I, too can now advertise on Google Adwords PPA

Well, not quite - I don’t advertise on Adwords CPC and one of the requirements to be eligible for beta-testing the PPA ads is that an advertiser must have generated atleast 500 conversions from their click campaigns in the past 30 days.

Nevertheless, Google has taken the PPA advertising platform global and is now allowing advertisers and publishers from around the world to participate in the CPA ad platform - which was limited to only US advertisers and publishers since first beta was announced three months ago. This would make google the primary and largest performance-based lead generation platform in many parts of the world.

This, once again, brings many affiliate marketers back to the question that was raised when the beta was first announced. “Will Google eat CJ and Linkshare alive?” Most affiliate marketers who have been in the industry long enough don’t think so. Google is on to something, but it isn’t quite affiliate marketing. they are an advertising company and adwords (CPC and CPA) is an advertising network - these are two different ballgames.

Sure, google could add to existing affiliate-marketing revenues, but the possibility of Adwords eating up a share of the existing affiliate-network pie is highly unlikely. The one way that google can really affect the affiliate networks of today, is if they do something about the newly acquired doubleclick and performics, like bringing the performics platform to all adsense publishers and adwords advertisers, making opening an affiliate program on performics as cost-effective as advertising on adwords. Such a thing, as of now, can’t be seen for quite some time in the future. Google seems to see Doubleclick as mostly a CPM based banner advertising platform. CJ and Linkshare are safe.

More on:

5 Star Blog, Cost Per News, Search Engine Journal, Inside adwords, Clickz

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How about an Ebay/Yahoo merger?

Few weeks ago, there was a mega-rumor started by the NY post that Microsoft is all set to buy Yahoo (this was later rubbished by Yahoo and many publications as what it was, a rumor). Then, yesterday, Jerry Yang, yahoo’s founder took over as it’s CEO and although he denied any plans for the sale of the internet giant, this has once again sparked the debate of yahoo’s potential sale or merger and many are speculating this would happen sooner than later.

eBay, however is rarely talked about as a company that could potentially buy or merge with yahoo — The weblog ebay strategies has posted some interesting reasons on why an eBay/Yahoo merger would make a lot of sense.

This fits in so many ways it really is a perfect match. This gets eBay back into Asia with ecommerce, it gives eBay/Y!/PayPal a Google Checkout option. The Y! toolbar+skype are a great desktop combo. Skype and YIM go well together. Y!’s graphical ads would come onto eBay and eBay sellers could buy them. Y!’s graphic ads could monetize Skype. Yahoo Stores is a great fit for eBay.

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The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce

Just got an email from Blogger and “Head Geek” of the Web 2.0 marketing company Capulet, Darren Barefoot about a video project he did with Elastic Path - which is a an e-commerce company that also hosts a fantastic blog about e-retail (that I am a long time subscriber of and have linked to often from here).

“The Crazy, Messed Up World of eCommerce” is a series of totally hilarious videos. “In a nutshell, the videos ask “what if real-world shopping was as cruel and difficult as buying online?” writes Darren in the email.

Here’s one of my favorite videos:

There are also three more equally funny episodes here and one new video is being posted each week. Enjoy!

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Customer Support 2.1 - ClixConnect.com

Mitch Cohen, entrepreneur and undergrad student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada sent me an email last week.

Mitch writes:

I’m a long-time reader and subscriber of Final Tag. I wanted to shoot an e-mail over to you to let you know what I’m up to - I thought you may be interested because I’ve leveraged many of the teachings from your blog in my new “Web 2.1″ endeavor

(LOL @ “teachings” hehe … I just talk here, never thought these posts would be perceived as teachings, hehe. But thanks for the ego-boost.) Cool! :D. It’s awesome to know ideas are being extracted out of the what is posted here!

That’s the first email of it’s kind I have seen in my mailbox since starting the blog a few months ago.

Anyway, Mitch and his friend - also an undergrad students at the McGill university have started a “customer support 2.1″ web company called ClixConnect.

Here’s why it’s cool:

The thing about online shopping is that there is no time constraint. Stores are open when you want to shop. The live chat feature that many sites offer is a great way to make online shoppers feel they are interacting with real people and persuades them to make their buying decisions quickly. In most cases, however, the live chat feature is only available when a store employee is online. If one wants to shop at say 2 AM in the morning, smaller shops will have no live chat, and probably, the sale will happen ultimately at a larger shop where instant customer support is available at that time.

