How to Publish for Profit – Collecting Tracking Links

Now that you’ve joined OfferForge and are ready to start earning, you need to place ads. To get  you started we’ve compiled a handy step-by-step guide to help you along the way.

The first step is identifying advertisers and placing their ads on your site. Selecting the right ads for your website is critical, as you want to ensure the advertisers you partner with are relevant to your visitors and match your content.   Luckily OfferForge has advertisers in virtually every industry, so you’re sure to find a good match.

Once you’ve identified the advertisers you’d like to add to your site, you’re ready to place ads.

 

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Login to the Affiliate Portal (http://admin.offerforge.com) using your Username & Password.

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Unsurprisingly social media spending increases

Certain things in life are fairly inevitable: death, taxes and that advertisers are spending more money on social media adverts. It’s simple, users are using social networks and it’s an easy way to get your product in their face. So inevitably social media spending on ads are rising.

A recent STRATA research report shows that most advertisers are using Facebook to connect with their customers and potential customers. YouTube and Twitter came in next, at 55% and 53%, respectively. An additional 35% 0f respondents said they were likely to use LinkedIn for social campaigns, and 25% each cited Google+ and Pinterest.

While brands have a choice between using free social products and paid placements on the networks, more than twice as many respondents (25%) saw paid social media as offering greater return on investment (ROI) than free social media (11%). Still, it’s important to bear in mind, 19% said they saw no ROI from social media.

Does more social media spending mean more opportunities for affiliates?

Brand promotions led as the most common type of ad placed on Facebook, used by 62% of respondents, twenty percentage points ahead of company announcements, which came in second. Just over one-third of respondents said they used social ads announcing services, and nearly as many said they ran social ads on products.

In total, paid ads still aren’t overtaking ad budgets, but they are beginning to make a dent in the total. While 58% said social media accounted for 5% or less or clients’ ad budgets, another 42% spent between 6% and 25% of ad budgets on social. No respondents spent more than one-quarter of ad budgets on paid social posts.

The critical issue to consider here isn’t that social media budgets are expanding, this is fairly obvious. What we need to consider is that marketers shouldn’t use social media in isolation. There are many businesses trying their hand at social media marketing and it is increasing every day. This covers lead generation efforts to subscriptions and everything in between. As social media spending is still a growing industry there are still loads of opportunities for the savvy internet marketer.

The trick is to split your budgets along multiple mediums such as the OfferForge ad network as well as CPC, CPM and CPA style campaigns. You’ll easily get the hang of which medium works best for you.

Contact us today to get the best advice on how to segment and budget your digital marketing campaigns.

Advertisers: get the best out of your SEO

As an advertiser or agency you don’t need us to tell you that it’s important to make sure you get the highest return on investment for your advertising spend. SEO makes up an important part of your marketing budget but how does one actually measure SEO results?

Ascend2 and Research Underwriters in June 2013 surveyed businesses worldwide, comparing them based on their self-rated SEO performance as either “very successful” or “not successful.” The study found that companies with superior SEO strategies were more likely than those with poor SEO strategies to focus on increasing their traffic conversion rate. By contrast, companies with inferior SEO strategies were more likely to worry about increasing website traffic in general. Companies with stronger SEO performance were also more likely to emphasize increased content development, compared with poorer performing companies.

The report pointed out that the most common SEO practices for B2C companies include the following:

  1. Updating the site
  2. Keywords
  3. Original content

However, the results also show that creating original content is considered one of the most difficult aspects of SEO to get right. This is probably due to the lack of “science” involved with content as opposed to pure keyword activities. Blogging and re-purposing existing content saw the least interest among B2C marketers as worthwhile tactics.

On the B2B side things are slightly different with keywords and original content swapping places for second and third. Interestingly in the B2B arena creating landing pages is fairly popular in fourth place and was considered one of the easiest “wins” in terms of SEO.

The critical issue to consider: metrics. When it comes to actually deciding how their SEO strategy is performing, nearly half of both B2Bs and B2Cs said conversion rate was the most useful metric, pointing again to how those businesses with the least successful SEO strategies might improve. Traffic to your website is one thing, converting it is a whole different aspect.

SEO is the friend of all website

The concepts behind search engine optimization is really the friend of any website. Although the main aim is to improve rankings in search engines, it also builds the foundation for a top quality site.

