Last week I was honored to be invited to be interviewed on Rebecca Blacksmith’s Leaders Portfolio radio show. Leaders Portfolio is a CEO leadership interview show broadcasting in the Washington, DC area hosted by Rebecca Blacksmith. The show will air at 11am on Wednesday February 3rd on Washington DC’s business talk Radio 1260AM WWRC, and then be available online at LeadersPortfolio.com thereafter.
I arrived early, and as the first guest on the show, I got a chance to talk to Rebecca and her husband and business partner, Chris Padot. They are a very bright and dynamic couple with some very good business ideas and a strong desire to give back to the community. It was a pleasure getting to know them both.
Rebecca has been a student of leadership since birth, with both of her parents being CEOs. She has received 2 Ivy Degrees from The University of Pennsylvania , and is currently completing her Ph.D. dissertation at Penn as well. Her current titles include: Bradley Fellow, Earhart Fellow, Fox Distinguished Graduate Fellow, Mumford Fellow, PRRUCUS fellow, Telly Award. Rebecca was awarded the prestigious Telly Award twice, and in 2009 alone she has won the Angel Award, Communicator Award of Disinction and the Videographer Award of Excellence.
Thanks for having me on the show Rebecca and Chris!
In this video, from Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Last Vegas, Tony discusses how you can work with performance search marketing firms and still protect your company's brand image.
One of the top reasons companies give for not allowing affiliate to fully utilize paid search to market them is "We need to protect our brand". How do you protect your brand and get the full benefit of the search engine advertising opportunity?
In this video, from Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Last Vegas, Tony discusses how you can work with performance search marketing firms and how allowing them to run search campaigns for you, using your display url, can bring incremental sales without driving up your own search campaign's costs.
In this video, from Affiliate Summit West 2009 in Last Vegas, Tony discusses performance search marketing and the hot topic of if you should allow your search affiliates to use your trademarks:
The following video from by Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, is a must watch video for anyone who wants to understand how Google decides which ads to display for any given keyword, what order the ads are displayed in, and how much an advertiser pays.
A quick summary:
The Auction - Every time someone searches for a keyword, an instantaneous auction occurs among the possible advertisers. Advertisers are initially ranked based on their maximum bid prices for the keyword in question.
Quality Score - Google looks at the historic click-thru rate, ad relevance and landing page relevance to determine a quality score for the possible ads in the auction.
Ad Rank - Google multiples the maximum bids prices by the quality score to determine an Ad Rank for each possible ad in the auction, this rank determines which order the ads will display in.
Final Price - To determine how much the advertiser will pay per click, Google divides the Ad Rank of ad below the current ad (or the minimum price set for the auction of there are now ads lower) and divides that Ad Rank by the current ads Quality Score to determine the actual click price.
The one thing I would have liked to have seen him explain is the Pre-Auction where Google looks at ads with the same display URL to determine which one of those ads will get to compete in the auction. This "pre-auction" actually occurs after Ad Ranks have been assigned, and then all ads with the same display URL are compared to each other, and the ad with the highest Ad Rank get's displayed, and the others get dropped. This insures that the ads with the same display URLs do not affect the Final Price per click paid.
In case you missed it, Tony recently presented a session entitled "Affiliates & Internal Search: Recipe for Disaster?" at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. The Audio of that presentation is available. Have a listen and let us know what you think!
We have just launched a new website called tripzam.com. Tripzam is a top brand travel destination site. Our goal with tripzam is to create top quality travel micro-sites promoting the properties and services of some of our travel partners.
With search engines constantly changing the way they treat and award quality scores to landing pages, tripzam is one of our first tests in creating a more targeted vertical collection of microsites that we can use to promote our clients via pa-per-click search engine marketing while continuing to focus on the brands our our clients as opposed to creating comparison sites that promote competitor's offerings on the search advertising landing pages.
If you run a leading brand travel affiliate program and would like to discuss the tripzam opportunity, please email Andre Colantuono - andre(at)imwave.com.
We have recently made some updates to the affiliate aim list and affiliate twit list!
For the affiliate aim list we have added "enhanced listings" for $19.99 / quarter. With an enhanced listing you get your listing highlighted in yellow, and get a clickable link to your website. The aimlist currently has over 700 members and received an average of 11,222 page views per month in 2008.
After a slow start and problems displaying the tweets of the affiliate twit list members, we have finally gotten a good script and site layout going. Now you can follow what members of the list are saying on-line. If you haven't visited the Affiliate Twit List in a while, we hope you will take another look! To get on the list, sent a public tweet to @afftwitlist with your full name and company name and we will do the rest. 70 members and growing!
Reston, VA – November 7, 2008 – imwave, inc. announced today that they have acquired move marketing’s performance search marketing business. imwave will immediately take over all of move marketing’s advertiser relationships and search engine marketing campaigns. Andre Colantuono, move marketing’s business development Director, will join imwave as the director of business development.
“Both imwave and move marketing have worked hard to build reputations as leading paid search marketing affiliates in the industry,” says Adam Viener, chairman and founder of imwave. “We believe that this acquisition clearly solidifies our position as one of the largest super affiliates in the industry focused on paid search engine marketing.”
“We are excited to have Andre Colantuono joining our team,” says Tony Pantano, CEO of imwave, “Being successful in this industry is primarily about building and maintaining successful long-term publisher / advertiser relationships. Andre has been instrumental in building the relationships that have led to move marketing’s success and will be an important member of our team going forward.”
imwave, inc. is one of the leading performance search marketing companies in the industry focusing primarily on building and launching effective pay-per-click search engine keyword marketing campaigns for companies paying affiliate commissions on sales and leads generated. As of September of 2008, imwave announced they had served over 2 billion ads for their clients through Google alone.
