Affiliate Summit West 2012, Wicked Cool!

I always am amazed when I’m at the Affiliate Summits and people hear me talk and just automatically go “Oh you’re from BAHston (*read Boston)!” Now to be honest I am from about 40 minutes west of Boston, and the accent I have sounds actually nothing like someone from the city depths of Boston, Massachusetts. I actually also make fun of the REAL Boston accent because it is fairly humorous to me. I am aware that I speak fairly crude, swear a lot, and do occasionally miss the letter ‘R’ when speaking but its a Central Massachusetts everyone, not Boston!

Ok now that we are done making fun of my wannabe Boston accent, how was the show? Well pretty much AWESOME!

This was my first time ever going to Las Vegas and I loved every bit of it. My friends and my wife will be the first to tell you I suffer from a moderate gambling problem. Not that I have ever bet more than I could afford to lose, I just am absolutely in love with everything about a Casino. I get such a rush being surrounded by the people all hoping to make their dreams come true and living dangerously with the thoughts that they might lose it all!

Travel

I booked my flight almost the day after Affiliate Summit East 2011 in New York. I was traveling out of Manchester, NH to Las Vegas, NV on Saturday the 7th. I flew Continental airlines round trip here which was overall pretty shitty. I had actually ran into a family member who had two $200 certificates for Continental and gave them to me. This is the sole reason I picked them… Booked one way flights with each gift cert. Still got hit for some bullshit $25 bag fee each way, I knew in advance of this, just thought it was complete BS still.

As usual I waited until like 4 days before I left to book a hotel and all the good places were sold out for Sat/Sun decent rates. To make matters worse the Consumer Electronics Show was in Vegas starting the 10th so hotels got really expensive! I was contemplating staying at a nice 5 star and then changing my room starting Monday. In the end I just booked via Hotwire for the FABULOUS Hooters Hotel & Casino. It ended up costing $76 a night for a 3 Star hotel.

Now this place was exactly as expected. Cheesy as fuck. However it did have a small casino below my room and I was in my room for a solid 4 hours a night to sleep and thats about it.

When I got back to Vegas I think I will definitely try and book in advance to stay at the main conference hotel but overall I didn’t experience any problem at all with this location. Several times I opted to walk there to get some much needed exercise and it was directly across from the MGM. It was definitely more than acceptable for the price. I als0 ran into tons of other affiliates staying there (It is normally like $22 a night but was along the lines of $350 a night during CES).

On the way home on the 11th I ended up sitting next to an awesome guy from EWA Network who works out of London, so that was a really interesting flight. However on the connecting flight out of Newark we got delayed for 4 hours and then around 12:30AM in the morning were told the flight was cancelled. They put me in a hotel for the night. Overall it sucked, I was exhausted and just wanted to be home. To make matters worse at 6:40 AM I was back at the airport checking into security and realized I left my wedding ring on the sink at the hotel…now that really sucked!

Conference

The extent of my actual interaction with the conference consisted of this: Trade Show Floor walk through and closing Key Note. That was it. The tradeshow floor was great! It was much larger than in New York with more space to walk and nice tables all around to sit down if you had to chat with someone. I got a chance to stop by some of my favorite affiliate networks, see some new ones, and visit a bunch of my affiliate friends!

I had previously saw on Twitter that the Peerfly affiliate network was doing a little contest if you were wearing one of their shirts that they have been giving away for the last few Affiliate Summits. I rocked my ASE11 shirt they gave me in New York and stopped by to say hi to Luke my affiliate manager over there. They all loved that I was rocking a shirt and had me pull a card from a deck to try and win a $100 Caesar’s Palace chip. Unfortunately I pulled a ’7′ which one me a whole $1 chip! I swung down to the roulette table and tossed it on Lucky #7. It hit scoring me an additional $35 on top of the $70 I won with my money. Thanks Peerfly!

 

The actual keynote from Shoemoney was pretty funny. One of the things I have always struggled in affiliate marketing with is the fact that I push some pretty messed up CPA offers sometimes. It really questions my morals in some niches. He had a few key points for us folks who “Exploit people’s passions for money”. This is only the 2nd keynote I have ever been able to attend and it was entertaining, not overdrawn out, and overall great.

The funny thing was I had went to the Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas convention center earlier that day (courtesy of my friend Blake!!) and forgot my ASW pass at the hotel. They actually rejected me at the door for the keynote. I went downstairs and they wanted $50 for a new pass print out but after declining to pay and stating that I would rather just go downstairs and gamble more they decided to print me a freebie.

Parties and Meetups

The party situation in Vegas was CRAZY! Every night had multiple things to do! Sunday I hit up the AffPlaybook Mastermind session at the Palms Place penthouse. The event was great as always and more millionaires were probably groomed at that event than anything else during the show.

