Blog: Advertiser Corner 
Trick or Treat Your Way to Online Marketing Success!
It’s finally Autumn and nearly time to get out and Trick or Treat! As you get outside to enjoy the leaves changing color, or as we do down here in Florida, hit the beach and enjoy the high 70s for a change – don’t forget to keep your end of the year goals in sight and finish out 2010 strong. Part of this plan should include a strong online presence through multiple marketing outlets and efforts. Let’s take a look at how marketing is like a bag of Halloween goodies!
Imagine you are a kid again, out having fun Trick or Treating for a bunch of treats around your neighborhood. What is the one thing you really dread getting? I’m sorry popcorn ball, but it’s you – no kid really wants to get a popcorn ball in their bag. When the alternative is a heap of yummy candy, there is just no comparison. The popcorn ball is just too boring and outdated – just like a marketing strategy which exists offline only.
The Internet presents a whole host of much more enticing ways to gain awareness and turn people into customers.
Here’s that awesome pile of candy I promised you – also known as Online Marketing. There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular treats of Online Marketing. First, make sure to use many approaches to maximize your presence and you’ll see that variety truly is the spice of life. Just like eating only one type of candy over and over can get tiring; choosing only one way to market your company online holds the same drawback.
These little pumpkins have been a long time staple to round out any Trick or Treating experience. You will, no doubt, see them at every Halloween celebration for a long time to come - just like email is an important part of any solid marketing plan. Make sure you have a way for your website visitors to sign up on your site and provide them email updates, news, exclusive deals and more.
Just like the two main types of lollipops (regular or with a bonus treat in the center!) search comes in two main categories – paid or organic. Make sure to use SEO to prime your website for maximum search engine placement so you can gain the most benefit from organic search. Couple this with some paid ads on your favorite search engines and you have laid a solid foundation for being discovered by your next customer.
Just like Social Media, candy corns have a few different layers which make up a popular candy that most people find hard to put down once they get a taste. There are infinite ways to use Social Media to increase awareness about your company, so get creative! You aren’t limited to simply paying for ads on Facebook. Instead, you have plenty of free choices, such as creating a Facebook Page, creating or joining Facebook Groups, or using various tactics on Twitter.
Peanut butter kisses, you know, those sticky things which come in plain black or orange wrappers. These are like display advertising because they’ve both been around for quite a long time and tend to get overlooked - but once you try them out, they are still tasty. Check out what Inuvo is doing to spice this up!
What’s your favorite mix for successful online marketing?
Managing Transactions as an Inuvo Advertiser
The Inuvo Platform offers advertisers a first-class way to manage transactions. Managing transactions on the Inuvo Platform is easy with the variety of search criterion and filters that have been added. I have provided an overview of the report, as viewed by an advertiser, below:
When you are logged in as an advertiser, you will see a designated “Transactions” section with a red box above the tab, click on this tab.
Several search criteria filters are available to allow advertisers build a truly custom report. Here is a guide to the filters:
Select By Status:
- Date Created- Search for a specific transaction based on when it was created
- Pending: We strongly encourage that all transactions are set to auto-approval. However, if you decided you’d prefer manually approving transactions you will notice when a transaction first occurs it is given a pending status until you take action. From the pending status, you have the option of either approving or denying the transaction.
- Denied: transactions which are not valid and you will not pay for.
- Approved: transactions you have deemed valid and will become paid.
- Charged Back: If you need to deny a transaction which you originally approved, and it has been approved long enough to have updated to paid status, this is called a chargeback.
- Paid: Once you decide to approve a transaction, it will update to paid status at midnight EST on the same day. The transaction is now in a payable state and the publisher will receive payment for the transaction on their next pay date.
- Paid and Include Chargebacks: Enables advertisers to view transactions that have been paid but charged back at some point.
- Date Approved- This filter is important since Inuvo bills by the date approved.
Filters:
- Publisher: Affiliates, or publishers, that are running an offer.
- Publisher Group: Filter for publishers that have previously been added to a group. Advertisers use groups to filter reports and assign specific commissions. Publisher groups are assigned a name by the advertiser and can be edited or deleted by the advertiser as well.
- Offer: All offers the advertiser has created in the Platform.
