As a direct result, R.O.EYE has doubled its account team co-ordinating eBay’s affiliate management across all four key territories, appointing:

• Remy Bigot as Account Manager. Remy, who has relocated from Cannes to London to work with R.O.EYE’s newly-appointed Commercial Director Matt Brown, has been working in digital marketing for over eight years, developing online strategies for a number of European companies including Ecce Vino, Officinea and News Parfum.
• Angel Chabier as Account Executive. Also now based in the London office, Angel was previously Web Product Manager at Horyzon Media – Yellow Pages Group in Paris and managed a mix of accounts including eBay France, lastminute.com, MTV and Ryanair.
• Davide Finocchiaro as Account Executive. Working in the Berlin office, Davide moves from PhotoSì in Rimini where he was Marketing Manager for the leading italian photolab and launched a number of key web projects for miofotografo.it.

The performance management agency has been responsible for managing eBay’s affiliate activity in the UK since 2008, helping the brand to operate one of the largest and most established affiliate campaigns in the channel.

Nicky Iapino, Managing Director of R.O.EYE, says: “The R.O.EYE and eBay teams are inextricably linked in their delivery of the eBay affiliate activity here in the UK and together they will ensure the eBay Partner Network is as effective as possible in these additionally important European territories.”

The world famous brand is using its new affiliate site to show its credentials as more than a condom manufacturer and will provide useful sexual education as well as give information and guidance about its extensive range of products.

R.O.EYE has already helped deliver five-fold growth year-on-year for sister brand Scholl since it began to work with the affiliate channel, and Durex is keen to also now utilise the channel to develop a wider brand appeal within the 26-35 demographic. As part of this strategy, it also recently launched its ‘Good Vibrations Tour’ with a branded Durex Play campervan visiting key locations in London, Cardiff, Manchester and Newcastle to sample products, hear the nations’ sex confessions and give fun, informal sex tips from the onboard Love Guru. The whole tour, which has been masterminded by fellow North West based agency Truth, also linked back to a Social Media campaign through YouTube and Facebook, to share the experiential campaign with a wider consumer audience.

Kaye Sutcliffe at Durex, says: “Affiliate marketing is the perfect digital channel for this kind of brand push and through R.O.EYE’s expert guidance, it allows us to work with a cross section of some of the UK’s leading affiliate partners. Working in tandem with our latest retail and experiential activity, we know this can achieve not only greater brand awareness, but also drive customer purchase and trust.”

Nicky Iapino, Managing Director of R.O.EYE, says: “The success of our Scholl activity shows how the affiliate channel can be strategically used to deliver brand objectives. Working as part of a focused, integrated campaign, the activity dovetails nicely to achieve even greater buy-in to this iconic brand, whilst at the same time providing users with accessible, fun advice and guidance.”

Rachel Humphreys, Head of Agency Account Management for Affiliate Window, adds: “Working alongside R.O.EYE, our aim is to generate incremental growth for Durex whilst increasing the range of publishers and partners driving traffic to the brand. Through strategic account management and a dedicated publisher services team, we’ll see Durex go from strength to strength within the performance channel.”

The R.O.EYE girls got in the ‘tache spirit today, and showed their support for the guys of R.O.EYE, who have this month been donating their faces for a very good cause.

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

To donate to the R.O.EYE team’s efforts, head over to http://uk.movember.com/mospace/1842180/

The guys will be posing for a picture shortly, once their order of moustache grooming wax arrives…

In the photo (l-r)
Back: Jill Petticrew, Fanny Kabaghe, Amy Swatkins, Suki Moulds, Emma Houlden
Front: Rebecca Charlton, Sarah Gilchrist

Recent research from YouGOV discovered that 18% of SMEs using Google AdWords actually regain their investment, which is quite daunting and clearly an area of concern for almost 4 in 5 of businesses.

Traditionally with Google AdWords, you have to select keywords yourself, however, with Express, all you do is designate an amount for the month and they’ll do the hard work for you, based on your business and category. It certainly makes it easier for smaller businesses who are often perplexed by the ‘intense’ bigger brother, Google AdWords.

Sign up is promised to be a breeze, taking roughly half the time as Google AdWords, which allows these smaller businesses to be found – what’s more, you don’t actually need a website – just a postal code, which brings in a whole new element to advertising.

Think of it as an online Yellow pages mixed in with Google Places.

