Affiliate Blog

One-Time Publisher Bonus Opportunity

As you know from previous communications, DoubleClick Performics experienced a system outage on Saturday, December 8, 2007 due to an inadvertent complete loss of power in the DoubleClick Thornton, Colorado data center. In light of the service disruption, DoubleClick Performics decided to do something special for its Affiliate Publishers and will pay a one-time bonus of 10% based on affiliate commissions generated on Saturday, December 15, 2007. Such bonus will be equal to 10% of the commissions earned during the entire day by an Affilate Publisher and will be reflected in the January payment statement. We are hopeful you view this as a reflection of our commitment to your success, and the success of our Affiliate Marketing business. We appreciate your valuable contribution. The DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Team

Current Outage - 3PM CST Update

There was an outage at our primary data center that caused a major disruption in service this morning.  I do not have all of the details on the timeframe and impact of the down time at the moment, but this affecting both our application and tracking servers at the moment.  I'm told we should have the tracking back online soon (it's 12:37PM CST as I type).  More updates as they become available.

Larry Adams
Product Manager Affiliate

UPDATE: Services began coming back online around 2PM CST.  We are fully operational at this point and are assessing impact to our systems and recoverability of data.  I will continue to post updates as I receive them.  If you follow us on twitter, you can get updates via sms on your phone: http://twitter.com/performics

Advertisers are Feelin' Hot Hot Hot!

DoubleClick Performics would like to congratulate our advertisers who have made the Internet Retailer Hot 100 list, which recognizes some of the best and most innovative online retailers. We are pleased to offer affiliate programs for many of the retailers on this list. Below is a partial list of our advertisers who were recognized in the Internet Retailer Hot 100. Congratulations!

AE.com                                   Patagonia                           
BarnesandNoble.com                PCConnection.com
Cabela’s                                  Skechers
Delightful Deliveries Inc.          Swell
Diapers.com                            Timberland
Guess Jeans                            Vivre
Harry & David                         Kohls.com
LakeChamplainChocolates

12/2 ConnectCommerce Outage Update

We suffered a hardware outage that affected banner serving to consumers and a media server for the ConnectCommerce application on Sunday afternoon. The two systems both started having problems around 3:20 CST on December 2. Services for ConnectCommerce were restored within an hour and twenty minutes. The banner serving outage lasted approximately three hours but only impacted images hosted by DoubleClick Performics. Many affiliate publishers host their own ads and these images displayed properly throughout the outage.

At no time were our tracking/redirect servers affected and text and data feed links were fully operational throughout the media serving outage. The tracking servers operate on different hardware systems and are not dependent on media serving for operation.

Publishers Hit the Target

As I've mentioned in a previous post, Target Marketing magazine is now running a regular feature (in print and online) called Affiliate Spotlight, where I get to highlight top performing, fast-growing, and/or innovative publishers in the space.  Those that have been featured to date include Keycode/Nuuvy.com, Mall Networks, Kaboodle (recently acquired by Hearst), and Bill Me Later.  Kudos to this diverse set of publishers for positively contributing to the growth of our industry, and stay tuned for many more Affiliate Spotlights to come.

-Dan Chiss

Drop and Give Me a ConnectCommerce Boot Camp!

On November 8, the Affiliate Publisher Team held a ConnectCommerce^SM Boot Camp. This webinar provided how to’s in ConnectCommerce^SM included joining advertisers, running reports and obtaining links through our new Get Links(Beta). We closed with a robust Q and A session.

Sara Adler, Manager of Affiliate Strategy moderated the session, while Jorge Zapata, Business Systems Analyst walked us through ConnectCommerce^SM . Larry Adams, Affiliate Product Manager, handled the Q and A. Thank you to attendees for a very successful webinar!

If you are interested in viewing the webinar, please visit our recorded session:

http://breeze.doubleclick.net/p10216105/

*Please note there is a brief 10 second pause approximately halfway through. Just sit tight, and the sound will return.