After the meetup David Ford from AffPlaybook picked up a limo for a bunch of us to swing up to the Adsimilis meetup at the hangover suite at Caesar’s Palace.

At the Adimilis meetup I got to briefly meet the whole crew, including my awesome AM Naomi, and reconnect with some friends I haven’t seen in a while! Please notice the classic Mike Chiasson maneuver of not planning for the night and walking around all night in a lame Red Sox t-shirt.

 

After the Adsimilis party a bunch of us grabbed some cabs and headed back to the Palms Place for the AffPlaybook meetup. A couple things to note, the AffPlaybook meetups have been GOLD for me. Its always been so relaxed that its nothing to jump into a conversion with new people. If you are a member of the forum its even more effective of a networking event because you can try and find who is who. If you are interested in signing up for the forum check out AffPlaybook.com!  Also as it turns out…I still suck at pool. Jeremiah Cooper from Wolf Storm Media kicked my ass with like 3 of my balls left on the table. That was kind of rough. Fortunately for me he declined my original offer of playing for $100 a ball.

 

The next night I was invited out to dinner by Vito and Flo from CPA Tank at the Old Homestead Steakhouse in Caesar’s Palace. Vito had a great crew of people going out to dinner. I got to meet a bunch of new faces and see some familiar ones! I even got to catch up with my account manager over at Traffic Vance, Jonathan Vogel, who convinced me to reinstall Starcraft II so that we can go dominate the gaming niche haha. Big thanks to Vito and CPA Tank for the good times and good eats!

 

 

After the amazing dinner was finished up I met up with my friends Brian Evans and Sam Rusani to hit up the Affiliate Fight Night at Xtreme Couture MMA Gym by Clickbooth! We were all PUMPED for it!

Although the venue was awesome the ultimate lure of this party was the fighting, and that fell short. I was expecting an amateur fight for sure, but this was not only amateur, but unsanctioned gym friends sparring was a more accurate statement. We stayed for the firs fight where the guys were wearing the heavier padding gloves and not doing any grappling. It was a one sided fight and although having exciting moments it was lackluster at best.

Props to Clickbooth for picking such a unique venue, but we left after the first fight and some of us headed over to the Ads4Dough, Dough4Hoes party.

This party was out of control. Unfortunately for us we got there so late there were no tables left and we had to settle for the typical white guy standing against the wall maneuver. Plenty of eye candy there and I even caught up with a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while. There were so many people at this meetup I could only imagine the bill. Big thanks to Jason and the A4D team for the drinks!

What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas!

There were countless things that happened that really don’t need to be repeated on the blog. Those of you involved, know what I mean!!

Unfortunately I feel like some of my connections might stay in Vegas as well. A lot of the coolest guys I met didn’t have cards on them so I picked up their first name as we chilled at an event but no idea how to reconnect. If I met you in Vegas feel free to friend me on Facebook or hit me up via email or twitter!

Special thanks to all my friends who I met up with that shared their industry news and tips with me through out the show! See everyone in New York?!?

 

New Prosper 1.7 Proves 7% Faster

After reading CTR Tard’s quick review of the new release of Prosper 1.7.2 (view here) I really wanted to get my hands on it. I previously did a case study showing the speed of my Prosper202 redirects vs Tracking202 and the Bevo Media platform. You can view those results here. With 1.7.2 I was really excited to see exactly how much faster my server redirects would be once I cleared the click data. For anyone who doesn’t know, Prosper202 retains a record of all kinds of information for you to perform past queries on old information. It is widely believed that this excess of information kills your server speeds. I’ve spoken to a few internet marketers who preach that they wipe their click database tables on a weekly basis otherwise their ‘server crawls’. Mind you some of these people are doing hundreds of thousands of clicks a day, but some were definitely in the sub 1,000 a day and still claim the speed bonuses.

Testing Time!

I used the same platform and same landing page as before to perform the tests. All prosper tests were performed on a low duty dedicated server. I was really only interested in viewing the Prosper202 stats but I figured it would be nice to compare to another platform’s speed as well. Even though the results show one way, I still opt to continue to use Prosper as my primary tracking platform.

Prosper 1.6 vs. Bevo Media

Prosper 1.7 (No Click Data Removed) vs. Bevo Media

Prosper 1.7 (ALL Click Data Removed) vs. Bevo Media

All in all you can see the Prosper 1.7 with click data removed is significantly faster. It topped my original benchmark by just under 7%. If you are focusing on redirect speeds I would recommend an immediate upgrade as the standard upgrade alone also showed a 6% increase in speed.

I’ve never cleared my Prosper202 click data before, some currently do it manually. It reported about 250MB of click data on this install. I was really thinking that it was time for me to wipe the SQL database and just refresh to really get my snappy redirects back, however in the end it seems they were just as snappy as ever and the click data deletion might not be as big of a deal as we all suspected. I still appreciate them adding it in though!