- SUB IDs (1-3): View transactions by the publisher’s different traffic sources, or SUB IDs. Often times, publishers use more than one way of generating traffic/leads, especially if the publisher is also a network. Publishers assign SUB IDs to these different sources to help keep track of traffic/leads. For example, the advertiser knows that "Alberto Publisher" is the publisher that joined their offer but the advertiser also knows that this publisher is a network that uses SUB IDs 1, 5 and 10. Let’s say the advertiser wants to deny all transactions received from “Alberto Publisher, SUB ID = 5”, the filters allow this exact pinpointing to be done easily. In the transaction report, the data fields look as follows:
- IP Address & Country Search for transactions generated from a specific publisher by using the publisher’s IP address and country. Often times, advertisers want to see transactions that came from an IP so they can take action on them, as well as wanting to know the source country of the transactions they receive.
- Order ID: Look for a transaction by a specific Order ID. An Order ID is usually comprised of numeric and non-numeric components, such as this example: PAU100-3746380.
- Date:
- Timeframe: A list of pre-set time frames for quick reference.
- Date Range: Use this to select a specific date range across many months, years, days, etc.
Output:
- Max Results: How many transaction results to include in the report.
- Results per Page: How many results per page to include.
- Export to CSV- Export the report to a CSV file for personal reference.
- Reset Filters Tab: The Manage Transactions Reporting Page has an automatic ability to quickly reset all the filters back to their original settings. To do this, select the blue text “Reset Filters” tab in the bottom left corner of the screen.
- Hide Filters Tab: After selecting “View Report” the screen will automatically scroll down and display the transaction report data. If the only desirable content on the page is the transaction report data, click the “Hide Filters” tab to hide the filters at the top of the page and display only the transaction report.
A legend is available to show the status of each transaction.
A nice option for managing transaction data on the Platform is by selecting the tab the red arrow is pointed to in the below illustration. To easily view all denied transactions on this page, select “Denied” from this drop down menu. The “Clear All” menu item clears the selected transactions on all the pages, whereas, selecting “None” will clear transactions on the visible page only.
Advertisers have the ability to select transactions on different pages and change their status by using the “Change Selected to….” drop down menu. To clear all of the selected transactions chose “Clear All” from the drop down menu, as mentioned above.
If a transaction is not able to be selected, the reason why is displayed in the far left column. For example, there are several transactions below that were “ChargedBack”.
To view more details of a specific transaction, select the Transaction ID that is in blue, under the Order ID area. When the Transaction ID is selected a detailed description of the transaction will appear.
When the Transaction ID is selected a detailed description of the transaction will appear. Details include what type of creative is being used, what the offer type is, the referring URL if there is one, who the publisher is, if the transaction was paid, etc.
To make changes to a specific transaction, advertisers can simply just select the transaction individually. Additionally, a multiple number of transactions can be selected to be included as part of a group, transactions don’t need to be updated line by line. First, select the transactions to be changed. Keep in mind that it is possible to select these transactions across several pages. Use the “Change Selected to…” dropdown menu to change the status of the transactions to the desired status.
To pull up only paid transactions for a certain time period, select “Paid” in the “Date Created” filter on the far left of the screen. After doing this, select the “Date Range” in the “Date” filter.
We have added a “Paid, Include Chargebacks” option because often advertisers want to know exactly how much money they owe. To view this data select “Paid” as described in the previous step as well as the “Include Chargebacks” below it. The “TOTALS” on the bottom of the page will now reflect the transactions that advertiser owes for, less the chargebacks, no matter when the chargeback occurred.
Sorting and Navigating
Advertisers can sort the transactions contained in the report by selecting the menu item that names the column data. It is possible to sort the data by any of these menu items.
To easily navigate through pages use the blue paging icons in the far left corner of the report.
If you have any questions on this report, let us know in the comments below.
How to Optimize your Site with SEO Tactics
“SEO is the business of getting found; even if a user didn’t know they were looking for your site all along!”
Did you know…
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a component of Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
SEO is the act of optimizing a website for organic (also called natural) search engine listings. The idea of optimizing a website for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers for a specific purpose: to make a purchase, contribute to a blog, etc. The higher the site is ranked in the results, the greater amount of traffic directed to the website. Organic listings within search engines are very popular because they receive anywhere between 3 to 10 times more traffic than paid listings! This makes SEO extremely cost effective. Optimizing a site is essential to its existence on the Internet and for receiving more free targeted traffic without paying a penny! This can save site owners up to thousands of dollars every month.
