Bharatmalik.com

Affiliate marketing as such is coined by Amazon and best explored by big ecommerce players like ebay, expedia, and other US gift portals. Now it has become source of making money online. It has slowly started its journey in India.

Back in 2007 it entered with players like DGM (A firm from UK) for which we were the first one to integrate their pixel code as a Merchant. In not less than a month, we understand the pros and cons associated with this piece of online marketing.

Hence from what it was when given to me to scale, what is remarkable is the way new players are entering. Now it seems that OMG is also making inroads into India with Shoogloo online marketing.

In the coming years, we will see more and more Indian merchants signing up and affiliates (Internet marketer) learning to promote and making some good bucks.

Interesting time ahead for all those waiting to earn money with their niche websites. Just have a website and lean how to monetize with merchants offers will give you monies.

Today I just thought let me share what do we understand by Web Enabled calls and See Page Ratio. And why it becomes critical to monitor.

Web Enabled Call: A type of customer behavior induced by your online marketing efforts on your website to generate sale which induces him to call your sales representative to understand your product offerings in detail.

Normally many online portals offer different call center number on those pages to understand quality of product offerings thru frequency of these web enabled calls.

See Page Ratio= Web Enabled Calls/ No. Of Visits to website or landing page

See page ratio works in the same way was conversion ratio works and trend will give you an idea of online marketing efficiency on the website or landing page. But this is different from Conversion Ratio.

I would share one example to conclude this, lets say 10 customers looks at the online AD in Google and clicks on it. After seeing the product 4 checks the number and calls to your sales representative. That call would be Web Enabled Call and See Page Ratio would be 40%. And further on if remaining 5 books directly on the website then that would be counted in Conversion Ratio (6/10)=60%.

Recently we were looking to expand our base organically thru brand penetration in tier 2 towns and niche cities. One thing that came to my mind was how to do that at an affordable cost. So far I was learning that buying media is a tough ask as lot of publisher’s/networks charge exorbitant prices and delivering peanuts.

I turned the table around with different proposition. I have learnt one nice quote somewhere, “In time of peace, be at war”. That would mean, go aggressive and build your ammunition when everyone else is reluctant to do.

And believe me it clicked, we have cracked deals on major publishers at a lower price than ever. I guess when everyone is struggling to get the Business, they are bound to give that.

Recession worked for us in buying media from major publishers but one has to positive in making it work for you.

Recently IAMAI conducted a research and released papers on Internet In India, interestingly Young Men and college going students constitutes more than 50% of active Internet users base in India and it is increasing at a rapid pace.

In this evolving phase of offline to online shift of Internet advertising, it would be ultra important to segment your execution plan depending upon these demographics.

While

As an online marketer, one has to try different permutaions and combinations to find what works better in order to generate demand.

What is Lead Generation- When customer has intent to buy your product & he needs a hygiene factor to go with you as a service provider.

What is Online Booking- When customers has intent to buy and he is going to pay you online to transact with you.

There are pros and cons of both technique, and I think biggest differentiator is what kind of product a customer wants to buy makes his decision to go for lead generation or booking online.

When a product is commoditized like domestic flights, he may not like to fill in a form and wait for travel agent to get back to him like traditional travel agents used to operate. Customers would be more than happy to pay online and get his tickets on the fly.

Whereas, customer needs a handholding and he is not sure about the content and product he is buying, he fills a form and generate a comfort factor from the service provider.

We have tested this with our holiday packages section for outbound travel, where customers are still reluctant to buy either because of content, product or paying that much huge amount for their leisure travel, this lead generation model has given significant demand to serve our customers.

Having said that, it wont be too long when these kind of products would become part of online booking by the shear amount of scalability it holds and also, money and time it takes to acquire customers offline.

When i was building Affiliate Marketing in Yatra.com, I came across many affiliates/websites operating coupon codes websites in US. It made me curious to get into detail as to what is so lucrative about this piece of the online marketing.

I deep dived into it and found out that 85% of internet population in US checks coupon codes, discount codes, voucher codes or promotional codes online. This is humongous as far as reach is concern. And it answered my question as well.

Some of websites i dealt as a Business partner directly from affiliate networks are www.couponwinner.com, www.couponcodes.co.uk, www.retailmenot.com.

I guess with economy downturn more and more people will move towards deals and discount, and for marketer it makes it easy to reduce the cost of acquisition and clock more sales.

However downside of this, your brand may become discount oriented and hence would not be counted as service provider.

So a word of caution here, use these coupon codes and discount codes as an emergency resort to improve sales rather than risking your brand’s value proposition.

Google's Search behavior

Recently, i have come across Google’s search behavior evolution from what it was in 2005 and what is now. I guess picture speaks lot than words so i would leave up to the folks to interpret how important is to appear on top search search results.

Even harder to get that postition and hence it is becoming even challenging to crack your best keywords to drive traffic to your website.

Like i mentioned in my previous post on display advertisement. Its time to share feedback on it.

We went ahead and did a deal with one of the most traffic generating websites like Yahoo, AOL etc. And found out that we were getting clicks (mind you at some cost per click) but not the return in terms of sales. Reasons could be following:

• Since these websites have huge amount of page views. Unless you cover 360 degree space on these sites, it would just burn your money and nothing else as you will appear very few times out of large publishers waiting to show for the same space.
• CPC and CPM is too high to justify the return

Having said that, it has advantage of brand reinforcement and build recall.

Overall, i would say display advertisement on big portals like Yahoo, AOL wont be cost effective and be clear about the objective of your activity. If it is brand penetration then worth spending but if it is about advertisement versus sales ratio then be ready to spend extravagant amount with no return.

Hope this will clear hoopla about Yahoo, AOL or Rediff display advertisement.

Recently we have tried a slight different way of getting demand thru ad copies. We have started mentioning our call center sales number along with the best offer so that while cost of click may increase or decrease, we have managed some customers to call us after seeing the offer.

Goa Hotels at Rs. 999

Lowest Price in Last Ten Years!
Book Online or Call 0124 304 0777.
www.Yatra.com/Goa_Hotels_Offers

While this approach has its advantages, this will surely reduce CTR and quality score of the whole campaign.

One has to balance such acts and drive efficiency while focussing on demand generation in online marketing.

One of the key element in today’s online marketing scenario and has always been is what is your ATS ratio. That means Advertising to Sales Ratio.

Let me explain this in bit detail as this useful while an online marketer tries to drive online traffic to his website.

Lets start with an example: I have spend close to 10000 in Google adwords and generated an affiliate sale of one million. This means my ATS ration will  be become:

ATS=(10000/1000000)*100= 1%

This means so far my marketing spend is 1% of the total sale. This ratio differ from product to product and Business to Business.

For any Business or product, an ideal ATS ratio should be 2-3% . Later in the post, i will touch what is see page ratio.