If a customer spends over £30 on Virgin Vie Day Spa and / or Summer Skin products online they will receive a free “face in the sunshine” tanning lotion (RRP £9.00). This offer is visible on the homepage of Virgin Vie.

But hurry! Offer ends Wednesday 21st May 2008.

We are delighted this month to have launched this brand spanking new website. This is for all stakeholders but specifically we want to use it to provide affiliates with more information regarding dgm, the affiliate team, general affiliate news and we have also launched a dgm blog!

This is very much in development so if you have any suggestions on what you would like to see included please feel free to let us know.

If you haven’t already done so, you have until June 1st to complete our survey to be in with a chance of winning an iPod touch.

To read the rest of the May Newsletter and to see this month’s promotions and campaign updates please click here

Ciao for now
Cat and Jess

Affiliate Management Team

It started me thinking again about how affiliate marketing can be integrated more closely with offline and why we have not seen this evolve particularly over the years.  We know that Merchants use offline advertising to drive online acquisition all the time and we often see this in peaks of sales when a client has a prime time television ad for example, but traditional affiliates advertising offline is not as widespread as I thought it might have become by now.

Interestingly, when I spoke with the affiliate above they said they had seen a significant increase in sales.  Obviously the inherent nature of television advertising meant that they could not allocate this peak specifically to the ad, other factors could be involved, but the increase was significant enough for it to be clear the TV ad had made a positive impact.

We are not obviously only talking about TV when referring to offline advertising as this is only really accessible to those with large marketing budgets.  However, it is not unusual to see affiliates advertising offline in some capacity, and offline PR in the media specifically has become a key driver of online traffic for incentive and money saving sites, even traditional leaflet dropping has also been picked up by affiliates and exclusive codes can be requested at point of purchase to successfully track the acquisition online.

So, my question is why do more affiliates not do this?  Cost would be the obvious barrier and I would presume then the ability to track accurately back to ROI.  To run an offline campaign is always a risk and investment is needed up front to fund it but given that most actions online can now be tracked to some degree (as above even with TV you can estimate a relatively accurate increase in traffic) through unique codes, publisher IDs etc. it could be a feasible channel to generate sales online.

I think that perhaps networks and merchants need to look at this together and see if they can provide collateral and support to decrease some of the cost and initial investment.  I know a lot of gaming companies provide their affiliates with flyers with their affiliate ID on which they can use to generate new players through a wide variety of means – from a local pub to magazine drops. 

Success in this area will most likely depend on sector as well, we have seen it work in the gaming and finance sectors but whether it can be leveraged enough to add value in other sectors such as retail and travel is yet to be seen.

Now, another thought what if we look from the opposite angle, online driving offline sales.  What if we turned this concept around and use online to drive offline sales.  Why not enable the user to download a voucher online then use this offline in a store for example and track it back to the affiliate.  This could drive significant incremental sales for affiliates and merchants alike.  This reminds me of an article that I read last year regarding mobile marketing.  Yes, I know this has been banded around for ages and two years ago it was meant to be the next big thing but it has not yet really emerged (yet).  However, what if you could download a voucher / barcode to your mobile phone which could then be scanned in store?  We know the technology is there to do this, many concert tickets are accessed like this already, but if you could do this commercially and then be able to track back to affiliate this could again be another added value channel.

So, what does the future hold?  As I see it, in many of the larger sectors of affiliate marketing such as finance, gaming and telecoms the competition for traffic is getting fiercer and new ways of gaining incremental traffic need to be assessed and tried.  In the first instances I would see the larger affiliates doing this, like we have seen already, but with merchant and network assistance this could be something that is feasible for all affiliates. Offline advertising is traditionally used to build a brand rather than direct response mainly pertaining to the issues with tracking back to an ROI but as tracking develops I can see offline becoming a viable channel.   I am sure there are a lot more complications in this than I have covered such as avoiding sending the same messages several times and spamming customers but an interesting idea to be explored further perhaps.

If you have any ideas or feedback please feel free to drop me a line Helen.southgate@dgm-uk.com.

They have announced that current loading time evaluations are available on the keyword analysis page to review so well worth reviewing all of your landing pages now to make sure that they don’t negatively affect your quality score when this kicks in in June.

More details from Google are available here:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144&topic=14467

Come and see us on Stand 86 - attendance to the seminars and expo are free - registration can be found here

Representatives from dgmAffiliates, dgmSeachlab and dgmDisplay will be there throughout the 2 day event to answer all of your online marketing questions.

In addition, our very own Martin Giraud, Business Development Manager, will be delivering a seminar on Affiliate Marketing at 10 am on Tuesday 20th May.  If you’re available please come along and say hello.

See you there….!

