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Earlier this morning I Tweeted:

What do @argos_online @bitdefender @ladbrokes & @shutterstock have in common? All coming to @amdays London in 6 days. bit.ly/AMDLon

— Geno Prussakov (@ePrussakov) May 9, 2013

Businesses large and small — from all kinds of verticals (retail, hospitality, software, media, finance, energy, etc) –  are sending their marketing managers to the inaugural European Affiliate Management Days next week.

Our first European conference will be held in London on May 15-16, 2013 [more here].

It will be a truly pan-European conference. Delegates from all over the Old World have already registered to attend. Here’s a sample (alphabetical) list of the top 10 countries (based on the number of attendees from various countries):

• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Germany
• Hungary
• Finland
• Latvia
• Luxembourg
• Romania
• Russia
• United Kingdom

The conference is coming up next week, but there is still time to register. Register today to save £100.00 on your pass (versus the onsite price). And keep in mind, too, that each additional attendee from the same company registered at the same time receives an extra £100.00 off.

Yesterday evening I have finished uploading all photos taken by photographers who were working at Affiliate Management Days San Francisco 2013 last week. Here’s the final count:

• Trisha Lyn Fawver – 11 photos (+ 73 here)
• Murray Newlands – 55 photos
• Steve Hall – 73 photos
• Geno Prussakov – 410 photos

The 549 photographs that were uploaded to Affiliate Management Days Facebook albums may all be viewed here, or by clicking the screenshot below.

Did you know that Affiliate Management Days London 2013, our inaugural European conference, is coming up in just 3 weeks? During this unique conference you will be able to:

• Hear experts dissect such vital topics as affiliate recruitment, communication, combating fraud, affiliate analytics, tracking and multi-channel attribution, m-commerce, international affiliate marketing, and much more.
• Discuss and find solutions to your most pressing professional challenges.
• Discover new technologies and developments to help you maximize the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing.
• Network with colleagues from around the globe.
• Attend receptions, and just enjoy London.

You’ll hear from such companies as IAB UK, Econsultancy, TagMan, Argos, all Europe’s major affiliate networks, as well as such affiliate marketing stars as Matthew Wood, Jason Spievak, Adam Riemer, Jim Banks, and many others [see the agenda here]. It is going to be one amazing show!

Whether you are a digital marketing manager, consultant, affiliate programme manager, researcher, affiliate network rep, or vendor who caters to the affiliate management market, you’ll have a blast. Register today!

In case you have missed our San Francisco 2013 show, which ended just two days ago, do know — you were missed too. We’ve had a great time, full of high-class content and networking opportunities. Don’t take my word for it — listen to what the conference’s attendees say:

@eprussakov A great experience. Very happy to have attended, spoken, and learned so much in just a couple of days.

— BrandVerity (@brandverity) April 17, 2013

We want to thank @eprussakov for a great time at #AMDays in SF!

— AccelerationPartners (@accelerationpar) April 18, 2013

My #AMDays wrap up: Great time, learned a ton, met many cool peeps. Thanks @eprussakov + team for a solid event. Cheers!

— Hunter Boyle (@hunterboyle) April 19, 2013

@eprussakovBig Thanks to all the folks who attended #AMDays! I enjoyed meeting & getting insight from the trenches of affiliate marketing

— David M. Adler, Esq. (@adlerlaw) April 19, 2013

@sandmangirl and @eprussakov thank you for the retweets and reading! Geno it was good to see you at #AMDays in SF. Thank you for experience!

— djambazov (@djambazov) April 19, 2013

Our inaugural European show is less than 4 weeks away. It takes place in London, England and you may learn more about it here. It’s not too late to register.

This is a live blog post from AMDays presented by Lisa Picarille.

Types of Trends

• Pop Culture – movies, music, fashion, technology, etc
• In the News – based on an events that take place or people that make headlines right now
• Celebrity, Personalities, people in the news – people the mean stream public are talking about
• Fads – these are more “out there” and not likely to last
• General – Design (Vintage, etc)

Spotting Trends

• Observing – TV, movies, music, magazines, language used in ads, people on the street, colours, behaviours, etc
• Personal Experience – what’s happening with your kids, friends, family
• Using Search – actively seeking trends and keywords
• Social media, Crowd sourcing
• Listening to your affiliates

Let Affiliates Help!

