Methods and Tools Every Publisher Should be Using

In the world of affiliate marketing there are still many areas that require improvements. Affiliate networks offer a wide variety of tools for publishers and also give advice on how to optimise sale commissions. However, that is not enough if you really want to be competitive. In this article you will find some technical advantages that I think every publisher should have in order to generate more leads and sales. Of course, not every company has a team of developers available, but many tools exist online to improve your performance.

Conversion tracking

First up is conversion tracking for landing pages, deals, products and/or advertisers. Observe your traffic sources and ads and see how they perform. You can do this by using existing tools or services like Voluum. Personally, I both use this tools in addition to a self-developed tool.

Also, make sure that you know from which page of your website a conversion or (e-mail) subscription originates, so that you can optimise it when necessary.

Dead links detection

Broken links won’t make you any money. Manually looking and finding dead links takes a lot of work and effort. Also, a system to let users report broken links is not optimal, as broken links on your most remote pages won’t easily be discovered. Best is to can create your own tool that automatically finds broken affiliate links and replace them. There are also some WordPress plugins and other dead link checkers to help you cope with this problem.

Self optimising website based on performance

Self optimising websites or landing pages can explain themselves in many ways. Some websites automatically push their most popular deals or products forward to their homepage, where other websites categorise on search metrics. This saves a lot of time on sorting things out and it also improves financial performance. Work that you would normally do manually, after having to analyse the traffic and clicks on your site, can not only be done automatically but also continuously.

A/B testing based on conversions

A/B testing allows you to split traffic on your website, so that visitors experience different web page content or designs on version A and version B of a page, while you monitor visitor actions to identify the version that yields the highest conversion rate.

Most (performance) marketers are optimising by the amount of clicks. But it’s better to make the technical connection to be able to optimise on the amount of conversions. That’s because a high number of visitors clicks could just come from confused visitors. So try to close this blackbox.

Technical SEO done right

Although many of you have the skills and knowledge to do SEO, doing SEO right is actually quite hard. Of course, it’s important to have a fast website and have sitemaps available in html and xml, so a search spider can crawl and index your website.

When you are not a developer, there are many tips on how to improve technical SEO. Think about keeping your site free from cloaking, using redirects, and URL structure properly and preventing duplicate content.

Automatic quality checks on content

Another thing that can save you lots of time when done automatically, is checking and updating your content. Personally, I like to use a tool that checks sites for duplicate content. Make sure you are connected and make use of as much automatically generated data as possible. Doing things manually on a regular base is your big enemy for productivity, it should only be allowed when you want to do something special.

Automatic SEO checks on pages

A great tool to automatically check your SEO is Yoast. Actually Yoast is a game changer to boost your SEO. It’s a plugin for WordPress that can easily improve your SEO, even when you have moderate knowledge of it. The tool checks if your website is SEO-proof and will give you tips on how to improve your site SEO.

Methods and Tools Every Publisher Should be Using

A European online marketing software company raises $33 million

September 16, 2015, 1:37 PM

By Sandra Guy Senior Editor

Emarsys, which counts eBay among its clients,  sets up U.S. headquarters in Indianapolis.

Marketing software company Emarsys, based in Vienna, is expanding in the U.S.  and has received outside funding for the first time in its 15-year history with a $33 million Series A investment from Vector Capital.

“We are focused on growth,” says Sean Brady, Emarsys’ president of the Americas. The company, which sells cloud-based software to create automated digital and mobile marketing campaigns for midmarket retailers and small enterprises, employees 40 in North and South America and expects that number to grow to 200 within the next five years, Brady says. Emarsys will hire in sales, marketing, customer support, product development and professional services development, he says. The company’s U.S. headquarters is in Indianapolis, Ind.

Emarsys counts eBay Inc. as a U.S client and Toys ‘R’ Us Inc., No. 40 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide, plus Canon, Superdrug and Volvo among its global customers. Brady says Emarsys has 10 to 20 U.S. clients. The software can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000 annually, depending on the size of a merchant’s database, he says.

Emarsys’ software works in conjunction with a merchant’s e-commerce platform or data management system. The software uses machine learning and proprietary algorithms to analyze what online shoppers are doing on a retailer’s website and to send them automated and targeted messages via email, SMS and social media to encourage them to purchase, Brady says. “Organizations are trying to leverage technology to do the bulk of their digital marketing work without adding tens to twenties of new employees. We let the retailers make the decision of where they need to spend time, money and effort to grow their businesses.”

Another customer, U.K.-based surf and outdoor accessories retailer Surfdome, uses Emarsys’ tool to identify and target sales leads, active buyers, defecting customers and first-time purchasers, according to a case study provided by Emarsys. Surfdome’s marketing team creates loyalty campaigns to win back customers they can see exiting the e-commerce site, and create loyalty campaigns for active buyers, according to the case study. The company also run stock clearance campaigns, launch products and back-in-stock promotions and initiate cross-sell, up-sell and post-purchase programs based on information the software provides.

Brady says that Emarsys competes with Bronto Software, Silverpop IBM, Adobe, Salesforce  and Oracle Marketing Cloud.

Bronto, which in April agreed to be acquired by NetSuite Inc., is listed as the email service provider for 37 retailers in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide that had a combined $3.33 billion in web sales in 2014. IBM has 105 web analytics clients with $66.4 billion in yearly web sales; Adobe has 229 web analytics clients with web sales totaling $222 billion; Salesforce has 54 email marketing clients with web sales of $30.69 billion, according to Top500Guide.com data.

A European online marketing software company raises $33 million

Facebook Marketing Partner SocialWire Rebrands as Manifest, Launches Automated Ad Platform

SocialWire, a Facebook Marketing Partner specializing in ad tech, announced Wednesday that the company has rebranded itself as Manifest.

Another big announcement from Manifest: a new automated ad platform for Google and Facebook, with ads API integration on Pinterest coming soon. Manifest works with retailers such as Neiman Marcus, Gilt and Choxi by promoting their catalogs via search and social.

The automated at platform is focused on helping people discover new products, rather than urging them to purchase products in which they had expressed interest.

Bob Buch, Manifest’s CEO, explained the new platform in a press release:

Unlike retargeting companies, we are helping retailers grow sales by exposing their customers to new products. Retargeting makes sense when a customer is already on the website, but what retailers really want is growth and incremental sales. They have so much gold hidden in their catalogs – we give them a scalable way to realize the full potential of that asset.

The press release went on to show how the ad platform work:

Manifest combines a retailer’s product feed with its proprietary Matching Engine to automatically identify which products will fare best among specific groups of customers. The Manifest platform is constantly performing thousands of micro-tests to verify viability of each product, and automatically scales the best performing product ads across all channels.

So far, retailers on the first-generation Manifest platform, which focused on Facebook and was managed-service only, have optimized more than 14 million products in 4 billion ads to generate more than $70 million in ROI-positive revenue.

Facebook Marketing Partner SocialWire Rebrands as Manifest, Launches Automated Ad Platform