The site would not only be aimed at impressing the likes of Google and Bing, but will also offer users the best possible experience. Long gone are the days where a few little underhanded sneaky tricks to move you up the rankings. The only way these days to get the results you want is by putting in the work.

Everything you do in your efforts to improve your rankings should be built in quality and delivering this quality consistently.

The result is that you will have visitors to your site that enjoy your content and find value in it. This in turn will increase the likelihood of them acting on any affiliate marketing programs you have running on your site. You would be able to drive more sales and generate many more leads as a result.

There are really no losers when it comes to quality content. Although the effort that goes into improving your rankings are time consuming, it comes with lasting benefits. It pays to put in the effort.

A look at the Cannes Cyber Lions winners

Whether you work as a publishers, advertiser or agency, a little bit of creative inspiration is a great way to help your own work. Last week we saw the Cannes advertising festival where the worlds greatest advertising creatives got together to celebrate their year of work. In 1998, the Cyber Lions were introduced to celebrate digital work. This year the Gran Prix winners included Intel and Oreo with Pereira & O’Dell and DraftFCB being the respective agencies.

Intel + Toshiba 

According to the agency both Intel and Toshiba were the client and since Intel wanted to refresh “Intel Inside,” Toshiba wanted to feature the Ultrabook it made sense.

The campaign had 70million views, 26million interactions, 97% approval on Youtube and led to a 66% lift in brand perception for Intel, a 40% for Toshiba. The campaign led to a 300% sales increase.

You can also see the social media work done on Facebook here.

Oreo Daily Twist

Born in 1912, OREO was turning 100. Having always spoken to families in a traditional way, the brand had developed a traditional image.

Now, how to use a centennial anniversary to actually rejuvenate OREO? Celebrating the culture of the day, every day.

The campaign created 100 ads in 100 days. Each morning they identified trending news stories, gave them a playful OREO twist, and pushed a brand-new ad to their social networks.

oreo 1st flight around the world ad

The results were staggering: 433 million Facebook views with +280% increase in Shares, creating 231 million media impressions and making OREO the brand with the highest buzz increase in 2012 (+49%). A full list of the images created can be found on Pinterest.

For a full list of winners and even more inspiration click for the full list on the Cannes Cyber Lion page.

Is there power in social media for local publishers?

There definitely is. These numbers are astounding and they might look out of reach. There is however huge scope in the South African marketing for those willing to take their digital marketing to a new level. The number of views on Youtube and interactions on Facebook keep growing with every passing month. If you are keen to give your digital marketing efforts a boost, you should invest the time in studying social media campaigns and creating your own top content.

Youtube viewership continues to skyrocket

We can’t help but notice that almost every Youtube video we watch lately has a pre-roll advert playing. Obviously advertisers are catching on to the platform but how big is Youtube really?

youtube-logo2

Canadian pop star has the third most watched channel with a mere 79 videos racking up a massive 3.6 billion views according to SocialBakers.

According to Youtube themselves:

  1. More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
  2. Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
  3. 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
  4. 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
  5. YouTube is localised in 53 countries and across 61 languages
  6. In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth
  7. Millions of subscriptions happen each day. Subscriptions allow you to connect with someone you’re interested in — whether it’s a friend, or the NBA — and keep up with their activity on the site

How is Youtube growing in South Africa?

In South Africa the medium continues to grow and grow.

The number of video uploads rose 30%, said Jared Molko, their partnership manager at Google South Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of views rose 90% last year and video uploads grew 40% from the previous year, with South Africa leading the region with the most playbacks. “From discovering global pop sensations to reinventing the classroom, the YouTube community is transforming entertainment and shaping the culture of our times,” said Mr Molko. “It’s great to see South Africans playing an active role in this.”

Luke Mckend, Google South Africa country manager, said spending by the top 100 global advertisers on the video site rose more than 50% compared with the previous year.

“It has the power to directly target customers, a factor that is invaluable to any organisation,” he said. “In addition, on average, spending on YouTube was approximately 2.4 times more efficient than the equivalent television spend.”

Video advertising has massive potential and could become the new 30-second TV advert of the internet. For now though, your audience is on there, make the platform part of your campaign.