• Affiliates reach audiences you might not have access too
• Affiliates have loyal audiences
• Affiliates have built in trust and authority
• Affiliates are seeing things you might miss
• Affiliates specialize in niche topics
• Affiliates let you experiment without spending lots of money on campaigns
• Affiliates can expand your brand via social media.

Encouraging Affiliate Participation

• Include info in newsletter about subjects or trends you are looking into
• Making trend discussions part of the regular talks / communications with affiliates
• Don’t auto approve affiliates
• Create a calendar for affiliates about upcoming things that are trending or seasonal trends
• Ask affiliates to submit ideas news trends
• Offer special incentives for really cool ideas or base it on performance
• Run contests among affiliates to come up with ideas for quick campaigns based on trends or fads.

Monetizing Trends

• Content – Microsites vs niche sites, specific pages, blogs, etc
• Offers – where to find offers that are related to trends
• Using Search – how to get ranked for trends

Measuring for ROI

• Set expectations
• Determine what success is for your business (more likes, more fan, more revenue, larger order value)
• Select specific affiliates so you can more closely monitor them
• Know your numbers

Be aware of what’s happening in your industry but be aware what’s happening in the general public that you can spin sales around, such as the World Cup in Brazil or the birth of the new King in England, and how you can leverage those trends through affiliates.

“Lies, damned lies and statistics” Mark Twain

This session does not focus on technology but rather how the human works.  Instead it focuses on how to be a great analyst versus how to use a new tool. Right away Jim had my attention with his magnetic personality and excitement on the subject.  I knew this was not going to be a boring statistical presentation.

How to be a great analyst you need to master these skills

• Understand the raw material: The worst thing you can have is really smart people making smart decisions on bad data
• Understand the tools: You have to understand what all the tools do for you and how they will solve your problems
• Understand the problem to be solved.
  • We have to have a specific problem that everyone agrees upon and has a specific timeline
  • Everyone has to be onboard from upper management to the implementer.
  • There are only 3 business goals: raise revenue, save time and  customer satisfaction
  • Understand the art of analysis (the wonderful world of puzzles)
    • Look for anomalies (errors and omissions, complaints, spikes & troughs, oddities.  Things that makes you think ”hum that is funny”)
    • Segmentation is key.  If you only take an average of anything is always wrong.
    • Work backwards.  Look at that people who are completing the call to action and see how they got there.  From there you can find out how to find more of them.
    • Microconversions are essential.  It is about getting the users to do one more click.
    • Avoid the traps: if you torture statistics you can get it to say whatever you want it to say like .  Correlation is not causation.
    • At the end you need to have intelligence and intuition.  For the intuition, you need to tone it down..day dream, relax
    • Create a representation of reality through a model. All models are wrong, some models are useful – George Box.  Whatever you figure out will change.  They have a limited lifespan.
    • Keep the model as simple as possible.

• Understand the art of communication
  • Have an opinion, data to back it and a way to test it. Your opinion is your value!
  • Do not deliver reports, tell stories
  • Help individuals achieve goals.  What’s in it for me.
  • Don’t describe the data and be confident.  It’s about probability and trends.

I have always loved analytis and recomendations.  This session reaffirmed my passion.  Well and there is one more thing I learned.  According to Jim, if I review my data with a glass of wine, I will have better results.  Now that is a new tactic I plan to implement immediately.

This is a live blog post from Affiliate Management Days Conference presented by Amber Melhouse of Linkshare.

In 2012 Linkshare invested $100MM in Pinterest to help them grow internationally. In 2013 Linkshare launches “Know your Customer”: Mobile device specific tracking.

This is now – Use affiliate marketing to align your brand. Forester Research anticipates substantial growth and spend in the performance marketing space.

Good things can come from great partnerships. Know their demographic, Engage shoppers front he first click. Are immediately relevant tho your potential customers. Take care of their customers.

Where are your customers today? Average spends 3.2 Hours per day on social networks. Wish.com is an example of sites that leverage Facebook pages to provide new experiences and services. Luvocracy.com is another example of social platforms that achieve particular shopping experiences and results for consumers and social users.

Good partners can give you:

• Additional agreement with campaign specifics
• A Branded demo campaign
• Case study around similar campaign

150- number of times per day users check their smartphone. Consumers are adopting a solid model of mobile gifting. Boomerang (rang.com) is an example of one that handles brands beautifully, shares options used by recipients.  CoffeeTable.com – this is an app that allows you to download ideas they would like to see in your home.

