The average click-through rate (CTR) on Facebook ads is half that of an average ad banner and about 8 times less than average CTR on the Google Display Network. In figures, average CTR on GDN is 0.4%, on the average ad banner in the USA it is 0.1%, while on Facebook it's just 0.051%. These figures come at a time when, according to TBG, Facebook ad rates increased by 40% in the … [Read more...]
Google CPCs Drop As Facebook's Rise 28%
In the last quarter Google's CPC rates decreased by 12% compared to the year before, at the same time that Facebook's rates increased by 28%. The shift of power towards Facebook is probably the result of Google's frantic search for new display ad revenue: the drop in CPC prices coincides with their purchase of AdMeld. AdMeld is a real-time bidding platform that allows major … [Read more...]
Facebook Mobile Ads To Increase Click-Thru 10x?
Advertisers can finally reach Facebook's 425 million mobile users, in a format that has apparently tested as offering a 5-10x increase in click-thru rates. At Facebook’s first fMC event, Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Global Business Marketing, presented the idea of viewing Facebook as providing stories-as-ads. This means that the various positioning and channel … [Read more...]
Every Country In The World Ranked By Facebook CPC Cost
For many offers the really big opportunities for affiliates lie overseas and Facebook is perhaps the simplest and most accessible way to buy targeted traffic in these markets. Nanigans is a company that provides Facebook ad campaign management and this week they launched a new infographic that draws from 175 billion ads impressions managed by them in 2011. Note that the size of … [Read more...]
Tried and True Performance Strategies
There are a lot of ways to approach affiliate marketing. Here are a few of my favorite tips.Feature Co-branded Messaging –Among the fastest-growing areas of affiliate marketing, loyalty and cash-back sites have come to play an increasingly important role in affiliate programs. Given that these types of sites are responsible for delivering a huge number of sales and often … [Read more...]
Consolidate, Optimize and Maximize
You can maximize the performance of your marketing campaigns by consolidating all of them under a single ad platform. This will save time on administrative tasks, offer comprehensive analytics on campaigns across multiple channels and help you optimize them accordingly. Affiliate software is in a unique position to consolidate campaigns from across different channels because it … [Read more...]
Passing the Test
In the May/June Affiliate's Corner column, I wrote about the ways super-affiliates prefer to be approached by affiliate program managers and merchants for the purpose of program recruitment.Wooing a super-affiliate over drinks and dinner with offers of exclusive landing pages, significantly higher-than-advertised commission rates, or showering them with free product samples … [Read more...]
The Tangled Web of Link Spam
In my last column, you were warned to "Never watch sausage being made," lest you find the process so unappetizing you'd never eat it again. But even if you find sausage links tasty, you'll want to spit out those spam links every time.Last time, we explored the consequences of content spam, which include bad publicity and getting banned from the search engines. This time around, … [Read more...]
Hybrid Auctions Are Taking Over
As author Robert C. Gallagher observes, "Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine." And so it comes as no surprise that paid search engines are changing too. The biggest change is one of the most fundamental, affecting which paid ads are shown first in the results. The tried-and-true high bidder auctions, pioneered by Overture (later acquired by Yahoo), are being … [Read more...]
Danger: Clicking Ahead
Sometimes a click isn't really a click. Sometimes the person knocking on a website's door is really a wolf in shopper's clothing, perpetrating a fraud that wastes marketers' advertising dollars or steals commissions. Skip Pratt says his Web hosting company BAPort.com was being defrauded on 20 percent of its clicks. He was so frustrated by the problem that he developed a click … [Read more...]