Posts About ‘a4u expo 2012’

What Real Value Can You Obtain From Analysing Online Performance?

Online performance naturally starts us thinking about data. A lot of talks over the two days at A4U London were orientated around data, the term ‘big data’ features prominently in an online marketers repertoire of late, but not many have taken the time to ask what it all really means? Data and digital marketing go together like bread and butter or peas in a pod, it makes perfect sense for their harmonious relationship after all, data is one of the things that separates traditional and digital marketing. In many respects affiliate or performance marketing simply wouldn’t exist if we weren’t able to collect data to assess affiliation or performance of online campaigns.

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Global Brand Building for Advertisers and Publishers

Having studied international business at university this was a talk that I was particularly interested in hearing. The panel were introduced by chair, Florian Gramshammer, as the “The United Nations of affiliate marketing“ as there were representatives from 5 different countries on the panel. The panel began the session by setting up some of the common questions they find themselves answering, and sometime asking themselves, including:

“Why should you try to enter another country?”
And if you have decided on international expansion then “where do you go and what do you base that decision on?”

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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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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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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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