American Express Global Corporate Payment has appointed global performance network, Affiliate Window as their sole business provider for driving new corporate business leads.

This builds on American Express’ presence in the market, providing the brand with greater access to a variety of new business opportunities for acquisition through their integrated digital channels.

The Global Corporate Payment division of American Express looks forward to working with the vast range of publishers joined to Affiliate Window, to ensure its highly visible ‘Corporate Payments’ brand continues to grow in the United Kingdom.

Michelle Boxall, Head of Online Lead Generation at Affiliate Window says: “The team is pleased to add American Express to the growing list of clients embracing online lead generation to further source new customer leads. We are excited by the challenge to achieve a wider B2B reach, targeting key decision makers within organizations”.

The program with Affiliate Window will target select websites from the extensive publisher base to build strong relationships and drive quality leads that convert highly to new business sales.

A big part of the total mobile traffic in the US comes from tablets, which is something that many people tend to pay less attention to. Smartphones get most of the attention, which is reasonable, but tablets cannot be forgotten, especially considering the number of people who use them is still on the up. People who use tablets each have their own specific reasons for owning them, because they clearly are not a necessity such as the smartphone has become. So, how are people really using their tablets these days, and what are their opinions on the mobile marketing campaigns that they see every time they do use them? These questions were answered today in an eMarketer research article based on the opinions of tablet users regarding the news and the ads they see during their mobile experiences.

Let me first clear up what the article focuses on in particular, which is the tablet owners who use their devices to read the news. According to eMarketer, who reports information from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism;

Pew found that getting the news was the No. 2 activity conducted on tablets both on a daily and weekly basis, not far behind email. That put it ahead of popular entertainment activities like playing games or even using social networking sites. News-reading was also more popular on tablets than on smartphones, where 36% of users told Pew they got the news daily and 62% got the news weekly.

So, I suppose that clears up what people are actually using their tablets for, with 44% of people checking their email daily, and 65% of the respondents checking their email weekly. Though eMarketer has put some strong emphasis on the news, email is still in the number one spot for tablet owners. Mobile email is becoming more popular still, and marketers should recognize that fact.

EMarketer continues to report their findings regarding where the entire news reading population of the US preferred to see ads presented to them. A total of 46% of respondents said they would prefer no ads at all. After that, the majority say they would prefer ads on desktop news platforms. As for tablets, only 5% of news readers would prefer ads on their devices.

So, to take this news reader study as an example, it does not seem that tablets are the biggest concern for mobile marketers these days. However, it still shows that people are continuing to use email on their mobile devices, which means that marketing to those mobile email users is still a smart choice. Optimizing emails for mobile is becoming more and more prudent in email marketing, since the number of people who prefer to check their email on mobile devices is constantly growing. Many marketers think that the practice of email marketing has diminished in importance long ago, but it continues to show that it is necessary. People are still opening email advertisements, and they are still successful; apparently more successful than ads on the news.

You may not have heard, but companies like Gartner have predicted that by 2014, 10 to 15% of all reviews online will be fake or irrelevant. These fake reviews are a big problem for businesses big and small, as they can do some serious damage to their online reputation. A reporting from May, by Mashable.com shows the importance of reviews online.

Before setting foot outside, about 45% of consumers have already chosen where to eat with the help of an online dining guide. Online reviews are a huge decider of what’s for dinner — 57% of patrons rely on them.

People used to think that there was nothing to be done about these fake reviews, and that they would continue to plague the reputations of businesses forever. Well, Restaurant.com may have just started a trend that could make fake reviews less of a problem in the near future, possibly ending them for good.

The online restaurant review and promotion website, according to a reporting from QSR Web.com, has started using what they are calling, “Verified Diner Reviews.” These will make sure that all reviews of restaurants are from those people who have actually dined there, making all of the restaurant reviews authentic and relevant.

From QSR Web.com;

To ensure the integrity of the restaurant review, all Restaurant.com Verified Diner Reviews meet the following standards:

• The diner is required to purchase a Restaurant.com certificate, and the restaurant must validate the certificate prior to the diner receiving an invitation to review the restaurant.
• The diner must complete the email review and short survey, including the assignment of a 1 to 5 star rating.
• Restaurant.com reviews are centered on the dining experience. For example, if the review is about the great deal or a bad date rather than the restaurant itself, it may not be posted. If it is about the food, the ambiance, the service, it is posted for everyone to see.

