as a medium to attract customers the results, costs, and expectations are very different.

The other similarity is that both services are often performed by the same agency or individual.

SEO

Are you looking to invest in the long-term success of your company? Are you patient enough to wait for results?

If the answer is “Yes” then SEO may be your choice.

PPC

Do you need results now? Are you prepared to spend more money to get the results you want?

If the answer is “Yes” then PPC may be your choice.




The Strengths and Weaknesses of SEO and PPC

SEO

Strengths:

The effects of good SEO are relatively permanent.

The upfront cost of SEO is less than PPC.

Weakness:

It may take two months to see results.

PPC

Strengths:

Very quick results compared to SEO

You can bring traffic/customers to your site instantly.

Weakness:

PPC is more costly than SEO.

PPC does not help the sites’ development for the future. If you stop spending you will stop seeing the positive effects.




Which is Better for my Business: PPC or SEO?

The answer is “it is unique for every business”.  It depends on your goals and budget. Often a business owner will know for certain which service she wants to try, sometimes they will ask for input from us.  If you have a question contact us and we’ll answer any questions.