Being in the affiliate arena, it’ll be interesting to see where affiliates can take this. Larger merchants won’t feel the need to immerse themselves in the arena, but what about the smaller merchants with affiliates – who’s to say that an affiliate can’t pin point each store in the UK and drive traffic online. With the boundaries of offline and online becoming ever so blurred with voucher codes being used both on an online capacity and in-store, I can only see this affiliates embracing this rather new initiative.

Time will indeed tell however; Google’s promise of an easy new product to set up may not require the full force of affiliates, but they may be required for ‘back up’ to block out competitors for the more smaller merchants. It’s certainly interesting and I guess we’ll wait and see what advancements are planned for Express, which would cement itself in the top projects affiliates must watch out for in 2012.

At the moment, I like Facebook, but as it evolves and changes I start to feel like I don’t want to be on there, and thinking about leaving and deactivating my account. One of the reasons for this was an announcement they recently made regarding this new feature called the timeline. This feature seems really cool for some people with kids etc, as the information it collects seems great.

But for others (including me) it’s really quite intrusive: I mean, why would you want everything on your Facebook?

I like the way that you can check into places, “like” pages and upload photos, by choice. However, the idea of your whole life story being uploaded and existing on a networking site, down to the music you listen to, and the apps on your phone, well, I find that a tad creepy. The internet makes things very easy for people to know as much info as possible about you, and this tool is going to make it that much easier.

Facebook are even being sued by Timelines.com for trademark infringement and redirection of the aforementioned company’s Facebook page to the social networks new timeline feature. Timelines.com claim that this will cause confusion and ultimately lead to the demise of their business.

As it stands, the feature hasn’t gone live yet due to this matter but Facebook already has 1.1 million ‘developers’ using it according to court records. Roughly 100k-200k are signing up each day. How do you feel about it?

Facebook stores are a popular F-commerce strategy as they bring the online purchasing point to the consumer. From Coca-Cola to Kiddicare, many brands have stores within their Facebook pages. There are a range of companies offering page builds and integration within existing Facebook stores as part of affiliate deals, opening up F-commerce to a variety of companies, large and small. Success from stores has been limited so far with ASOS recently reporting that social commerce has been slow to provide them with financial returns. However Facebook stores can help push users through to brand sites in the purchasing frame of mind.

Competitions are a key method of building up a fan base for a brand, as well as giving the opportunity to collect user data and increase mailing lists. A large value prize may be seen as a risky without guaranteed sales. Instead if should be viewed as an investment – the more attractive the prize, the more new fans the brand will acquire who can then be marketed to in the future.

A huge benefit of social media for brands is that consumers can help market the brand through liking, sharing and recommending products. With surveys indicating that customers trust recommendations from friends more than general marketing; the sharing and liking of products helps move customers along in the sales process. Amazon’s ‘Your Amazing Facebook Page’ application recommends music, films and other products based on the recommendations of your friends, creating a more personal experience for the customer.

Facebook check in deals can help improve conversions in-store by offering discounts and freebies to increase footfall. Gap offered free jeans in the US to the first 10,000 customers to check-in, creating a buzz around the brand. Check-in campaigns also raise brand awareness as they come up in activity feeds, acting as a marketing channel.

Group buying deals on Facebook help to generate buzz for brands as well as offering consumers a discount – deals within stores can be set up to go live when they have received enough likes, similar to Innocent’s recent Tweetandeat campaign where the discount voucher available improved as the number of tweets went up.

Exclusive offers on Facebook stores have been successfully used for rewarding customers and trialing new products, as well as offering benefits to customers who engage with the brand. Magners recently became the first drinks company in the UK to sell it’s products via Facebook and they launched a new range of Mangners Specials as a limited run on Facebook – creating demand and interest.

Shop and Tell plugins enable users to recommend a product to people in their social network whenever they purchase, and in return receive discounts, free postage and other offers from the Facebook store. As brands recognise the value of their customers as a huge social media marketing team, social payment systems such as ‘Pay with a Tweet’ are taking off. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ allows people to pay for a product with the value of their social network – as the value of people talking about a product can be higher than the money you’d get for it. This is currently being used by DJs and bands who can sell their latest mix or single for a Tweet to promote a gig or simply bring traffic to their site, and has potential uses for launching new products or giving away samples.

Given the wide range of social media strategies available to brands, companies are keen to see which perform best to enable fine-tuning and improvements to campaigns. In recognition of this Facebook announced new metrics earlier this month which will allow companies to measure user engagement. The 3 new metrics available through Facebook Insights are ‘Engaged Users’, ‘People Talking About This’ and ‘Friends of Fans’ – these provide a far better understanding of a brand’s reach, making it possible to judge the effectiveness of a campaign and consequently plan even more effective strategies.

