We are happy to announce the launch of the Zaplo affiliate program!

Zaplo offers short-term finances with online convenience to Canadians. Zaplo is a brand owned by one of the leading microfinance companies, AS 4Finance LTD which has issued more than two million short-term loans worldwide and serves customers in nine countries.

Affiliates joining The Zaplo Affiliate Program will be provided promotional text links, banners and additional creative materials to help them optimize their marketing campaigns, ensuring a truly personalized service, both for the affiliate and the customers. Affiliates promoting Zaplo will earn $40 for each approved loan and to celebrate the launch of the program, Zaplo is also offering a special three-month promotion, giving affiliates the chance to earn up to $55 /approved loan.

Additional Program Details:
• Banner creative
• Text ads
• 60 -day cookie duration
• Search Marketing/PPC (Bing and Yahoo only)
• Email marketing
• Targeting Canadian customers only

For more information on Zaplo.ca loans, please visit their website or click here to sign up to the Zaplo affiliate program.

Google has recently announced the closing of its long-running Google Affiliate Network (GAN); established in 2007, its final day of operation will be July 31, 2013. Google’s network has been utilized by a large segment of the performance marketing industry, and GAN’s closure will mark a shift in the industry’s landscape, as Google’s affiliate network clients search for alternatives.

The most surprising part of this news, other than the announcement itself, is that few North American-facing affiliate programs know where to turn. Google Affiliate Network’s departure has left an affiliate marketing void to fill, forcing merchants to search for alternatives. That said, there are terrific options available for merchants looking to increase their exposure; after all, while GAN was successful in many areas of affiliate networking management, it was not a full-suite agency, and it did not offer its clients a complete range of affiliate marketing services and tools.

As one of the leading online marketing firms in Canada, Share Results provides clients with a full turnkey digital marketing solution, in addition to our industry-leading proprietary software. Specializing in retail, the Share Results network is home to many high-profile and established brands, including Hudson’s Bay, Scotiabank, and LASIK MD.

Above all else, our network is known for cultivating meaningful, prosperous marketing initiatives. The network facilitates successful partnerships by bringing compatible affiliates and merchants together to create shared goal-orientated enterprises. This is particularly valuable for clients leaving the Google Affiliate Network and looking to establish new relationships and partnerships, whether as an affiliate or merchant.

Connecting more than 12,000 affiliates, our platform provides customizable affiliate programs and a network that caters to individual client needs. Learn more about the types of client we work with below.

If you’re a merchant or affiliate of Google’s, we’d love to hear from you. For more information, you can get in touch with Erica by emailing her at info@shareresults.com.

Share Results’ Partners:

Hudson’s Bay

Hudson’s Bay, or simply “The Bay,” is North America’s oldest company with a chain of 90 department stores across Canada. The retailer has a focus on fashion apparel, accessories, and home goods, and is known for its quality, service, and style.

Scotiabank

Scotiabank is Canada’s third largest bank, serving 19 million customers in 55 countries around the world. The institution, in operation for more than 175 years, offers personal, commercial, corporate, and investment banking products and services.

LASIK MD

LASIK MD is the largest provider of vision correction in North America, based on procedure volume. The company is recognized across North America for its experience, world-renowned surgeons, state-of-the-art technology, and its affordable prices.

For beginners, affiliate marketing can seem like a complicated riddle wrapped in a puzzle. It doesn’t, however, have to be.

There may be no magic potion to help you start earning money, but a solid plan backed by the right investment of time and money can lead to a lucrative career for affiliate marketers in Canada. After all, Canada continues to be a leader in online engagement and activity. The most recent ComScore “Canada Digital Future in Focus” report, in fact, shows that Canadians spend more than 41 hours per month online on their PC (good for second place in the world).

How, though, do you get started? And more importantly, how can you get set yourself up to make money in affiliate marketing?

Here are some tips for the neophyte affiliate marketer:

Choose Wisely

The mistake rookie affiliate marketers often make is to choose a hot “bandwagon” product. The most successful affiliate marketers, however, are those who have chosen products that they are truly interested in. Don’t just follow what you think is in demand, look for products and services that you are truly passionate about. This will push you to learn as much as possible about the product, and to produce authoritative, engaging content.

The easiest way to effectively promote a product or service is to be convincing, and if you don’t know anything about those products or services, you’ll be as convincing as a three-dollar bill. Knowledge and experience with the product or services creates an aura of authority and truthfulness, and this stems from choosing the products that are most interesting to you.

Test Tracking and Performance

Once you have set up your affiliate marketing website, and are populating it with great, authoritative content, you need to be able to track and analyze your website’s performance. This is the key to ongoing improvement and optimization.

Using your affiliate system reporting, you can track impressions, clicks, and registrations to understand exactly how your traffic is interacting with your content. Equally important, you can then test the performance of creatives by running affiliate reports by creative. This type of in-depth data will clearly highlight the most effective creative approach, removing the guesswork from decision making going forward.

