Q&A: David Fieldhouse on mobile affiliate marketing
Launched earlier this year, Linking Mobile aims to move the affiliate marketing model onto mobile.
I've been speaking to co-founder David Fieldhouse about the company and its plans, as well as the challenges of tracking affiliate sales via mobile.
Don't get stuck in binary madness!
So your campaign didn't deliver the right result? Not enough sales, leads or engagement (or whatever the magic success metric was)? Poor ROI perhaps? I'm not surprised!
The reason is that, in general, we use really simple measures and record binary outcomes; ‘hit/miss’, ‘sale/no sale’ or ‘open/did not open’ metrics.
Typically we use one or maybe two such metrics per campaign. This simple methodology is the default across the industry but in reality it is now a hindrance to really optimising campaigns.
Tracking tags 'break' a third of webpages: study
Tag implementation and management is a major headache for 99% of digital marketers, and 36% have experienced problems with webpages or entire websites, thanks to tagging issues.
This is the finding of a report by TagMan, and the consequences for firms include a loss of sales, traffic and campaign performance data.
Apple: digital's greatest challenge?
If Apple’s version of the digital universe were to reach real scale, then alongside privacy legislation, it poses the greatest challenge to the development of digital.
Six ways to effectively track offline sales
While we often debate how effectively we can track ROI online, it’s
occasionally worth stepping back and remembering that the ability to
track transactions and engagement points online is actually a
luxury.
In the offline domain the ability to effectively track ads and effectiveness can be severely limited. How do you know if your billboard campaign is effective?
Here’s a few ways to track what customers are up to when they’re off the grid.
Apple closes the iTunes store for iPhone users who don't want to share their location
Apple has found a new way to get people to agree to online tracking: withhold applications from them if they don't. This week Apple is launching a new iPhone. And with that comes a new operating system and the company's new advertising platform.
According to Apple's new privacy policy, users can opt out if they don't want to be served targeted ads. But if they don't want to share their location information with the company, they also won't have access to new apps from the iTunes store.
Web browser fingerprints — a new tracking method no one uses
Consumers and privacy advocates are forever concerned about the ways they can be tracked online. But it looks like one effective method has not gotten much attention to date: the browser. According to a new study from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 84% of browsers have an "instantaneously unique fingerprint." What's more? Efforts to disguise a browser might actually make consumers more easily identifiable.
Now if only companies were using this information for nefarious purposes, we'd have a real privacy issue on our hands.
Cookies under fire as regulators move in
A massive push on securing opt-ins from consumers on cookies is well under way both here and in the US.
For the record, and contrary to what you might think, I’m glad, if only because it forces us to review how we failed so badly to keep the wider world informed about how online advertising works.
How to use Google Analytics to track telephone leads: Part three
This is part three of a four-part series on how to use Google Analytics to track Telephone Leads.
Part one described the overall call tracking system. Part two explained how the data can appear in Google Analytics. Part three (this one) will start on the technical side and explain how to get the phone numbers on your site to switch according to the route to site the visitor has taken.
The final part, yet to be written, will explain how to get the data from the telephone call into Google Analytics (this is the CallTrackID bit).
Q&A: Todd Crawford of Impact Radius
Impact Radius is a new performance-based platform for both online and offline advertising, which launches today.
I've been asking Impact Radius co-founder Todd Crawford about why he thinks the startup will catapult the performance advertising industry forward...
