Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant. The website owner will place advertisements on his websites to either help sell the merchant’s products or to send potential customers to the merchant’s website, all in exchange for a share of the profits.

There are three ways to earn money through affiliate marketing:

Pay Per Click — Every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by “clicking” on the link leading to the merchant’s website, a certain amount of money is deposited in the affiliate’s account. This amount can be pennies or dollars depending on the product and amount of the commission.

Pay Per Sale — Every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website, a percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

Pay Per Lead — Every time a potential client registers at the merchant’s website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate’s account, a previously determined amount is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

For many website owners, this is a great way to earn some extra money without actually having to “do” anything. All it involves is placing an ad on the affiliate’s website. There’s no selling or promotion of any kind. The affiliate can just sit back and wait for the profits to roll in.

It’s also beneficial to the merchant. By placing affiliate marketing advertising on websites all over the Internet, he has free advertising and doesn’t need to do much selling on his own. The more websites a merchant is affiliated with, the more exposure his products get, and all he has to do is allow ads for his products to appear on someone else’s website.

While affiliate marketing has its benefits, there are also a few cons. For instance, the merchant has to share the profits with an outside party. If an affiliate uses unsavory means to bring customers to his website and sell the merchant’s products, the merchant will also have to contend with doing a little damage control on his reputation.

The affiliate has to do thorough research on the merchant before agreeing to affiliation. To not do so can mean ending up with a merchant who refuses to pay commission fees or packs up his business and moves on without informing any of his affiliates. This is rare, however, and most merchants and affiliates have a pleasant and profitable business arrangement.

It’s important to choose wisely. In some cases, an ad can be placed on an affiliate’s website for months before a potential customer “clicks” or purchases something. If the commission is only pennies, this can lead to a frustrating relationship. Both the affiliate and the merchant are well advised to ensure the relationship will be mutually beneficial.

Affiliate marketing is considered one of the best ways to earn money online. If this is an avenue you wish to pursue, you’d be well advised to research each merchant thoroughly. After that, there’s not much else to do except wait for the profits to roll in!

Targeting of online campaigns

The most obvious targeting types that one hears of are geographic – based on which city/country you live in – or demographic – based on criteria such as age, sex etc. Virtually every online campaign as a geographic and demographic targeting element.

This is the undergird of most online campaigns. To make campaigns for focused, advertisers often add other layers to sit on a geographic and demographic targeting. Examples of such targeting are

Contextual targeting

Behavioral targeting

Re-targeting

Let’s examine each of these in detail.

Contextual targeting

In contextual advertising, ads are served in context to what the visitor to a website is doing. Typically, a contextual system looks out for keywords and displays ads to the webpage that the user is visiting. Ads may be displayed as pop-ups. For example if a visitor is using a website pertaining to bikes and if this website uses contextual advertising, the user may see ads for mountain bikes. Another form of contextual advertising is used by search engines. Ads relevant to the keywords are displayed on the search result pages.

Contextual advertising is quite an effective form of advertising. Simply because, it serves ads relevant to user interest. Possibilities of click-thru’s, registrations, sales etc are higher than in a CPM/CPC campaign.

Behavioral Targeting

In behavioral targeting, ads served are based on user behavior, such as pages they have visited, searches they have made. This type of targeting allows site owners or networks to display ads relevant to visitors to the page. Behavioral targeting tends to be at a premium because being more sharply targeted, such campaigns will invite more consumer interest.

Retargeting

Retargeting is just what it says – targeting a particular user repeatedly with the same product/service. This is best explained with an example.

Let’s take a user who does a Google search on ‘Dell Laptops. This leads the user to a Dell page which tells you about the latest Dell Latitude laptops. You take a look at this page and like most users, you spend time on this page and navigate away to another page.

Without the user knowing, a Dell cookie is installed on your PC. A cookie is a small piece of data which says something like ‘ this person is looking for a Dell laptop’. This is a small piece of data which can follow you for weeks and even months. The user surf around but will find an increasing number of Dell ads popping up.

These ads will keep following you till the user revisits the Dell website and take some action- registers, downloads some information or any other action which Dell would like the user to take.

Conventional methods of targeting combined with a contextual, behavioral or retargeting piece can considerably increase ROIs on online campaigns.