Posts on State of Search about ‘Events’

From Affiliate to Merchant

Dom Hodgson finished the first day of A4U off with his story of selling pick and mix online; an amusing tale of just doing it, rather than getting over cautious around having a business plan. For anyone who went to BrightonSEO in April 2012, then this talk would have been familiar.

Dom set up clicknmix.co.uk about a year ago, simply to sell sweets online. With the task of ‘making buying sweets actually fun’, he chose to go down a merchant route, rather than be an affiliate for two key reasons:

He would own the inventory
He could custom build the experience from the ground up.

Basically, being a merchant gave him far more control – the most important ingredient since he wanted to change people’s attitude towards buying sweets.

Rather than do much in the way of forecasting or a business plan, he built the site in two days and launched it over a weekend. Initial traffic was strong, but they experienced some problems:

For all the traffic, no one converted in the first few hours. Dom soon realised they were in sandbox mode and people couldn’t check out. He switched this and gained 5 orders.
People started complaining almost from the off – with ‘problems’ such as being confused about his squirrel mascot, and there not being enough selection (he had 17 varieties of sweets).

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Mobilisation of the Nation

Consider the world pre- and post- the mobile phone. Consider what changes have taken place just in your individual usage of that device in your pocket. It’s true that consumer confidence for mobile is growing rapidly, just compare mobile adoption rates to that of the Internet.

With the mobile consumer behaviour evolving faster than the mobile environment, simple enhancements to the mobile purchase journey can see great improvements. We are all aware of this as online marketers, but how do we capitalise on this? Below are some key takeaways from the ‘mobilisation of the nation’ session at A4U Expo in London, 2012.

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Get Your Mobile Search in Order!

My highlight talks from day one at A4U were during the session ‘Consumers are Socially Mobile: Get Your Mobile Search in Order’, with State of Search’s very own Bas van den Beld and Shri Sharma of Net Media Planet.

Bas opened the session explaining that we should no longer be talking about ‘the year of mobile’ – we’ve been talking about that since 2007, and mobile is something we should have focused on for years. Smart phone usage has become so ubiquitous, that apparently 36% of young people check social media on a mobile device after sex (a statistic that has existed since 2009!). Mobiles have become a social media enabler – with multi-player apps and games, along with increased access to social networks.

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For Blogs Sake – Don’t You Know I Add Value?

The second day at A4U Expo in London was kicked off by Edwyn McFarlane, Head Of Publisher Services for Affiliate Window. The talk started by Edwyn stating that “a man is best known by the companion that he keeps”, where he showed a number of the networks and clients that he’s worked with, he hoped that this introduced that “he kind of know’s what he’s talking about”…

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Performance Marketing – The Value and Perception Debate!

It was established early on during the session that there has been a massive shift in the performance marketing industry over the last few years. This has manifested in performance marketing ‘changing shape’ in the digital marketing mix, and media agencies are very much more aware and inclusive of this in their spend. Currently, 20% of digital marketing spend in the UK goes to affiliate marketing but could this be more now we are considering this under the term ‘performance marketing’? Below we have summarised the pertinent points raised during the discussion: (more…)

Keynote Session – Getting Personal to Drive Conversion – Customer Behaviour Meets Big Data – #A4UExpo

Dr Mike Baxter, Sales Logiq

Mike Baxter delivered the keynote at A4U and he delivers strategic consultancy to many blue chip brands around the world from Sony to Google and wanted too share some insights from his experience. (more…)

Turbo Charging your SEO & Link Building Strategy – #A4UExpo

This was a great session where Patrick and Jon covered some very actionable insights into site and link audits and how to recover from search penalties.

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Advanced Performance Optimization Strategies at SMX Stockholm 2012

All right folks, it’s that time of the year again – and I mentioned it in earlier posts that I usually call Oct. / Nov. something like the “conference madness”. And what would fit better than a re-cap on a talk I just gave yesterday at SMX Stockholm. I had the pleasure to close the conference sessions part with a 45 minutes solo-talk titled “Advanced Performance Optimization Strategies: 10 tips to make your site lightning-fast”. (more…)

Google Analytics for Publishers

The second to last session of the day at A4U Expo in London focused on setting goals devising action points and fully utilising the Google Analytics platform from the publisher’s viewpoint. It was delivered by Doug Hall and Russell Sutton from ConversionWorks.

Analytics for publishers is a fairly confusing area. Most don’t sell anything, so assigning monetary value for goals becomes difficult, whereas it’s somewhat easier to measure in e-commerce. What usually occurs is the publisher does not properly define value in their goals, and instead focuses on reporting rather than forecasting. The problem with this approach is that you should be using analytics to inform what you should be doing, rather than simply reporting on what you have done. Everyone with a website should be looking at data to size their opportunities, rather than looking at it from a rear view mirror.

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