So, you are probably asking “How can I optimize my site?” Below are just a few of the most immediate ways to optimize a site:
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- Page Content- The more relevant the site content is to the search made, the higher the site will appear in the search results. This process involves far more than simply repeating a key phrase several times.
- How does this happen? By what are commonly referred to as Search Engine “Crawlers or Spiders.” When a search is performed by a user on a search engine, a crawler skims the site for content that is relevant to the keyword passed. The crawler realizes the keyword as it is repeated fairly often. Crawlers use this information to return sites for this particular keyword.
- Page Content- The more relevant the site content is to the search made, the higher the site will appear in the search results. This process involves far more than simply repeating a key phrase several times.
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- HTML Coding– Be sure that the code is free of any errors.
- Title Tag- Title tags, technically called title elements, define the title of a document and are required for all HTML/XHTML documents. A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title tags are the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appear in these key places:
- Browser- Title Tags show up in both the top of all browsers and in applicable tabs.
- Search Results Pages- Title tags also show up in search engine results. In this example you can see the title tag's contents are displayed directly below the link:
- Browser- Title Tags show up in both the top of all browsers and in applicable tabs.
- Title Tag- Title tags, technically called title elements, define the title of a document and are required for all HTML/XHTML documents. A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title tags are the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appear in these key places:
- HTML Coding– Be sure that the code is free of any errors.
- Inbound Links- For a site to truly succeed, a major part of the site’s SEO strategy must focus on the importance of inbound links. Google explains that, "The best way to ensure Google finds your site, is for your pages to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to yours; the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly.”
A truly successful website uses a mixture of both SEO and SEM to anchor their overall Internet marketing strategy.
How to Make SEM Work for You!
Did you know…
Nearly 14 billion online searches occur every month!
It’s no secret that Google rules the Search Marketing world while Yahoo! and Bing are trailing a close second. Because of the huge portion of the market they comprise, it’s safe to assume that typical PPC advertisers aren’t exactly anxious to spend their PPC ad dollars outside of these three engines. Not a bad strategy!
Obtaining website visitors through search engine tactics falls into two major categories: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here is a look at both of these important marketing approaches and how they can work together to your benefit.
SEM- Paid Search
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the act of marketing a website via search engines by improving rank in organic/natural listings, paid/sponsored listings, or a combination of the both. SEM is usually accomplished through the use of what Google calls "sponsored links" and what Yahoo! calls "sponsor results." These are the listings that appear at the top or along the right column of a search results page, and are usually separated by a shaded box or border.
A successful SEM campaign includes the following:
- Search Engine Optimization – I’ll cover this in depth in the next article of this blog series! Stay tuned for it later this week.
- Search Engine and Directory Submission Management - A web directory in simplest form is a human indexed search engine. This practice entails submitting a site to a directory that indexes websites for the purpose of driving a large amount of quality traffic to the site.
- Paid Inclusion - This is a great option for dynamic websites which search engines cannot find. In order for potential visitors to easily find a website, it’s critical that the website’s pages are included in search engine databases. A Pay-For-Inclusion agreement means a website pays a search engine to include pages from the website in its database, or index. However, there is no guarantee by doing this that the website will be ranked higher than others. On the other hand, the site will be guaranteed that the pages submitted will be included in, and won’t be dropped from, the search engine's index for a specified period of time.
- Paid-Ad-Placement (PPC) -
- Expected ROI - According to a 2009 NY Times study, ROI should convert as follows:
Average value of visitor via Paid search Link: $2.38
Average value of visitor via Organic search result: $1.35
SEM vs. SEO - How do they differ? Check back later this week to find out!
Six Ways to be Awesome on Twitter!
Are you actively Tweeting away on Twitter but just can’t seem to ‘get’ it? Twitter is all about sharing information in the form of Tweets. A Tweet consists of a message you are shouting to the world. Twitter limits all Tweets to 140 characters so you’ll need to get creative to get your message across and give it the most impact possible. Let’s focus on some tips to help you make the most out of those 140 characters!
Before you Tweet, here are some important items to consider:
- Target - Think about your ideal target audience and the types of information you want to share with them. Tailor your messaging to fit the demographic you wish to engage with Twitter.
