Although they’ve made no announcements on their blog, nor anywhere officially, it’s been discovered that Google has added yet another feature to its arsenal. Designed much like it’s Google Advisor, Google has now launched Google Cars, apparently without telling anyone. It was reported by Brian Pasch on DealerElite.com that Google Cars is a new feature that is currently only available in the San Francisco Bay area. Like AutoTrader.com has done for a while now, Google has implemented a feature that will inform consumers about the best deals in the auto industry, in proximity to their location or the location they search.

Google is simply launching the new feature to improve upon lead generation in the automotive industry. Participating automotive dealers have their car results listed on Google’s new feature, and then Google is compensated for the listing. Just like in their sponsored results and advertisements, the new Google Cars feature has a “Why these cars?” link, explaining the way it works with automotive dealer participants. It further explains the way that search results are presented, based on distance and MSRP.

The feature provides various options for the automotive shopper, including contacting dealers and finding quotes on cars. The consumer can learn about the way that cars are priced, the best deals on cars, and of course information about specific vehicles. Also, it shows the potential for consumers to have the ability to deal with things like make, model, interior, color, and other specifications. Commenters on Brian’s post have concern about the way it will effect sites like AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. One comment from Jason Mickelson reads, “Two comments suggest that this change would affect Autotrader.com and Cars.com. I am interested in hearing more about how this would affect these two companies. I know that Autotrader and Cars would like to be new car lead providers, but both have struggled to gain traction. This will affect them, but won’t it affect AutoUSA, CarsDirect, Autobytel and companies like these more than the two companies whose primary business revolves around advertising pre-owned vehicles?”

As of right now, the feature is meant for lead generation for auto dealers, making the feature specifically designed for new car dealers, and not so much used. Being one of the most important aspects of internet marketing and advertising as a whole, lead generation is of utmost importance, so Google’s attempts to help out in the area will surely be a success. The format of the feature is similar to Google Advisor, announced in late 2011, but its design has been catered to create ease for the automotive consumer. Brian’s post provides a few examples of what the new feature will look like in the future, when released to the public, showing pop up window designs, contact pages for dealers and initial design. This new feature won’t be the most outstanding thing that Google has ever done, but it can help the automotive dealers and automotive advertising greatly. Google has always been great with helping out in the advertising world, and this is simply another way they will do so.

Sponsored by Ad4Game, the Leading Gaming Performance Network

With LeadsCon around the corner and most of the industry preparing to storm New New York City July 24^th-25^th, it seemed appropriate to talk about the fastest growing part of the online marketing and advertising community. Lead Generation, commonly referred to as LeadGen is growing in leaps and bounds, with many companies seeing it as the most mature part of the performance marketing industry. If you are an affiliate marketer you probably have promoted a lead generation campaign, even if you didn’t know it.

Lead generation has been succeeding in part because of a variety of reasons, but the following reasons seem to best explain why LeadGen is growing in such a fast pace:

 1)   Lead Generation is Mature. Lead Generation, offline has been around for a long time. Companies have been generating leads for themselves via call centers for almost as long as there have been telephones. This maturity has allowed for the industry to be better controlled, with more standards on performance and the value of leads based on a variety of factors.

2)   Lead Generation Creates More Value Long Term. The industry has developed so many tools to monetize leads that one lead can often turn out to be a moneymaker for many companies and different products. A car buying lead can obviously be used to sell to a dealership, but in turn is often then sold to car insurance companies. The financial data provided by the initial lead can often then be used to sell additional products, and then be used to even create more lead and acquire more consumer information.

3)   Everyone can use Lead Generation. Almost every industry can benefit from lead generation and use lead generation to create better customers.  Instead of having to worry about the influx of “junk” customers through coupons and specials, lead generation brings you customers that are actually interested in a product. That’s perhaps one of the most beautiful things about lead generation, when done right, it generates real consumers, really interested in your product many that will convert.

Many affiliates may not know that many of the offers that they run are lead generation driven. Obviously educational and insurance offers are lead generation, but the backend of many of the giveaway (email/zip) offers are lead generation. Companies like Acquinity Interactive are driving millions of dollars of lead generation to a variety of companies by getting consumers to answer questions, give up their information in exchange for prizes.

While affiliates may not see the reason to attend LeadsCon or understand the lead generation industry initially, they should still consider going or at least reading up more about the industry. If you are making money running other lead generation offers you may be in a position to use your traffic skills, your money making abilities to drive traffic to products and offers for a much higher price – or even being involved in the creation of offers that will produce more income.  Lead Generation is behind most of the industry right now and not knowing about it means you’ll be more likely to be left behind.

—–
Sponsored by ITA Leads
Learn more about Lead Generation Opportunities with ITA Leads

Steve Howe is the CEO and genius behind Convert2Media, one of those affiliate CPA networks that everyone is always talking about. He’s also known for having a pretty good pro-compliance team that has a special bullshit detector that keeps all the fake affiliates out of his network. He also loves recording phone calls he has with frausters and exposing the techniques they use to attempt to get into his network. This is one crazy CEO with a great sense of humor and style all his own.

Looking for Unique Offers? Join HitCPA

As I mentioned last week, fraud protection is a must for any network in the industry, and any company that doesn’t integrate fraud systems is starting to be viewed as outcasts. As part of that mission to prevent fraud LinkTrust has announced that they have now fully integrated with CPA Detective and Scrubkit, the two dominant fraud protection companies in the industry.

Here’s a bit of information about the systems and how they integrate with LinkTrust, from the companies themselves.

