Shopzilla’s free affiliate program - turning quality traffic into revenues

Posts Tagged ‘affiliate training’

How to use Top Search Results?

Monday, July 27th, 2009

The easiest way to create a Shopzilla unit is to use the Top Search Results. It’s the first item on Shopzilla’s dynamic assets list — and it’s the one that requires least work.

How does it work? Type the keyword into a search box, choose a department and a category…and voilà! You have a page-load of ads to choose from!

top-search-results-dynamic-banners

One unit can contain up to 5 different ads; you don’t have an influence over what products will be displayed, as these are (as the name suggests) Top Search Results - it’s up to you though what type of product the unit contains and what format the banner is in.

Serving an ad with several products can help you target the visitors who haven’t yet made up their minds on “what to buy” and are still researching.  That means that these sorts of units are likely to see the best results on a page with general information about the topic, like buying guides. What about single product pages? For these we suggest using Product Pods - ad units with a single product. However, as always we encourage our Publishers to test what works best for them! Whichever ad format you go for remember the golden rule: be relevant.

As always: if you have any questions, leave a comment or contact us using contact form!

How to use Shopzilla’s Product Pods?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Shopzilla dynamic banner featuring MacBook Pro

Bizrate dynamic banner featuring MacBook Pro

One of the biggest new trends in online advertising is behavioural targeting - a technique using information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behaviour, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them (Wikipedia). At  Shopzilla’s affiliate program we don’t use this technology ( yet ;-) ), but we give you Product Pods.

A Product Pod is a graphic ad for a product of your choice.  How does it work? Product Pods enable you to “target” your visitors, without their browsing history! It’s quite simple, really - if you write a review on the Apple MacBookPro, you could make an educated guess that your readers will be interested in seeing an Apple MacBookPro advertisement.This type of advertising not only gives you the opportunity to monetize your content, it also makes it more appealing!

Shopzilla dynamic product banner - 234x60

Shopzilla dynamic product banner - 234x60

Currently, we have 5 different formats of Product Pods. To explore this feature log in to your account and go to Get Content > Dynamic Assets > Product Pods.

Any questions? Give us a shout! We are happy to answer any of your queries.

Understanding Effectivness and Evaluating Success

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
How to measure the success of your affiliate programs

How to measure the success of your affiliate programs

Your statistics table provides you with very important information: how many impressions your ad received and how many clicks those ads generated. It divides clicks into impressions to tell you your clickthrough rate — the percentage of people who see the ad and click on it. The number of impressions your ads receive depends on the marketing of your site. The number of clicks the ads receive will depend on a whole load of other factors, including:

  • How closely does the subject of the ad match your content?
  • Where is the ad unit placed on the page?
  • How well is it optimized?
  • And even the type of users who visit your site (targeting)

Much of your job will always be to get all of these factors right to push your clickthrough rate up as high as possible.

After the clickthrough rate comes your most important piece of information: the amount you’ve actually earned.

The eCPC and eCPM can be a bit confusing. The eCPC is the amount of money you are “effectively” earning per click, and the eCPM is the amount that you are earning on average for every thousand impressions.

Since  Shopzilla’s affiliate program does not necessarily give you money every time someone clicks on one of your ads, you might think it’s difficult to compare it against other advertising programs, but actually it isn’t: AdSense reports, for example, will tell you also exactly how much you’re earning for each click on an ad unit. That’s when eCPC and your eCPM stats come to play:  those two values will enable you to weigh Shopzilla Publisher against other affiliate programs (regardless of whether it is CPC, CPA, CPM, etc), in this example compare it to AdSense.

It’s only when you’re able to compare like for like that you’ll know what to do. Shopzilla’s provision of the equivalent earnings in CPC and CPM rates make those comparisons much easier!

Read more about earning reports in our affiliate program.

Adding shopping content to your site

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Devising advertising strategy is one of the most difficult tasks that our Publishers face when joining our affiliate program.

Monetize your website - try adding shopping content

Monetize your website - try adding shopping content

Whether you already have a website or you are building one, the key is to plan the content you want to include. Think ahead of the topics you want to write about (adding category structure to your website/blog will not only  help you with your writing but will make it easier to navigate through your site!) and make sure that at least one of them is commercially oriented.

Example: you are a music buff and you own a website dedicated to classical music. Every day you write about your favourite concerts, arias…But how can you monetize this content? How about adding a category dedicated to albums/books reviews? or instruments? - topics that like-minded visitors of your website might be interested in reading and, most importantly, you can cash in on!

The key to creating good shopping content is relevancy: your ads have to be relevant to your content in order to spark interest in your visitors. Linking to LCD TVs on a cycling website is unlikely to bring you revenue, but the same ad placed on a DVD review site - it’s  a different story!

If you have any questions on how to implement our ads or you need advice on making your website/blog profitable, give us a shout!

Dynamic banners - colouring your ads

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Many of you wrote to us in the past asking about the possibility of changing the design of the banner ads to better match your sites. Here, at  Publisher, Shopzilla’s affiliate program, we understand the importance of ad optimization and how crucial it is for your earnings. That’s why, when creating the dynamic banners product, we made sure our affiliates would have full control over the appearance of the ads they created!

Now you can colour your ads!

Shopzilla's dynamic asstes - Now you can colour your ads!

