When we take on a brand new paid search account or start to manage an existing paid search account, the immediate and most fundamental task the Search team undertakes is hashing out the account structure. Solid and consistent account architecture makes campaign management easier and more efficient while enhancing the campaign’s performance, and the program’s growth.

The NetX Paid Search Team has developed a list of best practices to apply when evaluating account structure. Of course, every advertiser is unique and therefore every account will vary. But these are the best paid-search practices that we stick by, no matter what the account:

1. 1. Separate your campaigns by device: Keep the desktop campaign separate from the mobile campaign, which is separate from tablet campaign (which is separate from whatever comes next!)
2. 2. Separate campaigns by channel: Run search ads and display ads in independent campaigns
3. 3. Split Brand and Non-Brand campaigns: Keep brand terms in one campaign and non-brand terms in another.
4. 4. Use geo targeting: Set up the account to take advantage of localization, whether it’s international, national, regional, etc.
5. 5. Mirror the advertiser’s website: This ensures keyword scalability, simplifies destination URL implementation, and creates a consistent brand message
6. 6. Use standard campaign-naming conventions: This is critical for efficient management, cross-team knowledge transfer, reporting and analysis, and scaling
7. 7. Create tightly themed ad groups: This increases ad relevancy and click through rate (CTR), increases conversion rates, and allows for precise and targeted ad testing
8. 8. Have a back-up ad running: You never want to go dark if an ad gets disapproved
9. 9. Remove duplicate keywords: This decreases intra-account competition and increase your search ad campaign’s efficiency
10. 10. Separate ad groups by match types: This creates easy-to-tier bids and improves both campaign management and account efficiency

Jump ahead a few years and I anticipate that these 10 best practices remain just that: best practices for setting up your paid search accounts. If anything, as new products, targeting capabilities, and ad format are introduced, I believe this list will grow. It’s critical that our paid search accounts are capable of changing and expanding at the speed of the industry. This list is a great start to ensuring that your paid search architecture creates efficient campaign management, optimizes paid search performance, and enhances campaign growth.

Julianne Bohl is the Director of Search Advertising for NetX.

Setting goals for your affiliate marketing channel sounds so simple. But the reality is there are a number of factors to consider when setting goals and choosing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your affiliate marketing channel. Elements to consider include how established your brand is, the maturity of your affiliate program, and the other marketing efforts both online and offline that may influence your affiliate channel.

The most popular KPIs for retail advertisers with an affiliate program are Revenue, Sales and ROAS (return on ad spend). If you’re a new brand or launching a new affiliate program, revenue will be your easiest measure of success. How much revenue? That will depend upon factors such as brand awareness, how competitive your industry is, and seasonality. Mature brands should consider other factors, or secondary KPIs, such as whether affiliate sales are coming from existing customers or new customers. As your affiliate program grows, your goals and KPIs should evolve.

Affiliate marketing is generally known as the most efficient online-marketing channel because of its pay-for-performance model. That means it should have a high ROAS. Before calculating your ROAS, make sure you clearly define all of your cost variables. Affiliate commissions are obvious, but there are also network fees, paid placements and agency fees. If you operate your affiliate channel with a fixed budget, make sure you have allocated funds properly to hit your revenue goals and still meet your ROAS objectives. I also recommend keeping a small budget set aside for paid placements, additional exposure and testing.

For subscription products and services you’ll be looking at a whole different set of metrics, in fact revenue may not even be relevant. The number of subscriptions and your CPA (cost per acquisition) will be the means by which you grade performance.

Once you have your goals in place and you’re ready to measure your KPIs, it’s time to use these goals to build your strategy. One of the most important things to remember is that your goals are there to measure your success. If you didn’t hit your goals, make sure you understand why. You should also revisit and readjust your goals regularly depending on growth and other factors you may not have accounted for in your initial plans.

Salvatore Conca is the Director of Affiliate Marketing at NetX.

Attribution Management is the latest attempt by marketing technology companies to provide advertisers and their agencies with a solution for tracking and valuing the slew of advertisements that lead up to an Ecommerce sale. Attribution Management has a more complete definition, but beware: this site is a ClearSaleing blog, one of the early technology leaders in the space.

Currently the default methodology is “last click,” meaning that regardless of the marketing messages that a consumer is exposed to, the last click – whether it be search, display, affiliate, email or other – gets the credit for the sale. In some ways not much has changed since the advent of modern advertising – brand marketers are still fighting it out with direct marketers to get the kudos (and the lion’s share of the budget). However, thanks to technology we can now create an entire picture of brand interaction prior to sale – well, sort of.