Clicxconnect enables small to mid sized internet companies, specifically e-retailers, to offer 24/7/365 customer support on their websites. The idea behind how this is done is pretty simple and unique - You take care of the customer support while you are online. When you are offline, someone from the clixconnect call center will take over and offer customer support on your behalf. Pricing, apart from a monthly fee is based on the number of customer support minutes provided by the clixconnect call center. Plans (with a certain number of minutes included with each) start from $79/ month - which most smaller e-retailers can easily afford to spend in order to attract much better conversion ratios and very satisfied customers.

That was only customer support 2.0. Here’s the 2.1 part:

In Mitch’s own words:

hat’s half the innovation. The hugely innovative component of ClixConnect (and the part that for which we were truly inspired by your blog) is that we also have a new technology in our software which enables automated chat recommendations for customers, based upon the product they are viewing. So say someone is looking at a red t-shirt on a website, an automated chat window can appear recommending a blue pair of pants to them.

That’s the “if you like this, you may also like…” feature as seen on amazon.com, but done by a human - well, at least it will seem to the shopper that a human is making the product recommendations. if the customer replies back, a real human takes over over. Cool, eh? the only problem here may be a scenario where a shopper wants to quietly browse the store and “people” keep interrupting her by recommending stuff - because of which the shopper gets irritated and leaves the store. That’d be too much customer support and that’s equally bad as too little customer support.

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e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

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Selling ad spots on your website as hourly time slots

I was browsing techcrunch the other day, and noticed the ad of a sponsor there, Adicate - an online advertising network with a twist.

Adicate has taken the television advertising approach to the world of online advertising - they allow publishers to sell ad-spots on their websites - by the hour.

Adicate claims to already deliver as many as 35 million impressions each day using this model.

Their pitch is also pretty convincing. An email from them that I recieved upon requesting more information states:

One of the advantages with Adicate TimeAds is that advertisers can show their ads at their own prime time. This means that a medicine company can advertise for stimulants daytime, diet pills around dinnertime and sleeping aid at night time. This also gives the advertiser the unique opportunity to stand by waiting in the advertising period and interact with the customer immediately.

Now I don’t sell medicine, but this logic can potentially be applied to many other areas. For instance, advertising a job-site just before the end of the work day, etc.

I haven’t signed up with them as an advertiser (or publisher) yet, so it is still to be seen what kind of statistics and targeting they provide to advertisers - which can be a very crucial thing with such a system.

Nonetheless, looks like an interesting new concept and worth giving a try, although I am not too certain if adicate will be able to introduce and create the CPH (Cost Per Hour) advertising metric as a standard in online media.

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Linkshare Announces Webservices

This is one area where CJ can claim to have done it first.

Finally, Linkshare has announced today, a webservices offering (API?) for affiliates that they are calling the “Automated LinkGenerator”

From Their Email Announcement:

Automated LinkGenerator creates LinkShare affiliate links for any product on a merchant’s site that offers LinkGenerator. This new feature provides the same functionality as the LinkGenerator tool in the Individual Product Links interface, without having to log into the Affiliate Interface to get your links. This new tool does not replace Merchandiser (LinkShare’s datafeed), but will be helpful for getting direct links from merchants that do not offer Merchandiser feeds.

If you are interested in using the Automated LinkGenerator, please email us at linkgen_request@linkshare.com to have this new tool enabled. Once you are enabled, the Automated LinkGenerator will be located under the LinkShare Feed Synergy Services area of the Affiliate Interface. To create an Automated LinkGenerator link, you will use a REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services to request links for a given merchant URL. You will then send a URL from the merchant’s site to LinkShare using the specified link format (see the Automated LinkGenerator Help area).  The URL can be sent through a browser, a tool like wget or curl, or an automated script.  For each URL provided, LinkShare returns a click link.  You can request up to 1,000 links within an hour.

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Adsense Inside google maps

Read/write Web has a recent post that notes that google is soon (exact date unknown) going to integrate ads into Google Maps.

The good news for web publishers and developers is that Google would be sharing revenue from these ads to those sites and web-apps that have used Mapplets to create their google maps mashup.

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Google introduces the Tech B2B Knowledge Center

On the lines of the Retail knowledge center, google has just announced the launch of the “Tech B2B Knowledge Center” - a minisite with case studies, tips and tricks, ideas etc for B2B businesses that use Adwords as a medium of online advertising.

Google Tech B2B Knowledge Center 

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Godaddy to adopt registerfly’s domains

GoDaddy.com, the leading registration company for Internet addresses, has agreed to take over and manage more than 850,000 domain names belonging to customers of a troubled rival, officials announced Tuesday.

This is good news, I had a few domains stuck with registerfly that hopefully will be on godaddy soon. That would make much easier to transfer them to another registrar - which was very difficult to do with registerfly.

The full AP news story here

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