If this idea of verified reviews were to spread across all review platforms, or at least the more commonly used and checked ones, small and large businesses would have a significantly easier time managing their reputations online. The trend would help consumers as well, because the fake likes can also throw them off from going to a restaurant they may actually enjoy thoroughly. These fake reviews are often the product of wrongful bashing from other companies and competitors, and the businesses and consumers are the ones who feel the pain from this.

Anyway, whether this becomes a trend or not, Restaurant.com has done a great thing in the line of internet reviews. Any of the reviews on this site now will be those that can be trusted entirely, by businesses, marketers, and consumers alike. Since consumers rely more heavily on reviews than anything else in their decision of where to eat or where to shop, a way to manage reviews has been needed for a long time, and Restaurant.com has taken a first step. Hopefully, other review sites will follow suit.

Adknowledge has announced today the launch of the new “Adknowledge Partner Network,” an exclusive, invitation only network catering to the very high-end of affiliate marketing.  This announcement is just the beginning of the improvements in store for Adknowledge’s network.  Other changes include: new unique network-wide creatives; better service; higher ROI; and more.

“We wanted to narrow down our list of thousands of partners to a much smaller group of our top, most successful partners,” said Matt Hoggatt, General Manager of the Email Channel.  “It wasn’t fair to our very best and most loyal partners that a disproportionate amount of resources were going to support smaller partners with lower combined revenue numbers.  By working more closely and attentively with just our highest performing partners, we’ve discovered that we can raise ROI for these partners by drastic amounts, which turned this into a decision we simply had to make.”

In preparation for this new initiative, The Adknowledge Partner Network had been developing new creatives for all of the leading categories. Adknowledge is very excited to release these new, improved creatives, which have shown an average increase in eCPMs of 20-40%.

These new “hybrid” creatives have been completely assembled and tested in-house by Adknowledge’s award winning design team, and were developed from the ground up for display on desktop computers, as well as tablets and mobile devices, which generally have improved clickthrough rates.  Since the ads are brand new, they are free of fingerprinting issues that plague traditional online advertising and something that has typically causes deliverability issues for many affiliate networks.

“We want our partners to understand that The Adknowledge Partner Network is a completely new program,” said Hoggatt.  “We’re going to be able to provide a level of customer service that just hasn’t been available before.  We set out to create a network that provided the highest eCPMs in the industry, and that’s just what we’ve done here.  For example, when we release a new set of unique creatives each month, there is already going to be another batch in development right behind them.  Our team thoroughly tests each set of creatives, selects the highest performing ones, and releases them exclusively to the Adknowledge Partner Network.”

For more information about the Adknowledge Partner Network or to sign up, visit http://partners.adknowledge.com/join/

Everybody loves a few Likes on anything that they post on the World Wide Web. Likes began as something for the users of Facebook to use when they wanted to show approval or excitement about any of their friends’ posts or pictures. It then grew into something that marketers could use to effectively measure their results on their Facebook marketing efforts. Now, we have all heard of the phony Like issues, and that Facebook may be an avid user of bots, but Likes are still on of the most widely used units of measurement for Facebook success. Just today, I found out some things about Likes that shocked me a bit.

The things I found out all came from The Next Web, a publication that provides the latest news in internet technology. They have reported recently that a bug has been found that showed two Likes for every sharing of data in a private conversation. Supposedly, Facebook has fixed this issue, but it just shows that Likes are continuing to have issues, even though Facebook is always doing everything they can to fix the issues that create faulty results. This issue is not the main thing that surprised me when reading The Next Web’s report, though.

The real shocker was finding out that privately shared data was making Like numbers grow. Personally, I thought that Likes were nothing more than Likes, only being counted when people actually hit the Like button. It would appear that I was terribly wrong, because links and data shared through messages, private or public, also count as Likes on Facebook.

From the article on The Next Web:

This is news to me. Yet this was clearly the case before as on the Like button Web page over on Facebook Developers, the social networking giant says the number shown on a Like button is the sum of:

• The number of likes of this URL.
• The number of shares of this URL (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook).
• The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL.
• The number of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment.

