Ad:Tech Postgame

Hey hey, it’s Dave here, I’m back from Ad:Tech and finally getting my head back in the game. Overall, I’d say it was a great show and it was great touching base with everyone. Probably the highlight of the show was connecting with some of the folks we met virtually during the eComXpo – it’s always good to put names together with faces. There were plenty of unique solutions up for grabs at the show, including some interesting search marketing providers and some development shops.

Of course, the parties were good as well, including XYZ at the W hotel and Club Mighty later Wednesday evening. It was pretty exhausting all things considered, and I heard from Nigel over at MediaTraffic that a lot of folks there took on the party until the place closed down. Meanwhile, somehow I ended up on the other side of the city partying with a few Seattle Mariners. Ahh, gotta love the bay.

All in all it was a good time. If we hung out during the show and you somehow ended up with Joe’s card – drop him a line and say hello. I know we’re going to have some great updates coming here in the very near future, so keep tuned in (as always!). And if I said anything while I was under the intoxicating spell of Gray Goose & Redbull – I probably meant it!

Hope to see more of you at the upcoming Affiliate Summit, and as always if you have any questions, please drop us a line and let us know how we can help.

Adfinity and Myspace Traffic

Hey all, hope you had a great weekend and the traffic is kicking up a notch. There’s lots of exciting things going on here at Adfinity, including some new offers, some upcoming promotions (you’ll find out the details soon, we assure you), and the upcoming trip to San Francisco to drink do business.

Let’s talk about Myspace traffic, and where Adfinity stands.

First off, this is an issue that confronts all advertising and affiliate networks. We’re addressing the issue of “myspace” traffic specifically for two reasons. For one, we know that our offers work well and appeal to similar demographics that are on myspace. Secondly, the online rumor mill has started whipping up rumors that somehow we don’t take this issue seriously.

Here’s the reality. We are 100% committed to compensating all our affiliates on legitimate traffic, earned through any legitimate and industry supported marketing methods. What we do not support is traffic from illegitimate sources and methods, such as (but not necessarily limited to) email spam, private messages spam, private communications spam, and any sort of phishing activities that are used to acquire those spam lists. The number one venue for these sorts of phishing and spam scams is Myspace. Here’s an excerpt from our Terms of Service:

 Phishing, including, but not limited to, sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft, or any other activity, is absolutely and stictly prohibited.

As Joe Pantel (CEO) stated: “It’s a difficult situation for any advertising or affiliate network to deal with, especially one like ours which is so geared towards a younger audience. Obviously we can’t go asking every single publisher where they get their traffic from – that’s what makes them great affiliates. But we do take complaints or network abuse allegations very seriously. If a publisher is found to be phishing or spamming, we will remove them from the network immediately, simple as that. There’s thousands of great ways that 99% of our affiliates have found to earn legitimate revenue streams, and we’re always happy to work with affiliates that want to verify that their marketing practices meet the appropriate industry standards.”

If you have any questions about Adfinity’s Affiliate Agreement, please direct your questions to Joe@Adfinity.com. Thanks for helping make Adfinity the fastest growing network on the web, and we’ll keep doing our part to ensure quality offers, on-time payments, and superior affiliate support.

Will you be at Ad:Tech San Francisco?

Hey folks!

Are you planning to attend this year’s Ad:Tech San Francisco conference and expo? If so, please give us a holler and let’s make sure to meet up! Whether you want to chat about how well the Raiders are going to do next year (awesomely, by the way), or discuss your latest marketing strategies and how Adfinity can help, there’s nothing better than meeting face to face and getting to know each other better.

If you’ll be there, please email Dave@Adfinity.com to setup a sit down.

Have a great weekend! Look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks.

Adfinity Thoughts on Search Engine Optimization

Hey all! It’s been a while, how are the commissions coming?

SEOmoz recently published a great list of suggestions for ways to improve your organic rankings in Google (which, unsurprisingly, oftentimes carry over to Yahoo and MSN). Check out the full article here. As a dedicated team of former publishers and longtime internet marketers, Adfinity’s got a few suggestions to help you achieve great search engine optimization.

