eBay Enterprise Marketing Acquires AffiliateTraction, Expands Programmatic

eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions will announce Monday the acquisition of AffiliateTraction to strengthen its hold on performance marketing and build out programmatic tools to support its affiliate marketing network.

While terms of the deal were not disclosed, eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions CEO Michael Jones did reveal that the company’s focus is now turning to integrating technologies from AffiliateTraction, and Digital Net Agency, another recent acquisition in the past few months.

Jones says the AffiliateTraction acquisition will increase the “size of the business by more than 30%,” with operating expenses expected to rise “not more than 10%.”

AffiliateTraction’s technology manages affiliate programs through a set of tools — a feature that Jones calls “unique.” The software recommends the affiliates with which a retailer should work, and automates attribution and commissions by calculating the amount they should pay each affiliate.

The platform informs publishers about the best advertising partners by bringing in raw data about the retailer’s site traffic to determine characteristics such as the number of influencers who frequent the site.

The data serves up profiles of the traffic that might alert affiliates when they have better traffic than what they get credit for receiving. Or the merchant could make decisions on attribution that may not line up with what the traffic is worth.

Tom Barr, e-commerce director at MonkeySports, runs its affiliate program through AffiliateTraction on blogger sites to UPS.com. MonkeySports has become one in about 500 new clients to eBay Enterprise through the acquisition. The company, which sells hockey, baseball and lacrosse equipment online and offline, had been shifting some of its business to eBay Enterprise prior.

“The investment in affiliate marketing for us is between 1% and 2% of total sales,” Barr says. “The return is very good because we set the commission and AffiliateTraction has a fixed management fee.”

For each $1 MonkeySports invests the company gets back about $15, Barr says. MonkeySports also runs search advertising on engines, shopping ads, retargeting, and email marketing, 

Aside from the technology and dedicated clients, eBay Enterprise Marketing gains tons of data, about 100 employees, and an easier route to take its affiliate program global. 

While eBay Enterprise Marketing has a small operation in Europe, Greg Shepard, AffiliateTraction founder, who joins the company as chief strategy officer, says it puts “boots on the ground” for eBay Marketing Solutions in London, Toronto, Canada; Sydney Australia; and Santa Cruz, California.

The global position gives it a strong position to compete against affiliate programs rivals such as Conversant’s CJ Affiliate, and Rakuten Marketing’s LinkShare.

eBay Enterprise Marketing Acquires AffiliateTraction, Expands Programmatic

Rockin Technology Expands Web Marketing to Dental Offices -- LOS ANGELES, July 20, 2015 ...

LOS ANGELES, July 20, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Rockin Technology LLC announced that it is expanding its expert web marketing to help dental offices excel through web marketing. Over the last three years, Rockin Technology has developed expertise in dental web marketing through its existing clients in Orange County and Riverside.

Logo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150717/237895LOGO
Photo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150717/237896

Rockin Technology is ready to help dental offices throughout Southern California in Ventura County, San Fernando Valley, West Los Angeles, South Bay, San Gabriel Valley, San Bernardino, Carlsbad, Oceanside, San Diego, La Jolla and Del Mar. Rockin Technology keeps one dental web marketing client per city or coverage area so there is no conflict of interest in getting top positions in search engines through SEO or PPC campaigns.

“Rockin Technology is a results driven company. We strive to be agile to change instantly with new updates from Google, Bing/Yahoo.  That helps us bring the best lead conversion rate possible for any Dental office in any market,” commented Varun Tandon, CEO, Rockin Technology LLC.

Dental Office Pay Per Click case study

Boasting a robust current conversion rate of over 12% with existing clients, dentists get an above-average return on investment for Pay Per Click campaigns. Rockin Technology differentiates itself from others by focusing on accurately tracking phone calls, live chat and contact forms. This extensive Google Analytics tracking helps determine an exact “value” for the dental office’s website. See a case study for Dentist Pay Per Click Campaign.

Website design with a marketing perspective

Rockin Technology’s motto is to design websites from a marketing perspective. This motto helps them focus on creating websites that help dental offices’ branding as well as bringing traffic to their website. On-site Search Engine Optimization comes standard with their website design packages.

Dentist’s Online Reputation & more

Rockin Technology has done a lot of research in developing unique methods for local marketing for dentists. They clean up various online profiles to make sure that information on all websites are synced properly.

They help dental offices better manage their online reputation. Experts at Rockin Technology guide dental office front desk staff in effectively collecting patient emails and make use of their patient management system to communicate for favorable reviews online. They look forward to helping dental offices generate new patient leads through online marketing.

About Rockin Technology

With years of Internet Marketing expertise, Rockin Technology continues to help small businesses gain new leads quickly and gain exposure with a professional web presence.

Successful results are attributed to customer relationships, dedication to learning the intricacies of their customers’ businesses and a multitude of services: Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Local Marketing, Website Design and Google Analytics.

For more information, please visit https://DentalMarketing.RockinTech.com.

PUBLIC RELATIONS CONTACT:
Varun Tandon
Rockin Technology LLC
(877) 805 3053

 

Rockin Technology Expands Web Marketing to Dental Offices -- LOS ANGELES, July 20, 2015 ...

