Trends & Innovations in the Affiliate Marketplace – Live Blog Post from AMDays

I’m live blogging in a few different places this week while at Affiliate Management Days (the new affiliate management conference in San Francisco) and so far I’ve found it to be really fun and interesting. I’m sitting in a session called Trends & Innovations in the Affiliate Marketplace being taught by Google’s Ali Pasha.

I have to leave early, but here are my take aways from the first 20 mins of this session:

• Google affiliate network spends 70% of their time thinking about what will move the needle and push the limits to trends and innovation optimization.
• Top three focuses: Social, Mobile and Commerce

Social

• Social was actually started by PC Flowers and Gifts (they had about 2300 affiliates in 1996) and they recognized the gap between communications – especially between multiple people at the same time.
• The new kind of affiliate is the social affiliate – and especially if CELEBRITIES become affiliates themselves. Not only will they create a ton of cash, but their followers will benefit from riding the coat tails of celebrity product endorsements.
• Make sure as an affiliate manager you’re providing affiliates with tools they can use in the social space. Think of how the promotions would look as an end product and provide what they need to help them achieve that look.
• Think about fashion bloggers and mom bloggers and provide tools that make their posting faster and easier than past.
• Create a social presence – offer your followers incentives  – engage with partners building social
• Follow this lead from customers: Demand – Ideation – Production – Distribution (Threadless.com is extremely successful at this – they speak with your community FIRST, then design the product and make it)
• Shapeways.com executes well on nurturing a community to harness ideas and creating products based on that need
• “Turn social data into doing”
• Enable users to get connected with your product early

Mobile

• Make sure your conversion tracking works!
• Tables are here to stay – they are DIFFERENT from “mobile” – you do not use tables when you’re on the go and does not have the same constraints as a true “mobile” device (have separate experience for tables / mobile)
• People who are on tables are more likely to buy than someone on their phone therefore focus on these first
• HowtogoMo.com helps you evaluate how good your site is to go mobile
• 93% of US retail shopping is still done offline – 70% use a smartphone while shopping in store
• Google wallet will help increase conversions on mobile and tablet devices as you no longer have to carry your wallet – have the info in your phone and even connect it so you always collect loyalty points through your purchase. This can be done even for offline sales.
• RingRevenue.com and RevTracks.com work with Google to help leverage the affiliate marketing channel.
• Offer complimentary “online” “offline experiences for customers that can be leveraged by affiliates

Tips

• Track your shopping cart abandonment rate, then create a coupon strategy around fixing that.
• Segment everything – so you can track and make better decisions going forward

That’s all I have time for at the moment. Must go feed the baby. Will post on the Types and Value of Affiliates by Kush Absulloev of VMInnovations next!