Performance Marketing 2.0: Facebook Pages and Social Ads

Facebook announced some major new initiatives on November 6th that take social network advertising in interesting directions. While there are no guarantees that they will be successful, these developments point in an interesting direction that others are also exploring.

Here's some background information on three new inter-related initiatives that create some new online performance marketing opportunities:

Pages:
Businesses, brands/products, bands, organizations and even famous people can now have "pages" which people can become "fans" of. These are free to any business or org and present the opportunity to interact directly with customers/fans. We're testing this ourselves with our DoubleClick Performics Facebook Page. If you like us, "fan" us!

Beacons:

Websites can give FB users the option of including in their "newsfeed" actions like rating a movie or buying a book or reserving a flight (for instance). Users can choose which items to send to Facebook or not.

Social ads:
Replacing their Facebook Flyers, Social Ads are profile-targeted ads. In other words, they can be targeted to FB users based on information in their profiles such as gender and location, but also interests ("kayaking" or "harry potter"), relationship status ("engaged" -> bridal registries!!), political views or workplace, in any combination.

These ads become "social" when FB ties a fan to an ad to create an implied endorsement. If you've rated a movie on Blockbuster, for instance, one of your friends might see a newsfeed item saying "Cam rated 'Almost Famous' 1 star on Blockbuster" with a Blockbuster ad immediately below it. FB believes these fan endorsements will double conversion rates over typical banners.

Facebook also announced a dashboard called Insights to report data on page and campaign stats. An overview of all these features is available at www.facebook.com/business/. (I've also been tracking some of the detail these recent social networking marketing developments on my personal blog: www.web-cite.com.)

The sharing of favorite products and brands is similar to what social shopping sites have been exploring. Tying profile-targeted ads to these endorsements is interesting from an SEM and affiliate marketing perspective. As a Forrester analyst put it: "This could shift [Facebook] ad buying to large brands who have experience buying and managing search and direct response ads." 

For this reason, we're following these developments closely and exploring the campaign and marketing strategy implications carefully. If you'd like to partner with us to "think forward" into this territory, either from an affiliate or search marketing perspective, please contact us via this form or your Performics representative.

Cam Balzer
VP, Emerging Media

New Advertisers in our Affiliate Network

We dropped a press release Monday announcing the new advertisers we brought on in Q3.  There are 52 new advertisers in our network, many of whom are completely new to affiliate marketing.  From the release:

As further evidence of the renewed interest in the affiliate marketing channel overall, DoubleClick Performics was pleased to add many other advertisers embracing the affiliate channel for the first time. Some of the advertisers new to affiliate marketing Crabtree & Evelyn, Diapers.com/1800 Diapers, Guess, Lee Jeans, Oh Baby! Inc. and others.

We also re-launched our website last week (or the previous, it's hard to keep track).  There are some great new sections and our original research is featured prominently.  Take a look and come back to the blog and let us know what you think.

Larry Adams
Affiliate Product Manager

New Links UI Beta Release

I'm happy to announce that we've released a major redesign to our links interface for affiliate publishers.  This UI is being made available concurrently with our legacy links interface in order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season.  But I strongly encourage you to take give it a try; we've done a lot of user testing with this interface and most tasks take far less time in the new UI.

To view the new UI, select Get Links from the top navigation and choose Get Links Beta from the action list drop-down for any of your approved advertisers.  We expect this UI will be in a beta state for the next two to three months.  In that time, we will be taking your feedback and making improvements to the UI.  In fact, our next update is due in roughly twenty days.  Until then, please take a few minutes to kick the tires and let us know what you think.

Larry Adams
Affiliate Product Manager

Let's Hear it for Affiliate Shoppers!

This month's Direct Magazine features Partnering for Progress by DoubleClick Performics' Chris Henger which discusses the characteristics of the Affiliate Shopper in comparison to the average Web shopper. Affiliate shoppers trump the average web shopper in average order size as well as household income. Go Affiliate Shoppers!