Taking this into consideration, I now realize that Likes are more often not even the result of the actual action of Liking something. Shares on Facebook are being measured as Likes as well. What really worries me a bit is that Facebook is even measuring the private sharing of URLs, which can potentially result in completely skewed results. People do not always share things because they like them, obviously. So, why when people share privately is it immediately considered a Like. Anyway, below is a statement that Facebook gave to The Next Web regarding the privacy of their users and the way that these sharing Likes work;

“Absolutely no private information has been exposed and Facebook is not automatically Liking any Facebook Pages on a user’s behalf.

Many websites that use Facebook’s ‘Like’, ‘Recommend’, or ‘Share’ buttons also carry a counter next to them. This counter reflects the number of times people have clicked those buttons and also the number of times people have shared that page’s link on Facebook. When the count is increased via shares over private messages, no user information is exchanged, and privacy settings of content are unaffected. Links shared through messages do not affect the Like count on Facebook Pages.”

 

AffiliateTraction, the world’s largest affiliate management agency, has announced that it is supporting the inaugural Performance Marketing Insights conference in New York next March, becoming its first official sponsor as well as joining its global Advisory Board to help shape the industry event.

The two day conference, which is being held at the Crowne Plaza on March 12-13, 2013, will centre around exceptional content featuring world class speakers, as well as offering unrivalled, structured networking opportunities for all serious performance marketers around the world.

Greg Shepard, President and CEO of AffiliateTraction, says: “It’s about time our industry had a fresh approach that encompasses a global mindshare on the topics that endanger and break the glass ceiling of its success. Our sponsorship is a commitment to this industry and to an event that has its attendees’ best interests as a goal. The organic success of this show is based on quality, not just need; its content and attendees represent the class our industry should portray. I’m therefore delighted to support this event’s introduction to our calendar as its first official sponsor, and also to be part of the extraordinary, global Advisory Board who together will bring to you the pulse of affiliate marketing. This event won’t just deliver, it will set a new standard for delegates.”

Limited to 600 attendees by design, the event is the latest offering from Existem Events, the company behind the highly-respected A4u brands including the 70,000 strong affiliate marketing online hub affiliates4u.com. Since 2007, the team have equally delivered a number of highly-successful events pitched directly at showcasing the professionalism and innovative delivery of the performance marketing industry as a whole with the world’s largest Performance Marketing Awards ceremony and the well-established a4uexpo Performance Marketing Conference series of shows in Spain, Netherlands, Germany and the UK.

Matthew Wood, Founder and Chairman of A4u, says: “For our inaugural US event we’re delighted to welcome an agency with over 12 years of industry pedigree as a gold sponsor for Performance Marketing Insights. The ethos behind Performance Marketing Insights is to offer an advanced content driven event, enabling delegates to learn from leading global experts on advanced – level content, effective strategies and case studies.  To partner with a company who are focusing on forming global operations, directly compliments our mission to grow the Performance marketing Industry globally.”

Late last month U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tom Harkin (D-IA), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) sent in a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairman, Jon Leibowitz.  In the letter the Senators urge the FTC to not only better inform and update dated consumer guides for private vocational schools, but to investigate third-party online lead generation companies that are recruiting for for-profit colleges using deceptive practices.

“Recent reports, including a Senate investigation, have revealed that some unscrupulous for-profit colleges engage in misleading, high-pressure, and unethical recruitment practices to maximize revenue from federal financial aid. To recruit students many for-profit colleges have partnered with third-party marketing companies, so-called “lead generators,” that deceive consumers to obtain personal information by misrepresenting their affiliation with for-profit colleges, as well as concealing how and by whom their information will be used. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is well positioned to protect consumers from the deceptive practices used by lead generators.”

The letter comes just two months after the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions released the findings of a two-year investigation into for-profit colleges:  For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success.

“The examined colleges spent $4.2 billion on marketing and recruiting, or 22.7 percent of all revenue. Publicly traded companies operating for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of 19.7 percent, generated a total of $3.2 billion in pre-tax profit and paid an average of $7.3 million to their chief executive officers in 2009.” –Executive Summary

The Senate investigation found that, in 2009 alone, the for-profit colleges examined put more money towards marketing, and recruiting for profit, than they devoted towards total actual instruction costs, faculty and curriculum included.