From our personal experience, here’s a couple of suggestions to possibly help you further improve your organic search performance…

1. Write for your visitors, not for the engines. In the last decade, the SE’s have improved their algorithms dramatically to discourage “made for search engine” articles and pages. That trend isn’t likely to reverse any time soon. The easiest rule of thumb is to create content that your visitors actually want to read, rather than anything to “fool” the search engines in to assuming is relevant content. Two things are true about this. For one, if there is a way to trick the SE’s, there are probably way better Black Hat SEO’s that can get to that weakness before you can. And two, the SE’s are constantly working on making their spiders consider documents the same as human readers. Eventually it’ll be pretty close to true. The better your content, the better your pages will rank in the end.
2. Don’t forget the details. Even if you’ve just put a site up in a hurry, make sure to take the time to return to the site and update it with the proper optimization methods. This includes everything like paragraph (<p>) tags, correct titles, and accurate page naming conventions. Your content might be outstanding, but unless it’s formatted in such a way that the SE’s recognize it, you’re lost to the bowels of Google.
3. Watch out for Web 2.0 Trickery. There are lots of very sexy things you can do with AJAX, Javascript, DHTML, and other client-side scripts. Be very cautious about using these wonderful applications if organic listings is important to you. Can you do something with standard old-school HTML rather than a sexy CSS and Javascript twist? Do it old-school. The SE’s will likely have a hard time interpreting a javascript command that changes colors and button layouts, but it can understand simple things like “<a href”.

Of course, whatever works for you – do it! If you think it’s a neat optimization trick that you don’t mind sharing, please comment or send us an email with your thoughts.

Affiliate Statistics Explained

One way to keep track of your success with Adfinity is to keep an eye on your overall statistics. Within the statistics screen you have access to a great deal of information that you can use to optimize your campaigns, discover what offers are working best for your traffic, and help you get an idea of where your income is coming from.

Impressions – How many people have viewed the ad that you’ve deployed. In some instances, impressions may be calculated as landing page hits, otherwise it will be represented by advertisement views.

Clicks – How many people have clicked on your ad.

Leads – If you’re running a lead campaign, this will tell you how many leads you’ve captured.

Calls – This is a feature that we aren’t using yet, but if we get a pay-per-call transaction running, you’ll find out about it here first!

 Click Thru Ratio – The click thru ratio is actually a very useful figure to keep an eye on. The ratio is calculated as the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions (click/impressions = CTR). Especially if you have several campaigns running at once, you can find out which ones are getting further along by monitoring your CTR of all your campaigns.

S / U – Sales per Units is the ratio of how many sales you’ve achieved based upon how many clicks you’ve received, represented as a percentage.

Number of Sales – The raw number of sales you’ve received on any given campaign.

Total Sales – The total dollar amount of the sales that you’ve achieved.

EPC – Earnings Per Clicks. Especially if you’re running a search campaign, this will tell you exactly how much you’ve earned from your campaigns based upon each individual click.

Payout – The payout that you will receive for each actionable transaction.

Total – How much you’ve made from each campaign that you’re running, as well as the grand total for the period that you’ve requested in your report. That number should be big and growing!

We hope that gives you a little perspective on the statistics and reporting functions that are available in your Adfinity publisher account. There are actually even more features available, but if you’re just looking to optimize some basic campaigns, this should be more than enough to get you started.

Have a great and profitable week!

Ringtone Affiliates: Adfinity Re-Launches RingScene.com

Are you looking for a hot ringtone offer that converts really well? Make sure you’re signed up to Adfinity and get in on the action with our exclusive RingScene offer!  Here’s the deal: The payouts are awesome (around $10+ per signup), and the conversion rate on qualified traffic is phenomenal. On the right traffic source, you can get up to 40% conversion rates.

As with most Adfinity offers, our objective is to make sure that your traffic gets monetized fast – so there’s only a 2 step process. The signup form is on the first landing page, with just a simple phone-entry submit field.

We’re also loading up even more ringtone offers as we’re writing this, so make sure to get signed up and start putting these offers to work for you!

eComXpo Adfinity Booth Winners Announced!

We’re still recovering from the eComXpo show last week – if you’ve sent any of us an email, rest assured, we will reply ASAP! We’re trying to make sure that all our publishers are getting the full service they expect and deserve and will be working on touching base with everyone over the next few weeks and months.

We’re also here to announce the winners of our mega giveaways from eCom. So, without further hesitation…

Logitech MX Revolution Mouse #1: Juan from CardOffers.com!