GetThis.tv is an example of a community watching platform that allows you to watch and shop scene by scene on tv, and shop for any item in any episode. Anything you want to guy from the clothes, to the cars, to the colours on the walls, to the restaurants the people in the show were eating in, you can do that through this app.

In the future we are going to see:

• Multi-brand cart
• Shopping tourists – people who live overseas and shop online in the US (specifically in the Chinese and Russian markets) because they can pay less in the US.
• Hashtag Shopping – Chirpify – Sync your pay pal account with your twitter account. #Buy. They are moving the spontaneous shoppers to move even faster through social channels.
• Transactional Targeting
• 2nd Screen – shopping on a tablet even through they are sitting next to their computer or TV.

Where is your brand today?

Today – 130MM+ US Smartphone Users. We consider holiday shopping starting Oct 1st. If you don’t have mobile shopping in place yet, please make it a priority or you will miss the boat, again.

Take with you:

• Try everything yourself
• Ask partners for features.
• If you always do what you’ve done, you’ll always have what you’ve got.

Live Blogging Warning:  Grammatical and spelling errors may occur and be harmful to your English.

The words Super Affiliates make every affiliate managers heads perk up and stand attention.  I was lucky enough to sit in on a session at AM Days with a panel of top affiliates in the industry. On the panel were Tony Pantano of IM Wave, Shiva Kumar of The Find and Mike Allen of Shopping-Bargains.com.  The panel was skillfully modertated by Angel Djambazov, a successful OPM.  They shared your pet peeves, successes and predictions for the future.

Pet Peeves the Super Affiliates Have

Communication Is Key

• Always include contact information on sign up page. We want to know who to call, or at the very least a person’s real name. Need to know someone is behind the program
• If the information impacts the program, the affiliate needs to know..  Be more proactive.  Needs to be more than just the newsletter.  There are too many newsletter in the newsletter
• It’s about the relationship. At the end of the day, the better relationship you have with the affiliate, the better your program is going to run.  Have a relationship with your top 20 affiliates.  If you can’t contact one of your top affiliates, that is a sign of a bigger problem.  If something is urgent call, IM or text me.  I need to know
• Don’t use Stock Terms and conditions. It is permissible and acceptable to have set affiliates have different terms and conditions that are different than everyone else.  Be sure to update your terms and conditions with mobile since this is a changing marketplace.

Links

• If your site has been redesigned make sure all your affiliate links still work. This applies to datafeeds as well as links

Datafeeds

• The datafeed is up to date with no errors.  It has a huge impact on the affiliate and your customer.
• Be sure coupon codes are tested before they are sent out.
• Would be nice to know the exclusions so they can message that to the shopper.  It will help the affiliate pre sell the shopper.
• Make sure all your images are updated.
• Be specific in your datafeed.  Make sure it is easy to search
• Make sure price, landing page  url, product is available and image url is correct are the key components.  These must be right to be successful.
• Make sure the brand and qualifier is in the title.
•  Most affiliates use the title as the link so keep that in consideration.
• Most brands forget that their brand is important to include in the data feed. This also applies to keywords for example sneakers on a shoe site.  Look at it from the affiliate perspective.

Fight for your affiliate program

An affiliate wants a manager who is willing to fight for the program and the affiliate.  You need to stand up.  Affiliates are willing to come in to help but usually doesn’t get taken up on it. If you know your partners and will vouch for them, you can get them in to help you.

Whose customer is it?

These affiliates were more than willing to have customer data go in both directions.  Once again it is about relatiosnhips and showing value.

What merchants have you seen who do it right?

• Sierra Trading Club through their shopping cart, affiliate support, email
• Tommy Hilfiger  – often gives exclusive trackable even if there is no click
• A good affiliate is one that can have a dialogue.  Provides notice of promotions.