Datasift Expands Its Reach With New Pulsar Deal To Make Facebook Topic Data Bigger

Datasift, which has raised a total of $77.9 million to date, is partnering with social analytics platform Pulsar to make anonymized Facebook topic data available to any brands, government, charities and businesses. Last year Datasift did a Secondary Market raise of $6.2M from Upfront Ventures. This new deal shows Datasift is pushing hard to become a mainstay of the ad agency world.

Because Datasift is the exclusive provider of Facebook topic data, this new partnership with Pulsar means businesses can access Facebook topic data and conduct research through social media. What this means is that means that the realm of social data just got bigger. The whole area is now coming into its own as agencies will be able to add it to their bank of knowledge on how social media can prove its ROI in an advertising and marketing driven online world.

So why is Facebook topic data important? Well, it anonymously shows marketers what content audiences are sharing on topics which are relevant to their brands, plus the demographics of the people engaging around them on the world’s largest social platform (remember, this is about 1.44 billion MAUs). There are over 60 ‘targets’ to sample data against.

This partnership provides Pulsar’s clients with access to anonymous and aggregated content data about the activities, events, brands and topics people are sharing on Facebook, via Datasift’s platform. Pulsar’s social analytics platform lets companies map brand audiences, assess how content spreads and engage with people on social media.

The caveat to this deal however is that Facebook topic data is a different proposition to other sources of social data and agencies and platforms still have to work get used to using them. It is to be hoped that Pulsar can make this process easier, because it’s still possible to use all this data in quite a naïve manner. It still requires thought, experimentation and planning by agencies and their brands. So it’s not a magic bullet, but it is a potentially powerful one, if used wisely.

That said, Pulsar has got to market early with this integration with Datasift, so it’s ‘ahead of the pack’ compared to its competitors.

• Nick Halstead will be speaking at the upcoming Europas Conference, which is partnering with TechCrunch.

Datasift Expands Its Reach With New Pulsar Deal To Make Facebook Topic Data Bigger

Sun expands digital marketing offerings

<p>The Gainesville Sun is expanding its digital marketing offerings with Propel Marketing.</p><p>Creating a one-stop shop for all print and online marketing services, The Sun can now deliver traditional messaging options in print, along with extended digital services.</p><p>That includes responsive websites, e-commerce, direct email marketing, reputation management, social-media optimization for businesses and the opportunity to expand mobile marketing services, said Publisher Jim Doughton.</p><p>“Propel marketing allows us to offer customers digital marketing services for social media, websites, search, email marketing and more from one source,” Doughton said. “These digital channels allow businesses a chance to custom-design digital platforms to reach their customers. These services are a way to connect and establish unique connections with customers that will provide a deeper relationship.”</p><p>As search engines continue to redesign results to favor mobile-friendly sites, Propel tools also will ensure that a business’ existing site has an accompanying mobile-friendly version.</p><p>Propel was founded in 2012 as a subsidiary of GateHouse Media, the new owner of The Sun.</p>

Sun expands digital marketing offerings

LocBox Expands Its Local Business Marketing Tools With Support For Facebook And Google Ads

It’s been more than two years since I wrote about marketing startup LocBox, but co-founder and CEO Saumil Mehta told me that the company has been busy — it’s now up to 600 customers and is growing between 7 and 10 percent each month.

Most of those customers are small, local businesses, which is why Mehta hasn’t made it a priority reach out to the tech press. He’s making an exception, however, for a significant expansion in the LocBox model. The company already helps businesses encourage positive reviews and engage with fans through offers, rewards and contests. As of today, it aims to help with their Facebook and Google ad campaigns, too.

I’ve seen plenty of other online ad managers for small businesses (during our demo, Mehta mentioned AdStage specifically). However, those products are usually built for ad management specifically, and as Mehta put it, “There’s no marketing automation component, no landing pages, no email marketing.”

By combining ad-buying with LocBox’s existing tools, he hopes to offer local businesses “an all-in-one package” for their marketing needs, creating “a combination that does not exist today.” For example, they could use LocBox to create customized landing pages with either coupons or purchase options, then use a LocBox-managed ad campaign to promote those pages.

Mehta also suggested that LocBox has been designed with the local business owner in mind. So there’s a simple interface that doesn’t require much knowledge of the ins and outs of Facebook or Google advertising — he said it’s simpler than Facebook’s own ad manager.

Now, I’m not a small business owner myself, but for what it’s worth, all the ad creation tools and reporting dashboards that Mehta showed me were comprehensible. Despite that simplicity, LocBox can still improve campaigns, for example by optimizing the ad spending to maximum the return across different audiences.

The goal, Mehta said, is to present businesses with very simple options: “Push this button to get new customers. Push this button to reach existing customers.”

“We are not close to having ‘solved it,’ but at least we are trying to bridge the gap between businesses’ objectives and the crazy, really complex online marketing world,” he added.

And even though LocBox is starting with Facebook and Google, Mehta said he’s interested in other ad platforms like Yelp, as well.

LocBox Expands Its Local Business Marketing Tools With Support For Facebook And Google Ads