Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

As usual, there’s plenty of hype surrounding a new ad system that’s being released: The Twitter Ad System.  Considering Twitter is such a popular website you would think i’d probably be excited about it.  Quite honestly, I’m not.  I think it’s going to be a failboat for affiliates and i’m going to tell you why.

My buddy Jonathan Volk just wrote a post about Twitters Ad System so rather then rewording the details of the system i’m going to grab his breakdown and make some comments.  Read his post here.

“As we previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.”

Fail #1: I’m sure people do use search.twitter.com.  I even use it on rare occasion if I want to see what random people are saying about something.  The KEY word in the previous sentence is RARE though.  99% of my twitter use is either tweeting or looking at my lists and seeing what my friends are saying.  Considering a very large percent of twitter use is mobile as well, what is the percentage of the overall Twitter Population that is going to use Twitter Search?  My guess is that it’s low and that’s a straight up fail.  If this is the only way the advertising system is going to serve ads it’s actually kind of a joke because companies like Sponsored Tweets & Ad.ly will still thrive and be a MORE effective advertising method then Twitters own system.  Why would you let a parasite service take your revenue?  Makes no sense.

Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. The Times piece notes that companies could use this to combat negative tweets (they can place a positive tweet at the top of the page)

OK, I would expect disclosure.  If a company thinks that an ad at the top of the search results is going to combat negative tweets, that’s a company that just doesn’t get social media.  The only way to combat negativity in social media is to FIX THE PROBLEM.  In addition, most people trust their peers so if a peer they are following tweets negatively about a company, they are going to see it in their stream.  This ad would never reach their stream because again they aren’t using search.twitter.com.

A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.

Quality Score?  Uggghhh.  Go ahead and piss off your advertisers before they even start advertising with you.

One ad will be shown at a time

Wowzerz…I’m impressed.

Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo

This doesn’t surprise me at all.  My guess is that they went after these types of advertisers because they don’t really care about ROI.  By taking on “branding” (ie: immeasurable) advertisers they could avoid negative reviews like this one for a while.

Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets

No real comment here but branding campaigns do normally run CPM.

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Facebook Ads were a huge win for affiliates and self serve advertisers.  We all know that although their ad approval team is recruited from the monkey cage at the San Diego Zoo, they do have an awesome advertising offering.  Let’s give some thought as to what makes it awesome.  It’s really a pretty simple answer: insane targeting.  You can target demographics, workplace as well as interests.  All of this targeting makes figuring out ways to appeal to these users gosh darn easy.  Facebook users SELF IDENTIFY themselves and that’s key.

This is the major problem with Twitter Ads.  Their is no self identification on Twitter.  This is what’s going to make it hard to ever have effective in-stream advertising run by Twitter.  You can argue that they will come up with some sophisticated algorithm that can detect themes in a persons overall tweets and serve ads to those themes but I don’t think it will work.  Let’s say I tweet 10 times and this is what I say.

1) I just started a new Facebook Campaign and all Ads were denied
2) I just took a massive dump and there was corn in it
3) The trees outside are blooming
4) My car smells like rotten milk
5) Check out this article http://www.link.com
6) Weekend is almost here
7) Jersey Shore was hilarious last night
8 ) Class is not determined by what you spend
9) Just went to Ikea
10) My foot just fell off

It’s going to be very hard to create a theme out of random tweets and plenty of Twitter users tweet randomly.

What are your thoughts?  Do you think the Twitter Ad System (as it stands) is going to be effective?  Let’s discuss!

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There seems to be this new trend going around where affiliate networks want to be exclusive.

Former affiliate networks that took just about anyone, are trying to make this big push to get rid of any affiliates who are currently non-performing (ie. haven’t produced $x,xxx in the last x months).

This makes ZERO sense to me.

Pruning low QUALITY affiliates makes sense.  Affiliate networks can’t afford fraudulent affiliates.  It ruins their relationships with advertisers.  Having some kind of quality metric makes sense.

I think that some affiliate networks are losing site of the fact that they need affiliates.  Just because an affiliate hasn’t performed in the last x number of months or ever for that matter doesn’t mean anything.  An affiliate can be doing $100,000/month with one affiliate network and $0/month with another (numbers for demonstration purposes only).  Does that mean they aren’t a big affiliate?  Realizing that they are, why wouldn’t you want them to have an account at your network?  Just because they aren’t working with you now, doesn’t mean they aren’t ever going to.