Anyone else get a chance to try it out yet?

What Should I Be For Halloween 2011?

With October already on its way I am in full Halloween mode already. All my email newsletters have been themed for the big scarefest that is October 31st. But one thing is still up in the air, that is what I’m going to be for Halloween this year.

Now I HATE spending money on a costume. I would much rather build my own, it shows creativity and usually some uniqueness as compared to having the same exact costume everyone else has. Unfortunately, being so trendy, I typically end up having the same diggs as someone else at a party who bought a mainstream costume.

Let’s Recap Past Years

Halloween 2006: Market Basket Zombie! Basically threw paint over my sweet Meat Dept. uniform.

Halloween 2005: Vampire Mike...lipstick...naw, cherry chapstick!

This Year

Alright so you can see the assortment of finely crafted antics of years’ past. So far this year I am torn between several but am completely open for suggestions.

The top contenders are:

Or…

So what does everyone think? I am open for anything!!

PPV RON Traffic Still Proves Useless

The other day cleaning out my email I saw an email from DirectCPV saying that they had RON (Run of Network) traffic available with their intersitial popups at $4 per thousand views. Thats more than 50% off standard pops so I figured it would be good for a quick test. I had a few hundred bucks sitting in my Direct CPV account and thought it might make some use of it since I don’t run too much traffic with them anymore.

I’ve never worked with RON before but really heard nothing but bad news about it. Its essentially untargetted traffic that is ‘left over’ because no one else wants it. Since its so random you really can’t get too complex with what offers to pitch. I decided I would do the most logical thing and completely throw shit at the wall and see what stuck. I was going to write a fancy script to rotate in all kinds of banners and links but then saw a link on Luke Kling’s blog about Peerfly Banners.

 

Peerfly is an affiliate network that has a pretty HUGE inventory of various email submits. If you are interested in seeing what they got Click Here To Check Out Peerfly! What I really liked is that they have a few tools to help you out with campaigns. One of which was the Peerfly Banners program.

The Peerfly Banners program is basically a small portal that lets you select which offers you want to promote by selecting categories and then choosing what size banners you want. It then generates a javascript code that you can place on your page that will automatically rotate in all the selected category banners. This is AWESOME for placing on sites you aren’t sure how to monetize. You can easily let it run for a week and then see what people were clicking on and what was converting…INSTANT DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH!

I had the idea though to buy some cheap traffic and arbitrage it through this program. Now let me state that I have the nasty habbit of sharing ideas I get at like 3 AM after drinking excess amounts of soda at night on this blog. So sometimes things aren’t always pretty and clean, but the theory is there. I also have the problem that when things are small I typically don’t pay much attention to them. This campaign could’ve been optimized a bit more by adding some lander audio, some more PHP inserts, etc. Anyways, lets look at the landers I used!

What I basically did was offer 3 landers up. Each was pretty basic. The first one I wanted to play the numbers game, give the user a couple of choices. They basically got to pick one of the two banners and they also had an option to exit the page (Pssst. this was really another affiliate link trying to scavenge traffic). With the DirectCPV adware technology users can’t really ‘exit’ out of the page as easily as normal pop ups so I’ve had some REALLY good luck with ‘click here to exit’ options before. I am well aware that offering a user another option is typically not the best idea.

The second lander only had one 350×250 banner on it. I just wanted to try limiting the user’s options and see how that went.

The third lander had a single 425×600 banner on it and no Exit option at the bottom.

The Results

Well, after $52.43 in spend I should’ve received about 13,107 impressions. DirectCPV reported the full 13,107 where my tracking system picked up just over 8,000. So right off the bat I lost about 40% of my RON traffic. This could be due to multiple things but bottom line it was all wasted cash if I didn’t see any page loads from it. (*Note I was using Maxmind Geo Script and external Peerfly banners which may have slowed the page load down.)

The ‘Exit Option’ at the bottom of landers 1 & 2 had a 10% CTR on Lander 1, and a 7% CTR on Lander 2.

As far as click throughs on the actual offers go, I had 730 clicks (about 9% CTR!) spread over 180 different offers! I would say about 80% of those offers were email submits. Of those 730 clicks… ZERO Conversions!

I don’t attribute the 0 conversions to the network or the banner program, more simply the fact that most of the users were probably just trying to close the inner window popup and thought by clicking through it would. It was pretty common to see the same user clicking through on both offers when looking in my tracking logs.

What Sort of Traffic Was It?

When I was trying to do a bit of research I really couldn’t find too many people sharing details about RON traffic so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I ended up getting a ton of traffic from absolute shit sites that literally looked like they were bots just scraping keywords in different search engines. There was also a fair amount of porn in there lol. I extracted the full list of keywords and uploaded it in an excel list if you are interested in seeing them.