The technology has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and attribution management can be an effective tool for Ecommerce marketers on the hook to show ROAS/ROI. However, the current challenge has less to do with technology and more to do with developing industry-accepted methodologies.

If you look at the early leaders – ClearSaleing (now a GSI/ebay company), C3 Metrics, Convertro and Adometry (you can even check out Visual IQ and Atlas) – you’ll notice that they all use similar attribution models. These models loosely include last click, equal attribution (eg 25/25/25/25); and a weighted-model that looks something like this: 60% credit to first exposure, 30% split among the second, third and/or fourth exposures and 10% to the last click. These companies also offer “custom models” which are algorithms based on prior results.

Attribution Management companies often use a weighted model to track a buyer’s steps to make a purchase.

Whats wrong with the current models? Last click provides no real value – any basic web-analytics solution will give you that. Equal attribution is not based on anything other than indecision. The weighted model is interesting but I have yet to see any compelling consumer-behavior data that supports this model. The custom model obviously has the most promise but I think that technology providers need to be more transparent about how the model works so that we, as marketers, can make better decisions.

David Herscott is a Managing Partner at NetX. Contact David at David@netx.com.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about Google Chrome’s new no-track option, an answer to rising consumer concern over online privacy. So what will the no-track option mean to me as a leisurely Internet user? What will it mean to me as a search advertiser? I’ll bet if I asked five different people how implementing no-track would affect their online experience I’d get five different answers.

We know that Google will not collect users’ browsing histories when the Opt-Out extension is selected, but users will continue to see ads. How is this so? Not all of Google’s ads are served based on user preference. When I started out in Search, my campaigns consisted of keyword-search paid ads and keyword contextually targeted display ads. That was pretty much the extent of it. But a lot has changed in five years!

Browser cookies – a small piece of information sent by a web server to store on a web browser – have allowed us to collect signals about users’ interests, enabling us to build more-robust profiles of who our customers are. This profile is no longer just defined by the search engine queries and the content of the sites visited. With this wealth of consumer insight, we can now serve an ad to a former customer, informing them when an upgrade for their previously bought product is released. Or we can serve an ad to a non-purchasing browser, offering a site or product coupon. Do consumers really dislike these ads? Personally, if I’m checking the weather, I’d rather see an ad for sales on flights to Florida (because I’ve been researching this, and yes, I want to know about this sale!) than an ad for gardening (this is irrelevant to me – a eucalyptus plant is about as far as I get in New York).

So if users start opting out, and search engines and ad networks are forced to move away from preference-based targeting and back to the basics of keyword targeting, will the problem be solved? Will end-consumers feel more secure searching online or will they be irritated by the less and less relevant ads they see? What about advertisers? Will online marketing become less insightful? Will advertisers pull back from spending online? Will content providers dependent on ad revenue be forced to stop producing this content?

It’s tough to say. But I think as an industry, we can agree that we face the tough challenge of rethinking how we approach this space.

The phenomenon of online marketing has always been its measurability. The compelling data and the insights an advertiser can glean from campaigns are truly above and beyond any other marketing channel, and to potentially lose this is such a shame. Wouldn’t InStyle’s print team love to find an efficient way to send me my issue with one set of ads (if only they knew I always skip the beauty section) and my sister her issue with a separate set of ads (she saves the beauty section)? Search advertising is at the risk of losing what it does best: Understand consumers and reach them in precise ways that are personally meaningful.

If we lose this as advertisers, current and future brand enthusiasts lose out too. It’s up to our industry to find a way to maintain this relevancy while also securing users’ privacy.

Julianne Bohl is the Director of Search Advertising for NetX.

AffiliateBenchmarks™, the official research division of NetX, is pleased to announce its inclusion in Econsultancy’s Internet Statistics Compendium. The most recent report – published September 2011 – is the fourth iteration of the study and includes data from more than 8,600 affiliate marketing professionals. We are ecstatic about the opportunity to share our data and findings with Econsultancy’s userbase.

In fact, NetX has worked with Econsultancy to offer our readers and supporters a 30% discount on Econsultancy’s premium membership offerings. As a premium member, you will have unlimited access to all of Econsultancy’s resources, including the Global Affiliate Marketing Statistics, which includes data from AffiliateBenchmarks™.

To take advantage of this offer, visit Econsultancy’s membership page, choose the level that best fits your needs, and then enter NETX30 in the promotional code box. This offer expires 12/31/12.

Last month, Impact Radius released their informative e-book Top 12 Marketing Challenges Solved for 2012, the companion piece to their blog series #2012Marketing Challenge. The e-book addresses today’s marketing challenges and provides solutions from some of the top leaders in online marketing – including NetX’s Founding Partner, Chris Kramer.