Logitech MX Revolution Mouse #2: Christy from Edmunds.com!

Logitech MX Revolution Mouse #3: Randall from 14th Colony!

The 80 gig video iPod was won by Amy from MadeBig.com!

… and the winner of the Nintendo Wii is Nicholas from Memolink!

Congratulations to all our winners, and thanks so much for visiting our booth. To everyone that didn’t win that time around – don’t worry! We’ve got plenty more contests and bonuses just around the corner to help you earn sweet prizes and cold hard cash. Wait… Why is cash always cold and hard? Paper isn’t usually “hard”, but that’s what the money we’re giving away is. So, to recap, we’re going to be giving away room temperature, fairly flexible cash!

Adfinity becomes the 5th most visited booth at eCom

Well, we’ve now wrapped up our first eComXpo, and all in all it was a great success. We managed to receive a piece of acclaim by being one of the top 5 most visited booths at the show. The turnout was excellent, and we look forward to welcoming all our new publishers and advertisers over the coming weeks. Of course, if you have any questions as a new Adfinity partner, we welcome your email – you can find out your specific affiliate manager when you’re logged in, or by default you can email support@adfinity.com with your questions.

Our award winners for our Logitech mice, Video iPod, and Nintendo Wii will be announced shortly. Thanks again for a great virtual tradeshow! If you’re interested in meeting some of our team members in person, we’ll be at Ad:Tech San Francisco next month. Look forward to meeting you there!

Adfinity Becomes a No-Download Network

Hey all,

Hope you’re having a great Thursday! We’re going to be giving you an eComXpo wrap up in the near future, but for the time being we wanted to take a moment to announce another exciting change here at Adfinity.com. We’ve decided, in the interests of protecting both affiliates and advertiser relationships, as well as the end consumer that we ultimately all serve, to become a no-download network. That means Adfinity will not be promoting or distributing offers that include toolbars, adware downloads, or anything that might be interpreted as parasiteware or similar product.

The reason we’ve made this change is two-fold. For one, we want to focus our energies on high quality CPA and CPL offers, and frankly downloads just don’t fit in to that model. Downloads and tool bars add a level of maintenance and frustration with all parties involved, because the tracking is slightly different and the monetization model is different as well. The second reason is that we want to provide only high-quality offers that consumers truly want and desire. In too many instances, there are stories of toolbar downloads in the dark alleys of the internet. Ben Edelman is a watchdog of the industry, and has proven time and time again that there are just too many gray areas, for advertiser, affiliate, and consumer alike.

With this new change in mind, please note that we are discontinuing both our screen saver offer as well as our joke tool bar download. Affiliates currently running those offers will be notified individually about the change (truth be told, this does not affect many of our publishers). If you have any questions about this change, please contact Dave@Adfinity.com or add your comments below. We’re working hard to create the best affiliate network on the planet, and hope that this change highlights our dedication to our publishers, advertisers, and the consumers we serve.

NEW! 100+ Offers, Categories, and Design

Wow, this has been an incredible week for us here! Not only are we dropping the eComXpo like it’s hot, but we’ve also been working at a fever pitch to continue to add value to the network.

New Offers

That’s right, we’ve got some stellar new offers across quite a few categories for you to try out.  Some of the new digs include Long Term Care Insurance, which pays out over $8 per lead (with a fast-act lead form and remarkable conversions), as well as a ton of new Email and Zip Submit campaigns.

New Categorization

Okay, okay, okay. We know categorization was a long time coming – but it’s here now so – hooray! We’ve got everything sorted out on a variety of verticals, with categories like “Dating/Singles”, “Automotive”, “Ringtones / Mobile / SMS”, etc… Plus we also have categories based on what types of traffic you can run through it, such as “Can be Incentivized” and “Adfinity Exclusives”. Make sure to surf through and check out the new categories, and as always let us know what you think.

New Design

You’ve probably noticed that we switched from blue to red, and so far we’ve gotten some great response from advertisers and affiliates alike. Let us know if you’ve got a suggestion for that homepage stock-photo spot, because we can’t seem to make up our minds.

Anyways, we’re all out at eCom, so if you happen to be in the neighborhood, please stop by and say hello! Oh, did we mention that we’re giving away a Nintendo Wii, an 80gig Video iPod, and 3 Logitech Cordless Mice?

Earn baby, earn!