“This is changing the fundamental nature of the ad business from an exclusively above the line display advertising model to what will probably become predominantly a perfomance based sales model”

Essentially, we’re talkling about the difference between CPA and CPM.

At a recent conference held by the IMRG on Affiliate Marketing, Dan Cohen from dgm spoke about the ‘flight to CPA’. We see this shift happening already as advertisers seek more efficient advertising models. In a downturning economy this trend can only accelerate as marketing budgets are forced to become increasingly accountable and CPM rates are squeezed. At what point does a publisher appreciate there may be better rewards from a well planned, well executed CPA campaign?

Having recently migrated from the regional press I have have come from an environment with a very large amount of online traffic, but its generally unqualified and being traditional media owners, the idea of moving to a CPA pricing model is not very appealing. They are not alone here and I suspect that until revenues drop away from CPM and pressure to monetise the online content increases it’ll be hard to persuade them otherwise. However, we have had some success with smaller publishers who are looking to embrace other revenue streams and whose infrastructure allows them to be a bit more flexible.

Fundamentally, the issue is one of search optimisation and including it in the ongoing commercial and strategic activity rather than a separate administrative task. If a media owner invests time in optimising their site against the advertising they are hosting, they will attract the right traffic and if that’s regionalised they can even steal a march on the competition and in the process increase their local relevancy - the same could be applied for most other publishing sectors. I have likened this to the difference between stopping someone in the street who you know wants what you have, and standing by the side of the motorway with a placard hoping that someone in the passing throng is interested enough to slow down and stop.

Affiliate publishers have know this for some time and the affiliate marketing model is fast becoming part of mainstream media activity. Surely it won’t be long before we’re seeing more publishers from all areas, both B2B and B2C, embracing the performance based model.

Although we should stipulate that dgm is not an actual agency, we have been accepted onto the recommended register in our capacity as a digital specialist company.

The RAR said “During our research, your clients paid testimony to the high standards of services provided by your company (sic) and we’ll be promoting the results of our research to marketing spenders across the UK to help them make more informed choice of supplier (sic).

We at dgm wish to say thank you to those clients who submitted on our behalf and hope that we continue to earn your support in the future.

I’ve been in this industry now for nearly 6 years and the search landscape has changed considerably in that time. When I started in affiliate marketing as a fresh faced graduate the search space was completely open to anyone. Very few, if any clients ran their own search campaigns on their brands or their competitors brands so there were no policies in place for affiliates, it was simply a free for all. This worked well at the time as many clients did not have good SEO rankings either so the affiliates were capturing traffic that would have otherwise been lost in the World Wide Web.

The only issues we had in the early days were with brokers / early aggregators bidding on clients’ terms but sending the traffic elsewhere. This is where affiliates became increasingly important in the client’s search strategy as they could price out the aggregators or push them down in the ranks to make sure that the client was receiving the traffic from their own brand.

Today clients’ search strategies are very sophisticated. Most big brands will fill the SEO listings for their brand term and with the ability to trademark their brand as well they could dominate the first page of results for the brand. If a client can do this then an affiliate is not necessarily needed on brand terms except for to protect the broad match space which is where most clients need the “back-up” of affiliates. However, with the new Google policy clients can no longer guarantee domination of the search space on their brand as anyone can bid to appear. This does therefore create opportunities to use affiliates again, like back in the beginning of this decade.

I have lost count of the numerous conversations I have had over the last few weeks with my colleagues, affiliates, clients and I did even try to explain it to my parents! The general consensus, and our opinion at dgm, is that there is no blanket solution for what to do in this situation. It will depend on the sector, the size of brand, the clients search strategy, competitors search strategy and the cost / ROI of bidding on brand.

So after 4 long weeks of contemplating what will happen, putting strategies in place, putting contingency plans in place, 5th May has arrived and the new policy is live. As it is bank holiday I can’t see that a lot will happen today as I imagine most people are enjoying the bank holiday with campaigns perhaps ready to go live tomorrow. A quick search on a few terms confirms this, no changes as far as I can see at the moment, but it is only just passed 10.30am…….

For more information on the campaign specifics or to join the campaign please logon to dgmPro.

Since the MBO at the beginning of this year we have been working hard to take advantage of our new structure and make it much easier for affiliates to work with dgm. We have a number of ideas and projects underway over the coming weeks and months which we hope will benefit affiliates. What we really need now however is some honest feedback from you on how to see dgm in the market, what we do well and what we need to improve on.

We have put together a short survey which we would appreciate you filling out if you 5-10 minutes to spare to give us your feedback. Based on the feedback we get we will strive to continually improve our service to you and deliver what you need.

As an added incentive if you provide us with your email address at the end of the survey we will enter you into a prize draw to win a very trendy iPod touch!

The survey can be found here

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Regards
All at dgmAffiliates

For the rest of the April newsletter please click here