What does this mean to publishers in South Africa

With the huge explosion in Youtube’s popularity it has become very clear that there is potential for publishers to reap rewards. Investing some time and effort into creating videos for the channel you can greatly boost your affiliate marketing website. It has been said a thousand times, but it pays to be where your customers are. They are on the video sharing site and they are on social media sites. Go there!

The growing tension between browsers and advertisers

A new digital arms race is looming. Users, advertisers, browser companies, and website owners are pitted against one another in a battle over online advertisements and the way individual consumer information is used to deliver targeted ads.

The Do Not Track (DNT) header is the proposed HTTP header field DNT that requests that a web application disable either its tracking or cross-site user tracking (the ambiguity remains unresolved) of an individual user. In December 2010, Microsoft announced support for the DNT mechanism in its Internet Explorer 9 web browser. Mozilla’s Firefox became the first browser to implement the feature

The header field name is DNT and it currently accepts three values: 1 in case the user does not want to be tracked (opt out), 0 in case the user consents to being tracked (opt in), or null (no header sent) if the user has not expressed a preference. The default behavior is not to send the header, until the user chooses to enable the setting via their browser.

What’s the big deal? We expect to see ads for baby clothes and diapers when we visit an online maternity store. But some object to the practice known as “behavioral retargeting,” where the same ads follow us and show up on unrelated sites afterwards. According to a study last year led by Chris Hoofnagle and Ashkan Soltani, cookies were detected on the top 100 websites. They also found an average of 57 cookies per website and 100 or more cookies on one-fifth of the top websites.

Given this growing online data collection, privacy groups, government regulators, and others have argued that users should have a choice. If people don’t want to be tracked across multiple sites, then they should be able to indicate that choice through their browser settings: “Do Not Track.”

Already, 17% of Firefox users have activated the signal and that comes to 4 trillion do-not-track signals sent by Firefox each month, Anderson said. Almost all are ignored. That’s because the signals themselves don’t block tracking. Instead, they communicate users’ preferences, but ad networks and publishers are free to treat that information as they see fit.

According to the Lou Mastria, head of the Digital Advertising Alliance: “These actions do not advance consumer choice, and they will have a significant adverse effect on users’ Internet experience,”. Mastria stressed that third-party cookies are not intrinsically a threat to user’ privacy, but rather that they are a necessary mechanism to subsidize free content and services on the Web.

It’s still extremely early to call a winner in this battle, despite the growing  tension between advertisers and browsers, however it’s mildly shortsighted of privacy groups to worry about tracking. The truth is that while you may be “followed” by advertising on your journey around the web but you are a data point rather than a specific, known individual.

What on earth is Real Time Bidding?

Real time bidding is starting to grow massively as publishers gather more and more information about the people that frequent their sites. Wikipedia gives a great example of RTB:

Let us explain with a simple real time example, a user heads to a page on a publisher’s website, causing it to start loading. In the same instant the publisher sends out a “bid request” to tens of hundreds of potential advertisers saying, “We’ve got this user who is 30, Indian, male and based in New Jersey, US, and recently searched for return air tickets to Delhi, opening a page on our site. How much are you willing to bid for being the only ad on this page?” Within about 100 milliseconds the publisher gets bids from different advertisers, which then analyses to figure out the highest bidder and the brands being advertised. The winner is alerted by the publisher and allowed to place its ad on the page. The remarkable thing about this entire process is how fast and how often it takes place. The entire series of to-and-fro communication between publisher and advertisers takes place in 300-500 milliseconds, causing no visible delay to the user. This process is repeated for every ad slot on a page.

In essence, advertisers can select the specific demographics they want to target. According to Digiday:

Real-time bidding still accounts for a small fraction of digital ad sales. It accounted for between 10 and 20 percent of total digital display spend in 2012, according to estimates from agency groups like GroupM and Starcom MediaVest. Unfortunately not all publishers are embracing real-time bidding. Despite what advertisers and vendors say, many companies on the sell side believe that RTB is, or will be, a bad thing for their bottom lines. Some, like Turner and USA Today, are shunning the technology almost entirely, citing concerns that the potential rewards are currently far outweighed by the risks. The number of demand-side platforms continues to grow rapidly. Owing to the rapid growth of RTB adoption among advertisers, everyone’s trying to get in on the action. There are currently more than 30 standalone DSPs operating in the U.S., for example.