Keep an Eye on Devices

Having a killer website is essential, but you also have to keep an eye on new devices. Consider this: in 2012, smartphone subscribers grew by 17%, with ad impressions viewed on tablets rising to 14% by Q4. It’s now essential that you account for this clear demographic shift. How? By doing your research.

How are users interacting with the product you are promoting? Are they using mobile phones? Tablets? PCs? PPC? These are questions you have to answer. By leveraging subIDs you can track performance on a number of these different touch points, enabling you to understand where your focus should lie.

Ultimately, there’s no easy way to make money in affiliate marketing, but by choosing wisely and leveraging relevant data and tools, you can put yourself in the best possible position for a successful affiliate marketing career.

What other tips would you share? Leave your comments below.

With the variety of options available for tracking conversions and sales data, it’s important to have a clear idea of what is going to work best for your performance program and address its specific needs. To that end, the below information aims to outline some key considerations to keep in mind when making this choice.

The available options, at their most basic level, are the use of server-to-server tracking (also referred to as stats relay) or conversion tracking, which means the installation of an image/pixel, iFrame or JavaScript on the sales confirmation page. In some cases a combination of these methods can also be made available, depending on the need for accuracy and how quickly you want affiliates and your team to see results.

Rather than comparing stats relay and conversion pixels blow-by-blow, another way that Canadian retailers can approach this topic is to look at each option and ask the all-important question of “what’s in it for me?”

Accuracy – stats relay v. pixel

Popular wisdom suggests that stats relay will provide a greater level of accuracy because it is not reliant on cookies, which can be disabled on or cleared from a given users terminal. This is an entirely justifiable argument, worthy of serious consideration.

At the core of server/stats relay is the use of a unique identifier, or customer ID, that links a registration or purchase to the correct affiliate based on a click or impression. With this solution, no tracking mechanism needs to be placed on the user’s computer and the advertiser will instead capture and pass back that unique identifier to their tracking platform once a conversion has been completed.

As this process works independently of any settings that a user may have on their computer, or alternatively if they are using a mobile or tablet device, it ensures that activity will be tracked and that affiliates can be compensated accordingly.

Therefore, when it comes to deciding which tracking method or combination to use, it should be based on the following factors:

1) What channels you are going to let your affiliates promote by and via what creative.
2) What commission structure you choose.
3) Which device (computer, mobile, tablet) will your customers be using when they generate a sale or become a lead via your platform.

Ease of integration

While the use of stats relays will likely lead to a more accurate level of reporting, the implementation process is viewed as being more complex than that of conversion pixels, which are based on cookie tracking. With a cookie-based tracking solution, a pixel will be fired from the conversion page containing the information stored in the original tracking cookie placed on the user’s computer.

The use of conversion pixels is required by some merchants to store tracking information on their own servers before sending that information to their tracking platform. There is also the fact that some tracking platforms and retailers simply do not support stats relay and require the use of conversion pixels.

Your tech team can help you determine which tracking system is the easiest and most cost effective way for you to implement your solution.

Scalability

In today’s marketplace there are many shopping carts with different levels of customizability and an ecommerce shopping cart platform that you are running on today may not suit you tomorrow. As such, when this changes so do your needs for tracking and recording your ROI in your affiliate channel. So, if you choose a platform that only tracks via pixel, you may be limiting the growth of your affiliate program. This means making sure that you choose a provider that can offer the flexibility to grow with you and provide alternative ways to track your sales.

In the case of Share Results, we are always willing to review the requirements of our partners to better address their specific needs when it comes to tracking and collecting data.

Do you have an alternate or preferred method of tracking performance in your affiliate program? Let us know in the comments below.

Any Canadian merchant with an affiliate program has run into the same problem: what do you with inactive (or “latent”) affiliates? For one reason or another, these marketing partners are no longer generating sales or referring traffic. They are, put simply, a wasted opportunity.

Instead of cutting your Canadian affiliates loose, however, there are a number of ways to “reactivate” their involvement in the promotion of your products.

Here are four ways to reactivate inactive affiliates:

Stay Connected

“An ounce of prevention,” as they say, “is worth a pound of cure.” This is particularly relevant when working with affiliates, as the more you stay connected to your marketing partners; the less likely they’ll fall inactive.

Be proactive, keeping affiliates informed right from the start. Use personal welcome messages and phone calls, and take the time to schedule regular periodic check-ins (or to send out a mass newsletter). This can be time consuming, but there is no better way to develop long-lasting partnerships.

For affiliates who have already slipped into inactivity, try sending a survey to find out why they are not promoting you. The information gleamed can then be used to encourage them to try again, and to avoid running into inactivity problems with other affiliates.

Use Targeted Promotions and Incentives

A great way to reenergize inactive affiliates is to create a specific promotion or bonus targeted specifically to that group of affiliates. Special payouts, performance incentives (including increased commissions, cash bonuses, and improved payment terms for top affiliates), and sales contests, for example, can all help reactive wayward affiliates.