Did you get a lot of impact from Panda and Penguin

Mike:  The original Panda update was positive but subsequently it has been up and down.  They have refocused what is on a search results page.  It has been more challenging over the past few years but there are lots of other areas to innovate.  This is where the relationship side of affiliate marketing is even more important

Siva:  There was a great impact. All traffic comes from SEO.  As a result they were hit hard.  It took 12 months to recover.   He had to provide more added value.  It was a dramatic change.  Coupon sites don’t see it as much because Google

It is going to be harder since the screen size smaller now.  Organic traffic is only showing 2 results.  There is more emphasis on

Trends

Mobile was the top trend on all the affiliates’ minds. Shopping is moving to other devices.  35% of traffic is coming from a device.  Tablet is the highest percentage.  One problem is the website is not set up to handle devices.  Buttons is not set up for fingers versus mice.  Retailers should be prepared to  see 50% or more traffic coming devices over the holiday.  Is your site ready?  Do you track mobile sales? Unfortunately 20-25% of affiliate programs do not.

Adding to this complexity is the New Adwords Enhanced that does not differentiate between tablet and computers.  Your search engine marketing affiliates will not be able to differentiate between tablet and desktop traffic.  It will increase their traffic but not conversions.  As a result their budget will go down and so will your search engine presence.  Combine this with the fact that these devices only show 2 organic search results and retailers could be in trouble.

We need to lobby for the networks to improve their technology to keep up with the latest trends from Mozilla changes to consumers on mobile.

This panel was chocked full of great information.  I hope you found it as interesting and informative as I did.

Stephanie Robbins

Robbins Interactive, Inc

@robbinsint

http://robbinsinteractive.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/robbinsint

This is a live blog post from AMDays and is a session called coupon code compliance, presented by David Naffzigger of BrandVerity.

How coupon codes become a liability:

• Targeted coupons lead across channels
• Partner-specific codes proliferate
• Fake and fraudulent codes mislead users.

Path to Coupon Code Leakage:

CouponAwesome seeks to reward their users with the “Best Available” Coupon

>

Affiliate deduces commission in exchange for the exclusive discount

>

Exclusive code ends up on other coupon sites where the commission % is higher.

Impacts of Coupon Code Leakage

1. Destroy channel economics

• Offers created with targeted channel economics may become cost – prohibitive on top of an affiliate commission

2. Reduce partner incentives

• Poorly protected exclusive codes reduce value for coupon site

3. Create negative & costly customer experiences

• Customers may respond poorly to broken codes
• Customer support spends time placating customers.

Common Scenarios

• Friends and family codes
• Email-only codes
• First-time customer code
• Offline promotions
• Retention marketing
• Affiliate-specific codes

Warning Signs of Coupon Abuse

• Customer support complaints
• Existing affiliates identify abuse
• Disproportionate success of a coupon code (particularly channel00specific codes)
• High Failure rates on redemption

Affiliate compliance starts out with a well thought out affiliate agreement:

• Can affiliates post codes found outside of those provided by advertiser?  (typical rules – no)
• Will you pay commissions on non-affiliate codes? (typical rules – no)
• Distribution restrictions? (Typical rules – First  - party)
• What actions are the affiliate required to take upon discovery of a code? (typical rule – remove it).

Reactive Compliance

Cancel Code

• Impacts customers targeted for coupon
• Resulting customer service challenges
• Destroys promotion

Reverse/override commissions using unauthorized codes

• Removes all attribution from affiliate channel
• Creates unhappy loyalty customers
• Can create end of month conflict with affiliate partners

No Action

• Financial cost
• Promotional cost: Does this make it less likely your organization runs the promotions they want to?

Proactive Compliance

Manage the commissions and redemption rate of codes

• Non-commissionable codes
• User-specific codes (or limited use codes)
• Link-based discounts (no codes)

Similar challenges to reactive code management: unexpected consumer usage, continued code proliferation, etc.

Monitor and quickly request removal of unauthorized codes

• Requires consistent engagement & effort.

Techniques to Monitor

• Search!
• Many coupons are findable via search
• Google Alerts
• Twilerts (twitter alerts for tweets with codes)
• Automated systems.

If you would like a link to download a free coupon compliance report, please visit brandvertity.com/couponcompliance

Every year we produce a conference preview guide (which has been available for our U.S. April show since January 2013), and closer to the show we also make the full Conference Guide available to the public.

Today I would like to announce that the Conference Guide for Affiliate Management Days San Francisco 2013 is available for download. It is missing some of our newer sponsors (those who have joined us after the guide went to print) but they will be added in/on an addendum to the actual printed Guide. Click the screenshot below to download the Conference Guide now:

If you haven’t yet registered, there is still time to do so here. The show is just 4 days away!