F-commerce is great for reaching a wide pool of consumers and by getting consumers to share information and products with their friends, brands effectively have their customers marketing for them. Competitions, give-aways and an integrated online strategy can provide a great user experience. However the differing shopping experiences mean F-commerce can’t replicate e-commerce. Instead F-commerce can influence sales through the brand site by putting the consumer in a purchasing frame of mind and a joined-up online strategy can maximise conversions for social media traffic. Given the new Facebook metrics, social strategies are set to evolve and F-commerce set to grow as more brands take advantage of social media users as an extended marketing team.

The Manchester-based agency, which was the UK’s first independent affiliate management agency, is retained by a mix of leading brands including eBay, Google, Virgin Holidays and Autotrader to manage their UK affiliate campaigns as well as strategically advise on optimising their cross-channel performance activity.

Nicky Iapino, Managing Director of R.O.EYE, says: “Since 2004, R.O.EYE has been masterminding highly effective affiliate campaigns for some of the biggest brands and most well known digital companies here in UK. Most recently, we have also expanded our services beyond the core affiliate channel to help clients adopt and utilise performance marketing in the burgeoning social media and mobile channels also. In essence, our industry just doesn’t sit still, and to ensure we remain at the forefront of performance delivery we are embarking on a programme of acquisition and new office openings to enable us to build further teams of R.O.EYE specialists who can also provide more localised service.”

Pivotal to its new London office opening, the agency has acquired affiliate consultancy Hatmatic from founder Matt Brown. Hatmatic, which has been providing affiliate services since 2005 for clients including Vodafone, Comet, Red Letter Days and Hotels4U.com, is well respected within the UK affiliate space, working with an established network of some of the UK’s leading affiliate networks and affiliate partners. Matt, who will be joining R.O.EYE as Commercial Director, will also head up the new London office as well as lead its mobile services.

Matt says: “The opportunity for Hatmatic to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the UK’s most progressive performance management agency was a bit of an easy decision to be honest. My existing client contacts will be able to tap into the huge breadth of experience and knowledge of the R.O.EYE team, and for me personally, I get the chance to lead the agency’s London development strategy as well as growing its activity in the very exciting and frenetic mobile sector.”

R.O.EYE’s new Berlin office’s opening has been timed to capitalise on the channel’s busy seasonal activity and will service local clients as well as work in tandem with R.O.EYE’s UK teams to deliver fully integrated cross border campaigns.

“DO NOT EVER BOOK HERE!! – Awful, worst ever! The rooms were dirty and the staff were rude never again!”

Many of us, including myself, refer to and use these sites in our buying process from purchasing holidays to electrical goods, but what is their worth?

But can all reviews be trusted as being truly user generated content? It appears not.

Recently, TripAdvidsor were investigated by the advertising watchdog after receiving numerous complaints, namely from KwikChex.com a Bournemouth-based company who help to mange companies online reputations. For over a year they have been vigorously pursuing TripAdvisor over what it claimed to be numerous fake, misleading, and libellous reviews posted about hotels and restaurants they managed.

A formal investigation was launched by the ASA into the hugely popular travel review website. Interestingly, TripAdvidsor have now been forced to remove the strapline:

“reviews you can trust”

from its website following the investigation into these allegations, this has now been replaced by:

“reviews from our community”.

The change highlights that their reviews are generated by their “community “ – but this poses the question, just who are their community? Do they know? And are they trustworthy?

I don’t feel this really addresses the problem, which appears too apparent across the globe. The New York Times summed it up in a story last month: “In tens of millions of reviews on websites like Amazon.com, Citysearch, TripAdvisor and Yelp, new books are better than Tolstoy, restaurants are undiscovered gems and hotels surpass the Ritz.”

These style of reviews, which often use of hyperboles to evoke feeling and create strong impressions , have a tendency to have been written by freelancers recruited off job websites, who are paid very small amounts per review. It is felt that these reviews, good or bad, place the integrity of review sites in danger.

In the United States, companies are so keen to combat this ever growing problem. A study carried out by four researchers from Cornell University have developed a method for detecting fake online hotel reviews. Their research highlighted specific features and language used in fake reviews, and have now developed a computer programme, which uses an algorithm to identify those features specifically related to fake reviews. In tests the algorithm accurately exposed fake reviews 90 percent of the time, according to their report.