Real time bidding
via adpushup.com

Retargeting drives real-time bidding. Despite the promise of using RTB to identify and target potential new customers, a huge portion of impressions traded using the technology are actually used to re-message existing ones, or users that visited marketers’ sites without making a purchase. Google is doing its best to dominate the RTB arena, by offering a full suite of products for those on both the sell side and buy side of the table. It’s invested more than $1 billion in RTB since 2009, including the acquisitions of AdMeld, Teracent and Invite Media. The bidding might be real-time, but the targeting isn’t. Advertisers and agencies might be buying impressions in real time, but the data they use to inform those impressions isn’t always fresh. While they might be targeting the right users, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s at the right time.

We expect Real time bidding to grow massively in the future as advertisers work harder to target specific groups of people. We could probably give a lot of credit to the likes of Facebook for starting the concept of targeting specific demographics but either way, we think it’s a great step forward.

Are Facebook ads better than TV campaigns?

Recently there’s been a debate over whether Facebook ads are more effective than traditional TV adverts. Apparently Facebook is now “on a par with TV” when it comes to effective advertising, but the return on investment is far better, claim FMCG brands that have used the social networking site.

Nestlé said it could directly attribute 11% of Kit Kat sales to its Facebook ads following a recent cross-media channel campaign.

Facebook delivered the highest return on investment, generating £1.34 in return for every £1 invested, it said, adding that it was the best medium for “brand impact and overall brand equity, compared to other online channels and television advertising”. Immediately it’s obvious that the simple measurability makes the Facebook option a better choice for marketers.

General Mills also ran a cross-channel campaign to promote Old El Paso products. Some 27% of sales during the push were down to Facebook and it was “the most efficient channel for driving sales”, it said.

According to a Samsung campaign: The data indicated an average three- to five-time return on Facebook ads. An ad campaign for the Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, amid the iPhone 5 frenzy, resulted in an even larger return on investment. The three-week campaign reached over 105 million unique users, and generated $129 million in sales, a 13-times return on a $10 million ad buy, she said. Samsung now has more than 20 million fans on Facebook to market its messages.

The situation isn’t that simple though: ads on TV are more intrusive and offer instant audio-visual impact, as compared to Facebook ads which initially appear to be more like static print ads. While TV ads can be fast-forwarded, ads on Facebook can be equally ignored.

Facebook’s global head of CPG marketing Erin Hunter added: “As a marketer I would want to reach as many people as possible in a well-targeted fashion and in a mass way. Facebook absolutely excels at that, because of the number of people we have, but also because we know exactly who they are.”

At OfferForge we recommend you combine a wide range of online adverts including PPC and Facebook in order to spread your costs and maximise your ROI.

Digital marketing offers publishers and advertisers a huge variety of channels. Diversifying the digital channels you use has a number of benefits. The first and most obvious is that you have analytical data for each channel. The more data you have, the better you would be able to make business decisions on where you spend your marketing budget.

The data is often available in real time and this enables you to make changes on the fly. The second serious benefit digital marketing offers is that it is very low cost when compared to many other more traditional forms of advertising. You would be able to test numerous channels without breaking the bank.

YouTradeFX launches CPA program on OfferForge.com

YouTradeFX is one of the leading online brokerage and trading companies and we’re happy to welcome them to OfferForge.  YouTradeFX is running a CPA program, log into your OfferForge.com control panel to see your custom affiliate payout.

YouTradeFX affiliate program on OfferForge

About YouTradeFX

  • Traders can use company’s website for investing into stock, indices, commodities and foreign exchange market.
  • Our motto is to build long-term associations based on trust, corporate values and high performance.
  • We provide our visitors the trading platform, user-friendly environment and high quality and excellent services.

 

With their proven track record YouTradeFX would be a valuable digital advertisers creative to run on your site. A CPA campaign linked to a top brand has a far higher likelihood of success.

There are countless investors out there looking for ways to invest their money and make it grow. Giving them an opportunity to do this through the YouTradeFX affiliate program will help them and you will earn commission.

The foreign exchange offers are some of the most profitable offers that you can run as an affiliate. The returns in terms of commission is some of the highest you will earn with any program. They are more often than not sales offers where you will earn a commission for every successful sale.