“For-profit education companies are successful as businesses; throughout the 2000s many of the companies had profit margins that topped most of Wall Street. In 2009, publicly trade for-profit colleges had an average profit margin of 19.7 percent and generated a total of $3.2 billion in profit.”-For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success, pg. 94.

Additionally, the investigation found that for-profit colleges have misled students by misrepresenting program costs, time involved, accreditation and credit transfer.

Recruiters Were Told to Market to Emotions

“At Kaplan recruiters were instructed to ‘Keep digging until you uncover their pain, fears, and dreams…. If you get the prospect to think about how tough their situation is right now and if they discuss the life they can’t give their family because they don’t have a degree you will dramatically increase the chances of gaining a commitment from the student! If you can stir up their emotions, you will create urgency!'” -pg. 72

The Senators wrote,

“Between 2001 and 2010, federal student aid funds flowing to for-profit colleges increased from $5.4 billion to $32.2 billion, mostly due to aggressive recruiting practices, Lead generators have become a key part of the aggressive recruiting strategy for many for-profit colleges. Search engines promise prospective students connections to admission offices of selective and well-known public and non-profit colleges. In reality, the lead generators send students’ information to for-profit colleges and not the institution(s) in which the student actually expressed interest, with which the ad owners have no relationship.”-Senators’ letter to the FTC.

The letter makes mention of the $2.5 million settlement that was reached in June by 20 State Attorney General’s offices and lead generator firm QuinnStreet Inc. The States alleged that QuinnStreet had violated consumer-protection laws by their “false, misleading, and deceptive” sites including GIBill.com, which was falsely implied to be connected with the federal government.

Facebook seems to come up as a main topic in many of the articles that are written by countless marketing news websites, but that is simply because of the constantly changing state of their marketing offerings. They are constantly coming out with new ways for marketers to use their network for their needs, while at the same time they continuously screw up their existent marketing tools. Today, I heard about some new features that have been in the works with Facebook that might interest marketers and brands that use Facebook for their marketing needs. They involve consumers sort of taking a step further past Liking a post or picture on a company of brand page.

According to Inside Facebook and Tech Crunch, Facebook has been testing out some new features that they call “Collections” posts. These will be posts with images of products that will allow brands and businesses to include two brand new buttons. The first button is the Want button, and the second button is the Collect button.

People have been begging for a Want button for some time now, and now Facebook is offering it, despite it being in a different form from what consumers were expecting. However, the Collect button is something that I have never heard of before. It will allow consumers to keep track of the things that they have shown interest in, keeping the product fresh in their digital minds. Want buttons could also be good for marketers, in that they could show similar results as Likes do, letting marketers know what consumers actually Want.

Here is what Facebook told TechCrunch;

“We’ve seen that businesses often use Pages to share information about their products through photo albums. Today, we are beginning a small test in which a few select businesses will be able to share information about their products through a feature called Collections.  Collections can be discovered in News Feed, and people will be able to engage with these collections and share things they are interested in with their friends. People can click through and buy these items off of  Facebook.”

Now, the Collections feature sounds quite familiar to me. It sounds a lot like the entire idea behind Pinterest. Apparently, Facebook is insisting that the feature is not similar to Pinterest at all, but I feel like there is no way that Collections won’t end up as a competitor for the network.

With the Collections feature comes the Wishlist, which compiles all the Wants for consumers in a new Timeline section. People have been waiting for something like this for a while, be they marketers or consumers. Here’s some more good news about the feature though, reported by TechCrunch;

Retailers aren’t charged to share Collections posts instead of standard photos or status updates, and Facebook will not collect affiliate fees or a revenue share on purchases from Collections clicks. Still, the feature could earn it money.

It is useful, it will be effective, and consumers have already shown interest in the Collections feature. It’s another way for marketers to use Facebook, and another way for consumers to tell their stories on their Timelines.

If you closely follow the happenings in social media, then you have probably heard about the redesign of company pages on LinkedIn. They were first introduced a while back, when they started beta testing the new design with a few select companies. People all over the web seem to be responding well to this redesign of the company pages. A good response is uncommon when it comes to making over social media pages, because users tend to fall in love with the format they know and have been using for a long time. With their new design, though, comes something that marketers and businesses alike can get excited about.