Now you can customise your ad unit by changing:

  • ad border colour
  • image border colour
  • background colour
  • link colour (that includes before it’s clicked, after it’s clicked, when it’s clicked and when you hover over it…)
  • text colour
  • link target (you decide whether the link opens in a new window, leaving your site open).

How can you customise your ads in order to maximize your earnings? Try to make the ad fit your website’s design. At the same time don’t try to blend it in too much - your visitors should always be able to tell the difference between your own and sponsored content!

If you have any questions regarding this feature contact us and we’ll try to help!

Good luck!

How many ads are too many?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

If you are new to affiliate marketing you are probably asking yourself questions about how to make the most of your adverts?

Many believe that the answer is in sheer volume: “if you have enough banners on your site, someone must finally click on at least one?”. At Shopzilla Publisher UK, we don’t restrict the number of adverts you can place on your webpage, but we actively encourage our Publishers to optimize their ads thus limiting the displayed ads to the best performing ones!

Here are a few tips you might find helpful:

  • Remember, “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” is not always true when it comes to advertising so test different formats of the ads and find out what works best for you! How? With the use of ID-placements.
  • Try to “refresh” your banners ever so often. (It’s particularly important with static banners!). This way you have the opportunity to convert your returning visitors!
  • If you want to maximize the possibility of a click, think of embedding text links in your text. Using text links enables you to turn every reference to a product into revenue opportunity! Read more about how to use the Publisher program for custom text links.

As always, if you have any questions, please contact us using the contact form.

Your friendly Shopzilla Publisher Team

FTP data feed product - what’s it all about

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
Apply for Shopzilla XML data feed!

Apply for Shopzilla XML data feed!

If you are an experienced affiliate marketer and e-commerce is your daily bread think about utilizing our XML based FTP-data feed product! Shopzilla Publisher Program is offering a powerful tool enabling our e-commerce publishers to download BizRate.co.uk inventory (partly or whole) from one ftp location and display it on their own websites.

What do you need to do?

1. Consult your website developers. Incorporating XML feed takes some development effort - make sure that your website fulfils the requirements!

2. Apply for FTP-data feed product. Log in to your account and go to Data Feeds tab. Try to describe as well as possible how you will use our feed - this will speed up the assessment process.

3. Once we have accepted your application we will send you Shopzilla Mutual Nondisclosure Agreement - make sure you sign it and return it!

4. Once the paper work is out of your way and you have received your access key you can access our ftp location and test the feed.

Pretty straight forward, isn’t it? And remember, if you have any questions, contact Shopzilla Publisher Team!

Shopzilla Publisher @a4uexpo Europe 2009

Friday, April 24th, 2009
Shopzilla @ a4uexpo Europe Amsterdam 28-29 April 2009

Meet the Shopzilla Publisher @a4uexpo Europe

Jason and Diana of the Shopzilla Europe team will attend the a4uexpo Europe, which takes place at RAI Amsterdam on the 28th/29th April 2009.

On Tuesday, the 28th, the Shopzilla Europe team will take part in a session about XML product feeds in order to present merchants the effectiveness of clearly structured and standardised feeds, that are used at Shopzilla.

Beside this presentation the UK Shopzilla Publisher team will provide the attendees of a4uexpo with information about the brand new UK Shopzilla Publisher Program. We look forward to meeting the leaders of the European Affiliate scene.

Cash in on summer traffic with ‘Travel’ banners!

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
Cash in on summer traffic with our summer ads!*

Cash in on summer traffic with our summer ads!*

Hi Publishers!

Summer is approaching fast and it’s high time to start updating your site to cash in on benefits of seasonal traffic! If you are new to the affiliate marketing world here are few tips on how to improve your summer rankings and make money online:

1. Update your content using seasonal keywords - write a post about summer cycling holiday (for all those cycling clubs out there) or create a page dedicated to summer activities with kids (parenting sites) - whatever the topic, make sure it’s relevant to your site!

2. Make the current economical climate work to your advantage - target the users interested in budgeting this summer. Think of creating unique offering: list of cheap/ free things to do, places to go etc. See last year’s article from My Kind Of Mom - it’s a really good example of targeting local audience.

3. Customize your ads - displaying advertisement relevant to your content increases chances of converting your website’s users into shoppers! To cater to the demand for holiday related advertisement we created new range of  Stock Assets: Summer Holiday, On a Bike and Travel the World. You can find these in Stock Assets by Theme section of Get Content.

Good luck Publishers and we wish you record-breaking summer!

Publisher Team

*Image was resized. Actual size of the banner 160×600

Generating Clicks but Not Revenue

Friday, March 27th, 2009
Generating clicks but Not revenue

Generating clicks but NOT revenue

Looking at your reports you might have wondered why you have generated a lot of clicks, but you don’t see any revenue generated.

Being an affiliate using the Shopzilla Publisher Program, you make money online on a per-click basis. However, if your website visitors click on a Shopzilla ad on your website, but then, do not click on a product listed on a Shopzilla site, Shopzilla does not pay affiliates for those clicks. While this may occur from time-to-time, we encourage you consider your ‘effective Earnings per Click’ (eCPC) based on a meaningful sample of click activity (such as 500 – 1000 clicks).

Revenue generating activity occurs when the users you refer to Shopzilla redirect from product offer listings to the online retailer listing those product offers.

Learn more about earning reports or how to use placement IDs to see which ads perform the best.

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