Ad Strategies Exposed – Incentive Marketing Affiliate
One of my hobbies, or perhaps quirks, has been a fascination with ads. In some cases, that fascination has translated into presentations, such as the one I gave at the 2008 TARGUSinfo Online Lead Quality Summit, “You Give Leads a Bad Name.” In the future, I’ll share various examples of different marketing strategies spanning the broader performance marketing world. For an introduction to one of the broader trends to have emerged in the past six months, see my post on the Rise of the Flogs.
Incentivized marketing has existed offline for years. Online it tends to refer to a very specific form of marketing with users clicking on ads thinking that they have discovered a way to get a free prize. The “free ipod” ads have now become synonymous with that form of advertising and those in the industry have achieved a certain level of infamy.
Without getting too repetitive with respect to the countless articles written on the topic, the incentive promotion business resembles less a style of ad and more a platform for advertising. It allows marketers to leverage user interest in a given product (ipod, kindle, camera, tv, etc.), and parlay that interest into conversions on unrelated ads. When users click on an ad for a “free” product, they enter an ad funnel that ends with their having the opportunity to earn the product in which they first expressed interest.
The maturation of the ad market has made it ever more challenging for those in the incentive promotion space to attract new users. They face headwinds on several fronts. Most of the places that they used to acquire countless users have either restricted these types of advertising and/or the economics no longer make it possible for them to buy the way they once did. That doesn’t mean the companies behind the free offers or their affiliates have given-up, as evidenced by the two recent ads we saw.
We recently spotted two ads on Google. Years ago they could promote the free offer directly. Now, in order to get listed, they must come up with a different hook for the users. They can’t just say, get a “free x.” In a trend that we’ve seen employed, those trying to market incentive offers try to get the users engaged in a quiz / poll topic that could have some emotional appeal to the user. Celebrity is a very common theme as users tend to have an opinion and if executed correctly, the traffic is inexpensive. Given that the affiliate here makes just $1.50 or so per email submit, they still need a healthy percentage of people to click on the ad, again on their jump page, and convert on the following page. They do prime the users to convert by telling them what to do on the landing page.
It’s not an easy way to make money. There is limited traffic, so it’s really a lifestyle business at best, not to mention a constant cat and mouse game to make the jump page appear to be more relevant and valuable than it is, all in the name of Google Quality Score.
Ad 1:
PollRocker.com/MileyCyrus
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