Posts About ‘a4u london 2012’

From Affiliate to Merchant

A4U NEW

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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Get Your Mobile Search in Order!

A4U NEW

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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Performance Marketing – The Value and Perception Debate!

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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…)

Google Analytics for Publishers

A4U NEW

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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Performance Marketing Ranking Factors: Search, Social, Video, Mobile

A4U NEW

This session had three quick fire talks on what were the key methods of getting noticed through social media, mobile and local search and SEO.

The three speakers were:

  • Martin McDonald, Expedia Affiliate Network
  • Niels Doerje, Tandler Doerje Partner
  • David Naylo, Bronco

The session was aimed at SEO’s and webmasters and anyone who wanted to hear more about search marketing across the different areas of Performance Marketing.
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Changing Consumer Habits

A4U NEW

One of two opening A4U London sessions was ‘Changing Consumer Habits’, a panel reviewing the growth of new technology and what this meant for the consumer over the next two years. It featured:

This session was moderated by Andrew Copeland, the Head of Affiliates at Tradedoubler. (more…)

A4U London Expo 2012 – Interview With Chris Johnson

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October 2012 is just round the corner and on the 17th of the month, the next A4U Expo in London begins. State of Search are Media Partners at the event and will be bringing you updates on both days so keep a close eye on the blog between 16th and 17th October.

A4U have offered State of Search readers a 10% discount when you register to attend the event. All you need to do is use the following code upon registering – SOS10%

In the lead up to the event, State of Search put together some questions for Chris Johnson, Content Director at A4u – Affiliates4u.com to get their views on the show.

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