Review sites themselves are also making steps to prevent fake and paid for reviews gaining any more ground. Social commerce site Revoo, have developed a manifesto “Trusted Reviews” along with a logo, promising that all reviews positive or negative will be genuine and created from the customers who have purchased the products.
Their scheme is compliant with the ASA’s new regulations on user generated content and ties in with the Government’s desire for a self-regulatory mark for consumer reviews suggested earlier this year by Consumer Minister, Edward Davey.
Retailers who sign up to Revoo’s manifesto can display their logo, in an attempt to reassure customers that their reviews are trustworthy and dependable upon helping them in their buying process.
With Revoo’s homepage displaying

“Consumer reviews you can trust. No fakes and no hiding bad reviews.
We promise.”

they are extremely keen to drive this home to users of their site,
Co-founder and CEO of Reevoo, Richard Anson, says that 81% of online shoppers claim they use reviews to influence purchase decisions, which makes having a scheme they can trust “vitally important for consumer protection”.

Although I feel this is a great move to build this allegiance and it is positive to see they are making a stance, I find it to be very thin on the ground when it comes to how they intend to police this?

So do you trust reviews?

I am always dubious of reviews as I find it hard to believe that some customers have the complete polar opposite experience of the same place, or product. Is this because of the fraudsters out there skewing this? or because people genuinely are very different and one persons luxury is another’s hell?

I hope that the recent actions, investigations and development in technology do create a positive impact upon reducing and preventing the ability of companies to pick and choose reviews and pay for reviews. Although, I still feel that there will always be a degree of cynicism around this content, as a customer myself , I view them as just another aid to help me in my buying process, of which I do not weight very heavily.

How about you?

However it doesn’t stop there.  This type of tracking can also be extremely useful for affiliates, who can see what products are doing well, and what they can push further to increase sales.  They are able to produce bespoke, granular reporting on colour, size, amounts etc till the cow’s come home. But what is the benefit?

In order to maintain and be in control of reporting, different kinds of tracking can come in to play. Voucher code tracking is extremely beneficial, as these can offer code exclusivity to affiliates, and are excellent conversion catalysts.  Statistics show that between 20% and 50% of all online affiliate sales come from voucher code sites.  The age old human tendency to go for deals before they buy is a winner.  So being able to track this efficiently is something that could prove invaluable to all parties concerned.  This is easily achieved by the reporting available via the networks, as a voucher code as simple as ABC123, can prove to content driven merchants that those 20% to 50% of voucher code sales are measurable.

New customer tracking is also a different way to get ahead of the game, to understand where new users are coming from.  This is driven from the merchant’s side of things where their database can align new registered email addresses, and report this back to the affiliate network through the tracking tags.  Incidentally, it is hard for affiliate sites to identify which are new users, though in some circumstances they can earn additional commission for providing them.

Also non traditional types of affiliate marketing are able to be tracked in the sense of call centres, printable material, leaflets etc via specific codes.  The world is your oyster when it comes to being able to understand, track and work out best practice techniques in all things marketing.

How are these different types of tracking implemented?  Non traditional types of affiliate are tracked via various different platforms, Impact Radius and DC Storm being two examples. Traditional online reporting and analysis is currently provided as a given by any network or agency currently.

Product level tracking is a great way for merchants to be able to push a particular product or end of line stock.  The merchant may not require product level tracking but if they do require granular reporting that can span a range, then this is the perfect answer.

The truth is, while “last click wins” has been the centre of many debates, it is a simple and straightforward rule that everyone can understand and work by. The possibilities and potential rules that would need to be applied beyond the last click are complex and mind boggling. Should an affiliate content site be rewarded for an assisted conversion via paid search, and so on…

Currently, a major barrier to adoption is that full attribution reporting requires companies to integrate specialist tracking solutions such as DC Storm and Tagman, requiring significant investment. However, last week Google announced the launch of Multi-channel conversion funnel reporting and that it would be available as a Beta in Google Analytics accounts. For free!

Before we all get carried away I have been analysing some of the functionality. While it does offer some insight the reporting is quite top line and reliant on how campaigns are setup within the Analytics account. You can see from the example of the conversion path report below how the reporting is able to identify affiliate channel contribution. The reports are not massively detailed but it does highlight the varying instances of where channels are assisting a conversion.

At this stage it does not look like the reporting will allow you to look at sales at a more granular level without setting up specific campaign names for individual affiliates. But in these relatively early days of attribution reporting, it is a step in the right direction to increase the awareness of the reporting mechanism.

The question is how marketing managers will utilise this information to make strategic decisions on cross channel de-duplication. There is still much data collection and research to be done before best practices on attribution can be compiled. And even then companies are likely to have their own views on the “value” of conversion assists. More information about Google’s Multi-channel conversion funnels can be found on their website.