CLICK HERE To Download Direct CPV RON Traffic Keywords/URLs

Learn Anything?

Yeah, RON sucks. Seriously, 730 clicks over 150+ fucking email submits and not even one asshole entered an email address?!?

 

Offline Ads in a Train – Epic Fail

As much as I love online advertising I always get lured to offline advertising just because the competition is extremely weak. Calling the competition weak goes hand in hand to past posts of mine where I mention how most local agencies are pretty much retarded and just want your money.

Let’s take a look at the local train station, Alewife Station in Cambridge, MA. I usually hate driving into Boston so I will drive to this station, pay the $7 to park my car and then the $1.60 to take the train to where I need to go (Usually Red Sox Games!). I’ve noticed for a long time how they allow multiple forms of advertising in the train station. These vary from standup posters, cool complex ones that form a flipbook style animation on the walls as the train drives by them, and standard posters within the trains themselves.

The problem with offline ads is that they are NOT cheap! They are often times significantly more expensive than online methods, you can’t target demographics as well, and no guarantee people will see or react to your ads.

Prices to Advertise on the Train

The MBTA uses Titan advertising to manage their rail advertising. Titan shot me over some rough specs upon request and the prices were pretty crazy.

“Rates can range from $2,750 for an 11×28 orange line program to $11,200 for a market-wide 22×21 program [all 4-week net].”

According to their flyers the Orange Line of trains has a daily ridership of about 154,400. I’m sure that is an accurate statistic since there are turn style counters at every entrance/exit. Now they didn’t really clarify exactly how many 11×28 signs you got to put on the Orange Line (1 of 4 Major Subway Routes in Boston) but a little more investigating shows that there are about 436 total inventory advertising spots in the train station. Roughly looking through the areas it looks like only in the larger locations will you see the same ad in multiple areas. Probably an upsell to that particular client to fill the space.

I will assume that the 11×28 poster will have a total placement of ’1′ unit at each of these areas. In the lowest placement area you will be competing with at least 11 other advertisers for subway rider’s attention. Not to mention often times different entrances/exits may make your ad impossible to be seen anyways.

Taking that out of the calculation they claim that 154k riders each week. Now the frequency cap for your offline ad in an ideal situation here would be a maximum of about 2 (departure and re-arrival at the station). Unfortunately what is actually happening is the subway is home to MANY commuters so I would average their actual exposure for about 70% of the riders to be about 10 views per week. This obviously can hurt us advertisers. We can’t have our same ad being displayed to the same user 10 times  can we? Well of course those ever popular ‘brand advertisers’ think this is a bargain, but direct response, this sucks for us.

Anyways, let’s take that out of the equation. Let’s focus on just the standard 2 views per person in an ideal world. Here is the actual math of an ideal situation.

Well damn. $0.31 CPM actually isn’t too bad now is it? The problem being that this is an ideal case and in NO way is it real! I would be willing to bet that the actual people who view your advertisement is WAY less than 154k a day and to be realistic I would wager that approximately 15-20% of the viewers are all under the age of 18. Which is in many ways out of our target demographics. Realistically I would guesstimate that if we were looking to get unique viewers and over 18 demo that the actual CPM would be around $0.91.

Wow, now $0.91 that isn’t too different than the recommended CPM of Facebook for the 18+ Bostonian crowd as seen below:

Obviously the suggested $1.00-$1.76 is a little pricey. FB will still deliver CPM traffic well under those prices.

Well Maybe the Quality Is Better?!?

I asked myself the same question but lets be honest. The reason why online ads work so well is our Call To Action is so easily available. With offline ads your Call To Action is no longer a click away, but instead a ‘phone call’ a ‘request for more info’ a ‘scan this QR code’ or ‘Find us on Facebook’. Lets see what everyone else is doing for CTAs on the train.

The checking account one has a pretty good bribe on it. Some of them have ‘Pull Away’ information which is pretty cool (except that a few are excessively high in the air for most people). The gin ad is just brand advertising so whatever. However most of them had their call to action being a QR code. This was the advent of helping offline ads bridge the gap of mobile and online however on the trains and in the train station…market research SHOULD be your best friend.

I commend all these advertisers and their hard spent dollars but have one Crucial piece of information to share.

 

Conclusion

The advertising isn’t really as costly as the initial insertion orders would lead you to believe. Offline ads aren’t leveraged by many direct response marketers and there is huge room to grow this field. Most of the advertisers were either big brands looking for exposure or government funded groups (who clearly have money to burn) who must be looking to get their name out.

I think there is potential on railway advertising but definitely not using QR codes as your way to bring people online!