 CPA Detective offers affiliate fraud detection and risk management. Detect fraudulent sources and score each transaction using the most accurate and transparent solution for online marketers that leverages centralized fraud intelligence and smart device fingerprinting to uncover the latest fraudulent tactics.

• With seamless integration into your LinkTrust campaigns, CPA Detective provides greater transparency by introducing transaction quality predictors such as CPA Detective’s risk score, device fingerprint, browser, operating system, and the ISP alongside each transaction.
• Real-time alerts and a dedicated team of fraud experts provide a proactive method to verify fraudulent activity and shut down high-risk sources.
• Contact CPA Detective to learn more and receive a free 2 week trial, ROI analysis, and special LinkTrust partner pricing.

ScrubKit is an automated and powerful analytical system that assists with the detection of affiliate fraud. You can easily and conveniently monitor fraudulent activity 24-hours a day, 7-days a week, and 365 days a year. Many known networks are currently using it to effectively reduce exposure to fraudulent activity.

• Dashboard view of all activity, risk is visually color coded according to severity
• Effectively eliminate fraudulent, diluted, and fake conversions from your network
• Statistical and analytical breakdown on an extremely granular level
• “Plug and Play” LinkTrust Integration with a no-commitment month-to-month ScrubKit contract
•  Contact ScrubKit for a free trial and complimentary risk assessment of your network activity by a fraud professional.

LinkTrust joins Cake Marketing, which has also integrated with both Scrubkit and CPADetective. This integration by these two dominant systems means that the rest of the industry needs to play catch-up immediately. I’m sure this might just give more and more clients a reasons to leave DirectTrack.

Today’s American youth has become focused strongly on music and artistic creativity. Referred to as “hipsters” by many, this new generation of younger people has a strong interest in artistic, creative new innovations, and not so much on the business world. Advertisers have found that calls-to-action in advertisements have been very successful in the past, and even now there are stronger ways to go about calling attention to advertisements. The question is, however, will it be enough in the coming future.

As this new generation ages into their upper 20’s, their interests don’t seem to be altering as much as is traditional. Usually, people are interested in discovering new things and creating new things when they are young, but as they grow up, they seem to become more business oriented. However, the kids of today show little signs of change. A new age of artists is sprouting, and creativity is key. Now, since so many advertisers are becoming increasingly interested in advertising with Facebook because of it’s popularity in the social media world, it is important that they think hard about the way they go about their advertisements.

According to Inside Facebook, about 15% of users are ages 13-17, and 52% are ages 18-25. This is the exact age demographic that has morphed into a generation stricken with booming interest in creativity, despite the recession that America has long been suffering.Of course, it is no news to anyone that the majority of Facebook are of the younger demographic, but it often isn’t easy to tell through research exactly what it is that kids are into.

Anyway, the point is that, for a generation that is so deeply involved in expanding their creative minds, it seems that creativity is what they will respond to. For example, Durex, a condom brand that has been on the heels of Trojan Condoms for far too long, has come out with a new advertisement that is receiving quite a bit of traffic. Although most teenagers are already quite interested in condoms, it is their new creative advertising that has gotten them the desired clicks. Featured on Facebook is a Durex advertisement that says that by clicking it, you can find just the right song to accompany the use of the condom, to keep it in simple terms. This ad is interesting, and it shows that Durex is as much about the joy of the act, as it is keeping it safe.

Facebook has become the hub of conversation for young people all over the world, but America is where it began and has been used since. It started as a place for college students, and it pretty much still is. The generation of 18-25 year olds today respond, not just in advertising but in anything, to creativity. Over the years, some advertising agencies have focused more on profit than their own creativity in advertising, and it may be about time to bring some of that back. Getting the attention of the younger people of the world is what is important, because they are more often than not the ones that respond.

There are many things that every experienced advertising or marketing professional knows. Somewhere on the list are the following facts; mobile platforms are taking over quickly and successfully, and Google knows the course to success when it comes to advertising. Recently these two facts have come together in a post on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog. Google has released an official list of what they believe are the best ways to go about building websites optimized for smartphones.

The webmasters at Google write on their blog that things have changed since the last time they released information about smartphone optimization, and that Google has been improving upon their support for optimized content. Googlebot-Mobile was released for smartphones in December of 2011, in an effort to increase their mobile optimization support and to identify content that is smartphone optimized. Now, they are extending their efforts even further in releasing some recommendations for mobile optimization.

In the post, Google gives recommendations on successful mobile optimization, responsive web design, and use of device-specific HTML. They list the advantages of responsive web design, saying, “It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.” Also, in the case of responsive design for optimal Googlebot response, Google writes, “Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn’t need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.”

Google continues on to write how, if responsive web design is not an option in certain situations, using device-specific HTML can be almost just as successful. With their HTML suggestions, they map out the ways that advertisers can use Googlebot-Mobile’s technology to create successful HTML design. There are many more suggestions from Google on their recommendations page.

However, there is another company that feels that helping advertisers out with their optimizations for mobile is very important. An online web marketing company called Oracle Digital has released similar information to that in Google’s blog post. The difference is, Oracle actually provides a service of mobile SEO, so therefore retaining some information for themselves. They write, “If you’re a restaurant, for instance, you need to consider the benefits of mobile SEO. Your target audience is driving around town trying to decide where to eat. They will probably check their phone for local restaurants and reviews. An SEO company who knows local SEO and mobile SEO can be your very best mate.”

By now, everyone knows that mobile optimization and mobile SEO are important, but there are many who don’t understand the level of that importance. “Every day more and more smartphones get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content.” Google understands the importance and wants to help advertisers understand it as well, and then take action towards taking advantage of it. Both Google and Oracle Digital have a common goal of keeping the advertising world up to speed with new technology, and effective advertising options.