New Zealand SME Expo ..

I was at the Auckland small business expo for the day yesterday and have to say I was impressed with the level of online presence in the expo.

Many exhibits (there were 500+ I believe) were pushing their website as the main point of contact for the company. It makes sense to do this however I wasn’t sure how prevalent it would be in the New Zealand SME market before I arrived.

There were a lot of web development firms who were pushing their abilities to design, develop, promote and do anything else you can think of with an SME’s online presence however I was surprised that not a single one was promoting the use of affiliate programs for SME’s to bring in traffic to their site.

apnfinda had a heavy showing at the show however this was probably the only company there who were interested in online advertising and promotion. Every other online company (and there were a lot) were only interested in the development dollar and on discussions with most of them the all said “Oh yeah, we throw in some Google Adsense for the website as well but marketing is really up to the site”.

What a waste!

All these SME’s wanting to promote their websites, all these web development companies and only one online advertising company?

The Director of apnfind in his local search seminar was onto it, discussing the confounding problem that NZ business only spends 2.5% of its marketing budgets on online advertising where Australia is on 8.9% and the UK on 18%. This was especially shown to be lacking by the actual percentages of media consumption in New Zealand where online sites take roughly 40% of the media time of consumers.

Very insightful.

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Duplicate Affiliate Programs

A practice which I find particularly annoying in the New Zealand affiliate market which I believe is due to the small size of the market itself is when a website joins more than one affiliate network and also has an affiliate program on its own site as well.

Affiliates don’t need choice when they are on a website and select the link to sign up for the program to promote the site. Choice in this scenario just creates confusion, specifically if the affiliate is not already part of one of the networks that the site is offering.

The example of this I found this week has a site showing the options to sign up to it’s own program, the Commission Monster Network or the ClixGalore Network when you click on the “Affiliate Program” link on their site.

My first question on coming to this page is which program gives me the highest commission? Affiliates are invariably motivated by higher commissions so if you’re an affiliate program and expect to have affiliates sign up through a page like this then you’re going to have to spell out the pros and cons of each program. A flat choice just doesn’t work.

The program in question has the following quote on the page;

All programs provide outstanding affiliate tracking resources that will help you make fantastic profits from the range of products. Each program automatically calculates and tracks your commission and arranges direct payment to you. You can check the commissions you’ve earned 24 hours/7 days a week, simply by logging on to the relevant management interface.

In the end I couldn’t see what the pricing differences were and didn’t have the time to compare terms and conditions on each network so left the site without joining!

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New Version of Google Analytics

If you don’t already, you should be using the free Google Analytics tool as (at the least) an additional statistics package for your affiliate website. It offers so much more than many costly packages and it’s free!

This week Google have announced a completely new version of the Google Analytics interface and reporting on the Google Analytics Blog).

After an initial look through it’s an impressively updated GUI which does bring a lot of the features available already to the forefront of the reporting. The ability to email results will be very useful.

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Google Adsense / Google Adwords tidbit

I learnt something new yesterday which may have been common knowledge to a fair number of people but changed one of the assumptions I had about how the Google Adsense program shows adverts.

We’ve all seen how Adsense can sometimes show only a single advert in a large advert box. So you’ll end up with a skyscraper advert (120×600) which only has a single advert in the entire area in huge text.

Now here’s the thing; I always assumed that this was due to the lack of inventory (that is people who are bidding for the adverts that are listing on your sites keywords) however it turns out that this is actually a feature of Google Adsense where, if an advertiser is bidding well more than the next few bidders, then that advert will take precedence over both of the next adverts and only it will show. This can also happen if a Google Adwords advertiser is specifically targeting adverts to your site.

I can’t say I really like this feature much from a design stand-point as you can end up with some pretty glaringly ugly adverts on your site when you though you were going to have some nice text listings. The main positive is really that this will increase the revenue on your site.

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ClixGalore and the NZ market

I had a good chat with the General Manager of ClixGalore.co.nz late last week. Nice guy, quite passionate about his company.

They have built proprietary software and have an impressive list of features on the software they have designed. The complete inclusion of impression stats, clicks and the ‘google like’ use of EPC (earning per click) reports gives a nice indication of the performance of sites you’re promoting on their network.

I would have to say that the usability of their system leaves a little to be desired although this is purely from a design stand-point. Priorities have obviously been in the right direction for this company in building what affiliates want in the reporting and functionality first.

Something he mentioned which I was quite pleased to hear was that ClixGalore use their affiliates as their decision base for developing new functionality into the software. If affiliates ask for it, they get it.

They are also opening up a New Zealand team soon. At the moment, while they have a fair few NZ affiliate sites on their system they do not have anyone on the ground in NZ but apparently that will change within a few months.

Keep an eye on them as if they start to bring on some of the bigger affiliate brands in the New Zealand market like they have in the Australian affiliate market then they will be quite a force.

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New Affiliate Network from Google?

Google have just launched a Beta within Google Adsense which looks to be a version of an Affiliate CPA network.

Called “Google Referrals” the Beta allows publishers to pick out of hundreds of advertisers therefore specifically increasing the relevance of the Google adverts while setting a defined action for the payment. Sound like an affiliate CPA to anyone?

With referrals, you’ll be paid when your visitors click through to an advertiser’s site and complete an action defined by your advertisers, such as a sale or sign up. Because these actions are often more involved than a simple click or impression, advertisers pay more for these referrals, which can translate into higher earnings for your site. Further, you’ll see the expected earnings and advertiser performance ahead of time, so you can make the best decisions about what to refer. You can also choose to target the keywords that will ensure you get the highest-paying referrals for your ad space.

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