Chris discusses the benefits of companies using Business Intelligence tools to better manage their data and positively affect their ROI.

Top 12 Marketing Challenges Solved for 2012 can be downloaded for free at Impact Radius’ resource page.

For more expert marketing advice from Chris, follow him on Twitter at @chrismkramer.

First let me apologize to Erica and Valerie for the tardiness of this post. Back in August of 2011 I ran a little contest among the affiliate marketing experts that work at NetX. Our folks were asked to use their influence within the affiliate community in order to drive participation in our AffiliateBenchmarks research study. We tracked the results using unique links for each person and awarded the winners with cheesy cool trophies and free lunch for a month.

Erica Myones (right of photo) won the Most Connected Overall award for driving the most participants to our research project. This was not a surprising outcome since Erica is well connected as a result of her many years in the industry.

Valerie Russo (left of photo) won the Most Connected By Weight award (photo below). Val, an obviously fit person, won this award because she drove the most participants based on her tenure in affiliate marketing. This category was created to give everyone on the team an equal chance of winning.

Congrats to Erica and Val…NetX’s Most Connected Affiliate Experts!

click here to read press release

The day kicked off with a wrapped present (NetX logo drink cup) on everyone’s desk and a catered breakfast for everyone.  We get fresh bagels and juice on Monday’s anyway so we spiced it up with fresh fruit, pastries, donuts and muffins.  After breakfast our Office Manager Sharon passed around some clues for a scavenger hunt that would lead us to our second present of the day – a stylish yet practical NetX logo umbrella.

Around 11 the masseuses rolled in and our staff was treated to 20 minute relaxing massages as we turned one of our conference rooms into a Zen retreat.   The team was then treated to lunch on NetX – their choice of either Chipotle or Lenny’s Deli  and if they weren’t stuffed from all of that we broke out a series of red themed afternoon snacks like Swedish Fish and Mike and Red Hots.

Here at NetX we love our deserts so the late afternoon we surprised everyone with an ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery (red velvet of course!) as the whole team gathered in our break room / lounge.

The celebration finally wound down as we broke out the in-house kegerator and some Dos Equis (XX) beer.  Huge thanks to our prime minister of happiness and office manager Sharon – she did an amazing job coordinating the day to make sure it was a memorable day for the team.

Want to see some pictures?

Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs Passes Away
WashingtonPost.com
Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Apple Inc., has sadly passed away at the age of 56.  An original thinker who helped create the Macintosh also reinvented the portable music player with the iPod and reordered the cell phone market with the iPhone.  The introduction of the iPad also jump-started the tablet market, and now it dominates the field.

Holiday Sales to Rise 2.8% to $465 Billion
MediaPost.com
The National Retail Federation says it expects holiday spending to rise just 2.8% this year, to a total of $465.6 billion.  While that gain is far less than the 5.2% gain retailers saw last year, it is still above the 2.6% average of the last 10 years.  Retailers have posted sales gains for the last 14 months but ongoing concerns about the economy have them worried.

Google Analytics Adds Real-Time Traffic Data
Mashable.com
Google for the first time is providing a window into real-time web traffic with Google Analytics Real-Time.  Real-Time reports are available in the new version of Google Analytics, and administrators with Analytics accounts will get Real-Time reports.  For users trying to gauge how a campaign or post is performing, Real-Time will track the immediate impact to site traffic.

Mobile Ad Spend to Hit $1 Billion
SearchEngineWatch.com
According to eMarketer, mobile ad spending could reach $1.23 billion for U.S. advertisers by the end of the year, up 66% from last year’s $743 million figure.  They also predict that this figure will continue to see escalating growth, reaching $4.4 billion by 2015.

Google Launches Trusted Stores Program
InformationWeek.com
To ally doubts about the legitimacy of the e-commerce sites, Google has announced a new program to highlight exemplary online merchants.  Google Trusted Stores aspires to help shoppers recognize online stores that offer compelling shopping experiences.  Google has already begun admitting merchants into the program, which will require participating sites to share shipping and customer service data with Google.

Flash-sale E-mails Spark More Purchases When Sent Late in the Afternoon
InternetRetailer.com
Flash-sale e-mails sent after 3 P.M. generate more transactions and more revenue than e-mails sent out earlier in the day, according to an Experian CheetahMail analysis.  The data reveals that messages sent after 3 P.M. have an open rate 90% greater than e-mails sent at mid-day.  Late-day messages stand out more in consumers’ inboxes because fewer e-retailers send messages late in the day.