Now, you can argue that having crap loads of non-performing affiliates takes up too many resources.  If an affiliate is taking up an excessive amount of an affiliate managers time AND not sending any traffic then you have an argument.  In that case getting rid of the affiliate makes sense.  I doubt this is the case in most instances, since I don’t think most affiliates doing no business with an affiliate manager are going to be wasting much of their time.

I personally am signed up with quite a few affiliate networks that I do no business with.  I like to have an account so that if I need an offer or see something I like, I can be ready to run with them.  I’m guessing that other affiliates do the same thing.

Unless it’s based on a quality issue, I think that affiliate networks that are booting affiliates for non performance are making a really bad business move.

What do you think?

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I like to maintain minimal advertising on AdHustler.com.  I respect my readers enough not to bombard you with tons of crappy offers like many affiliate bloggers do.  To be quite honest, i receive at least a few advertising offers for this blog each week and I turn most of them down.  Tatto Media approached me with an interesting proposal that is win/win for everyone.

The Back Story: Mike from Tatto Media has been a supporter of this blog (especially the case studies) since I started it.  He has sent a lot of his new affiliates to check out my case studies and has thrown a lot of support my way.  His network (Tatto) has always been very private.  The extent of their promotion has been some really classy parties/cocktail hours at Ad Tech and other conferences.  Tatto has decided that they want to open up their network to more affiliates and approached me with an interesting proposal.

The Proposal: Tatto knows that I don’t like to whore out AdHustler.com and they also know that case studies are interesting and helpful.  Tatto has offered to donate $25 for each approved affiliate into their network, for case studies on AdHustler.com.  I have agreed to take this money and do some new case studies that will be totally transparent.  Whether the case study fails or succeeds, i will post the ads, landing pages, offers, revenue etc.  You as the reader benefit with new transparent case studies funded by Tatto Media & you get to work with a great affiliate network.

About Tatto: Tatto is a private affiliate network with some really exclusive offers and a history of coming up with “the next big thing.”  Tatto Media was instrumental in bringing mobile offers mainstream and own some of the biggest winners in mobile.  They also own a lot of other exclusive offers in a variety of niches.  Tatto tests their offers in house to ensure they perform.  Tatto Media has a propietory tracking system that is really clean, easy to use and accurate (i’ve used it myself).  Sign up for Tatto Media, check out their offers and if you see something you like, give it a try.

Sign Up For Tatto Media – Get AdHustler.com $25 Towards Public Case Studies

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If you’ve ever been an affiliate I can guarantee you’ve said to yourself  “SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS OFFER!”  It usually comes after trying a whole bunch of different ways to promote an offer that you were convinced were going to work but didn’t.  So what’s wrong with the offer?  Is it tracking?  Is it being scrubbed or shaved?  Is there something less sinister going on?

It’s a hard question to answer.  The first step an affiliate usually takes is to contact their dumbass affiliate manager and ask them “What’s wrong with this offer?”  More likely then not the affiliate manager will say something to the effect of “Looks ok across the board.”  Gee that was a lot of help!  It puts the burden back on you and makes you feel like a retard because if everyone else is converting the offer, why can’t I?

Now, I’m not saying your not a retard, because you very well may be.  All I know is that I’m not.  This lead me to a little strategy for proving to myself, that it’s not me, it’s the offer, and having some evidence to back it up.

If you’re in this prediciment you are already throwing away money because your running traffic (paid presumably) to an offer that isn’t converting.  If you are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED it should be, heres what you do: RIP THE LEAD GEN PAGE AND COLLECT THE LEADS YOURSELF!

If you have any knowledge of creating a landing page, this is dead simple.

1) Take a screenshot of the advertisers landing page.
2) pop a form on it that looks like the advertisers original form.
3) Turn your traffic on and collect any leads that come through.
4) Compare conversions against the stats you have collected on the affiliate network.

This provides you with unbiased information about how the offer is performing.  If you had a 1% conversion rate on the affiliate network, and a 15% conversion rate when you collected the leads yourself, you know something is wrong with the offer.  You can do a few things with this information.  You can provide it to the affiliate network so they have some information to back up your claims that the offer is fishy.  The affiliate network, may or may not care.  It depends on who youre dealing with.  If you can’t get an amicable resolution or answer as to why the difference in conversion rates you can collect the information yourself and monetize it privately (Of course without infringing on the original advertisers copyrights).

Stop wondering why your offer isn’t converting, and start adding this method to your testing aresnal.

(Disclaimer: This Works On Lead Generation Offers Only, Not Sales Based, Although With A Lot More Work It Could Be Used For Sales Based As Well)

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