- Conversation - Social Media is all about building relationships; don’t treat it as a one way street. Join in on existing conversations, reply to Tweets from people you follow, create your own conversation piece and be sure to ask plenty of questions of your followers.
- Positive Content - Since your Twitter account is for marketing your company’s products or services, make sure to keep your Tweets professional. You don’t want to bombard your current and potential customers with details of your personal life or items that could be taken as negative or inappropriate.
- Pace - Twitter is very fast paced. Remain consistent in the timing of your Tweets. If you Tweet five times one day and then disappear for two weeks, chances are people are going to forget about you. Conversely, don’t blast your followers with 15 Tweets in a short amount of time. Find a balance in the timing of your Tweets to remain in everyone’s mind in a positive way.
- Balance – Keep you goals in mind. Why are you using Twitter? Is your ultimate goal to drive new customers to your website? If so, make sure that you sprinkle in Tweets that drive people to your website, but don’t overdo it. Too many Tweets with the same marketing-based goal will become too repetitive and your followers will become bored.
- Keywords – Use relevant keywords in your Tweets so that people who are searching Twitter will come across you during their search. This is a great way to earn yourself some brand new followers who never knew about your company.
With all of this in mind, it’s time to get Tweeting!
Want more helpful tips on how to use Twitter to market your business? Download our free "Twitter for Marketing your Business" eBook now!
Inuvo Experiencing Explosive Growth in 2010!
Our Q2 of 2010 financial results were recently released and highlighted our impressive growth so far this year! This is a tremendous feat for any company to accomplish in such a sour economy.
The Inuvo Platform team has been hard at work in the past year since the Platform’s birth. We are celebrating the Platform’s first anniversary with hundreds of advertisers and thousands of publishers! These advertisers and publishers have made the Inuvo Platform home to hundreds top performing offers. These numbers continue to grow on a daily basis as people learn more about the Platform and what makes it unique.
If you haven’t had a chance to sign up as an advertiser or publisher – now’s the time! As you can see, we are constantly growing out Platform with fresh advertisers launching new offers daily. On the flip side, we are adding in new publishers after careful screening to grow the reach of the offers in the Platform. Also, if you join Offer Vault, you can compare our offers side-by-side with a multitude of other industry players.
What do you like about the Inuvo Platform? How can we help you grow?
How to Work with your Account Manager to Grow your Business
Jessica Cooper, Account Manager, has outlined the key to your advertising success by way of forming a team with your Inuvo Platform Account Manager. Our dedicated Account Management Team is comprised of chris [dot] gerbick [at] inuvo [dot] com (Chris Gerbick) and jessica [dot] cooper [at] inuvo [dot] com (Jessica Cooper). If you are a current or potential advertiser in the Inuvo Platform, here is a list of ways that you can work with your Account Manager to grow your business and boost your success.
What’s one thing you are guaranteed to get with Inuvo that you won’t get anywhere else? Great account managers! We understand that when you grow, we grow as well. We are here to help you and to ensure your success.
The “Quality Account Manager” is a lost art in the world of Affiliate Marketing. At Inuvo, we believe in keeping this alive and want to make sure you know are here for you. One thing you might ask is, “What does my account manager do for me?” Your account manager is here to:
- Provide the highest quality of customer service in the industry.
- Resolve any billing questions.
- Keep your contact information up to date.
- Let you know how your offers compare to competition on your space, including payout and performance.
- Opens your offer to other promotion types that may work better than it does currently.
- Give feedback and guidance on how to better optimize your program.
- Proactively assists in evaluating potential fraud, should it arise.
How you can help us?
1. Provide us with the details of all offers you have which may be a good fit for the Platform. This will help us make the best matches between our publishers and your offers.
2. Keep us up to date with your contact information and any changes in your team. If we (and through us, your publishers) can’t reach you, we can’t make your program succeed!
3. Let us know what you are looking to gain from your offer. What type of return? How much volume do you want? What are the best target demographics and verticals?
4. Suggest any features you need in the Inuvo Platform via our Feedback button in order to make your experience with us the best possible.
We’re here to make sure your experience with Inuvo is pleasant, profitable and stress-free and most of all, we want to see you grow and succeed. We are here for you, so feel free to reach out to your account manager for any questions, feedback or insight you are in need of.