LinkedIn will now offer free featured posts on company pages to its users. This will essentially give all the advantages of a featured post that would be used on other social networks, but in this case there is no money involved. With these featured updates, marketers and businesses will be able to have a post stay at the very top of their feed for at least 48 hours. It sounds very similar to the featured posts on Facebook, but Facebook has done everything they possibly could to ensure that marketers and businesses pay for it.

Now, as studies in the past have shown, and as is basically common knowledge in the marketing world, LinkedIn works best for business-to-business marketers, and not quite as well for business-to-consumer. So, even though they are offering a free service that Facebook charges for, Facebook still has the advantage of their mixed user base that can cater to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketers.

Marketers however, should not put too much of their interest into Facebook’s featured posts, as their algorithm has been apparently seeing some unforeseen changes lately.

From an article on Business Insider;

Two prominent social media marketing executives have gone on record to accuse Facebook of quietly altering one of its key algorithms in September, so that companies with pages that have large numbers of followers can now only reach a fraction of the followers they used to with each post.

Facebook being accused of dishonesty is not new. They seem to be finding ways to screw over marketers all the time, or at least they are accused of it quite often. However, I have never seen anyone accuse LinkedIn of dishonesty in their advertising, unless I just haven’t been looking in the right places.

Anyways, this article was not initially meant to be a Facebook versus LinkedIn article, but it should be easy to understand how it became one. Facebook is trying to make marketers and businesses pay for the featured posts that LinkedIn is currently offering to their users for free. Even though both sites are clearly used for different reasons, it is still exciting that the feature is being offered for free. Anyway, the LinkedIn page design has been getting good feedback from all over the web, and marketers have been loving the free featured posts that came along with them.

With mobile marketing being such a hot commodity these days, I find that it is quite important to know just how much growth or even how much shrinking is happening with mobile consumers. Most mobile marketing platforms that are being managed today rely entirely on the amount of traffic mobile internet is showing. Now, desktop internet still sees the most traffic, as it will for a long time. However, mobile internet is rapidly growing in terms of traffic, and this fact is what has kept marketers interested in mobile for as long as they have been. As of last Thursday, mobile has shown that it will not be slowing down any time soon.

Apparently, mobile traffic has, so far, increased 27% this year. Janet Aronica, a writer for the all-around internet news and marketing site Shareaholic, reported some of the company’s findings in one of her articles.

Our data, based on 200,000 publishers who reach 300 million people each month shows that mobile traffic has increased 27% this year so far. 

Mobile internet traffic has been showing growth for a long while now, according to the findings. In February of this year, mobile had already reached the point where it accounted for just over 12% of all internet traffic. Now, in the findings from September, mobile traffic has grown to just over 16% of all internet traffic.

That is not really what is important here though is it? Mobile traffic will continue to grow, and that is all well and good. However, it is not really how much traffic mobile sees that determines the success of a mobile campaign. Sure, it helps, but it is getting people to respond to your marketing efforts in a way that will create a successful campaign that is most important. Janet writes a bit about this in her article, showing that mobile may not be doing as well as its traffic numbers make it seem.

Mobile visitors have a 9.56% higher bounce rate than desktop visitors, and desktop visitors average 2.358 pages per visit, whereas mobile visitors average 1.979 pages per visit. With more smartphones and tablets, more mobile traffic is a given. Keeping that traffic on site long enough to take a meaningful action (share content, subscribe to content, or make a purchase from a product page) is the real key.

So, regardless of traffic levels on mobile continuing to rise, it seems that engagement has stayed significantly stronger on desktop internet platforms. A 10% higher bounce rate shows that mobile users are not quite as interested in spending time on the internet on their devices as they are on their desktop computers. Mobile marketing will continue to work best when marketers stay away from the mobile browsing advertisements and stick to advertisings on mobile content, such as games, music, and other apps. However, smartphones will continue to improve, and with them the mobile browsing experience will become more and more user friendly. When this happens, mobile internet will show better engagement results, but until then mobile internet will most likely stay firmly behind desktop internet.