Not sure who your account manager is? Just send an email to sales [at] inuvo [dot] com and your account manger will get right back to you. We look forward to a great relationship!
Inuvo Advertisers: Let's Get Seasonal!
Before you know it, Summer will be over and Fall will be upon us! Now is the time to start looking forward to the Fall and Winter seasons and the marketing opportunities that the last remaining months of the year make available.
We all know that marketing is a world-wide phenomenon, so be sure you have thoroughly researched your target market’s customs, traditions, holidays and more. More interest should be given to advertisements that your target audience deems as relevant and of interest to them. Look for creative ways to tie your offers into upcoming holiday and events. Keeping your advertisements and creative package updated and timely is an easy way to reinvigorate interest from current and potential publishers.
If you are marketing to people in the United States, we have a string of holidays throughout Fall and Winter that you can use to your advantage. A few weeks from now we will be celebrating Labor Day! Can you believe we are already that far into 2010? Then in the blink of an eye Eid-al-Fitr, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Kwanzaa, Hanukah, Christmas and New Year’s Eve will be knocking on the door. If you are targeting the United States, take some time to decide which, or all, of these holidays fit your audience and start working on your game plan now for new creative, special promotions, and more.
Publishers appreciate advertisers who are on the ball and remain involved in continuing to improve their offers. Make sure to get your seasonal creative loaded into the Inuvo Platform early so publishers have plenty of time to get it set in their workflow and so they are able to provide you with any specific feedback without being in a huge rush or completely miss key dates. Being proactive and allowing your publishers plenty of time to update existing creative or create new campaigns is a great way to win trust, loyalty and set yourself apart from the pack.
What types of seasonal campaigns are you looking to run? Have you had a specific holiday campaign in the past that was successful? Tell us about it!
The Inuvo Platform Simplifies Text Link Creative
The most recent improvement to the Inuvo Platform is the streamlining of the text link creative type. The simplification of this creative type was added to the Platform due to feedback received from some of our clients. Here are the details of how you can get started with this creative type.
For advertisers:
To access the ability to create new text links, you will need to navigate to the My Creatives section of the Platform and click on the “Add New Creative” button. Next, select the offer’s name from the drop down menu. This will take you to the “Add New Creatives” page. Here you’ll be able to complete the entire process of adding a new piece of creative for your publishers to use in promoting your offer.
Once you select the creative type in the second drop down box, Step 2 and Step 3 will automatically populate below. In Step 2 you will enter your text creative. Please note that any text you’d like to make clickable will need curly braces around { }.
Next, you’ll complete the creative’s name, description and place it in up to five categories. Optionally, you are allowed to give the creative a unique destination URL.
For publishers:
Navigate to the “My Creatives” section of the Inuvo Platform and either click on the “Jump to” links or use the filters to find the creative you’d like to use. (Please note you can also click on the offer name from your Dashboard and then click on “View All” in the “Creatives” block on the right column. Next, click on “Get Creative Code,” select Standard Linking or Direct Linking (if available) and enter up to three subIDs. Now your creative code is ready for you to copy and paste!
Inuvo Platform Team Continues Providing Important Updates!
Inuvo’s Development Team has once again been hard at work bringing important updates to the Platform based on your feedback! Here are the most recent updates to the Inuvo Platform.
Updates for Advertisers:
- Text Email Creative can now be up to 10,000 characters in length.
- Offer Description can now be up to 1,000 characters in length.
- Account Summary in the Billing section now shows all charges in red and credits in black.
- Invoice and Statement details have been updated so that charges to the advertiser are shown in positive values and credits given to them are in negative values.
Publisher updates for this release are:
- Offer tiles have been updated in the Browse Offers and Offer Details pages. We are now highlighting the Payout and any Second Tier Payout (if applicable).
- Marketing types and a Landing Page preview link have also been added to the offer tiles.
For Advertisers and Publishers, we have the following update:
- Once you login to the Inuvo Platform the initial landing page now shows Account ID and Owner Name if you have access to multiple accounts.
Keep your suggestions and feedback coming! We are coming up on the Inuvo Platform’s first anniversary and it’s exciting to see how it has already evolved so much with the help of client feedback. We want to keep improving your experience with the Platform, so let us know what is important to you.