Providing exclusive (e.g., products, bundles, and discounts) and customized tools (e.g., banners, landing pages, widgets, etc.), meanwhile, can help drive sales and strengthen relationships.

Engage, Educate, and Arm

Now that you’ve provided motivation, you need to also give affiliates ammunition. Take the time to engage and educate your inactive affiliates so that they can develop credibility and authority. This can be accomplished by providing free products to review (where possible), and by supplying content and unique selling points that simplify their campaigns.

Similarly, it’s important to keep your creatives up-to-date. Regularly freshening up your creative pool provides affiliates a steady stream of marketing materials, and more importantly, shows that them they have your support.

Keep Monitoring

Even after reactivating inactive affiliates, it’s essential that you leverage reporting and tracking to stay on top of this group. To do so, keep a close eye on drops in sales, leads, tier status, clicks, conversion rate, and relative sales, among other important metrics. There are a number of different platforms that can help you in this regard. At Share Results, for example, you can use the software’s grouping features, which allow you to pull reports by group and commission features, among other criteria. This ensures effective organization and relevant, up-to-the-minute data.

Reactivating inactive affiliates will always be a challenge, so engage your publishers by following these tips, and you’ll be on your way. Have you had any success reactivating inactive affiliates? Leave your comments below.

Scotiabank credit cards win five different credit card categories in the Best of Finance 2012 Awards.

What is the Best of Finance 2012?

Presented by RateSupermarket.ca, this annual award honours the top personal financial products in the Canadian market. The financial products and services reviewed include six separate categories: Credit Cards, Mortgage Rates, Life Insurance, Bank Accounts, GICs, and Online Trading.

Winners in these categories are chosen based on a careful selection process which takes into consideration different factors like competitive rates, overall value, user friendly features and convenience.

RateSupermarket.ca

RateSupermarket.ca is one of the top Canadian sites focused on comparing personal financial products. The website allows viewers to search and compare current financial products and services in the market thereby helping consumers choose the ones that are right for them.

And the winners are…

In the Credit Cards category, Scotiabank won five sub-categories: Best New Credit Card of 2012, Best Cash Back Card with Annual Fee, Best No-Fee Specialty Rewards Credit Card, Best Low Interest Credit Card with Fee and Best Student Credit Card.

Best New Credit Card of 2012:
Scotiabank Gold American Express Card

Best Cash Back Card with Annual Fee:
Scotia Momentum VISA Infinite Card

Best No-Fee Specialty Rewards Credit Card:
Scotiabank SCENE VISA Card

Best Low Interest Credit Card with Fee
Scotiabank Value Visa Card

Best Student Credit Card:
Scotiabank SCENE VISA Card

About Scotiabank Credit Cards

Scotiabank offers a wide range of VISA and American Express credit cards to suit a variety of customer needs, including flexible rewards programs and attractive special offers for new credit card customers. Scotiabank is currently the only Canadian bank to issue American Express credit cards.

Scotiabank and Share Results just launched their Scotiabank Credit Card Affiliate Program on February 2013. To know more about Scotiabank and their affiliate program visit Share Results. 

Effective, user-friendly landing pages are an essential component of any online strategy. You could argue, in fact, that landing pages are among the most important pieces of a marketing campaign, providing a huge impact on lead generation, conversion, and analytics.

Landing pages, after all, can ultimately make or break your marketing, working in tandem with social media, email campaigns, SERP results, and PPC ads. This is of particular importance for retailers looking to carve out a niche in the Canadian market, as targeted Canada-centric marketing can be let down by unsuitable landing pages.

Here are some basic tips for effective landing pages for Canadian-focused campaigns:

Keep it Simple

If a user cannot find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they will move on, regardless of your promotions or products. Use a simple design with a message that is clear and relevant to the original Canadian-focused ad. As these pages can also appear on SERPs, it’s important to make them keyword-rich, with a decidedly Canadian angle.

Above all, avoid clutter. No one wants to scan through a page bombarded with blocks of text and banners. Embrace blank space and leverage web writing best practises (headers, paragraph breaks, bullet lists, simple language, etc.) so that visitors instantly understand the purpose of the page.

Credibility is Currency

Your landing page is representing your company. It has to show you in the best light. Remember, the idea is to inspire confidence. Why should a visitor continue the sales process?

Prominently display your logo and contact info, and consider adding customer testimonies, all of which can boost credibility. In addition, try to engage your users with how your product or service can meet the needs of your Canadian audience. This includes using Canadian localization techniques, including spelling, common expressions, and ease of delivery to their location, all of which goes a long way towards building trust with Canadian consumers.

Stay Focused: Deliver One Compelling Call to Action

Always remember what landing pages are trying to accomplish with a single call to action. Cluttering it with unnecessary or irrelevant outbound links (to websites or newsletters, for example) will only confuse visitors.

If these links are important, however, make sure they do not take prominence over your call to action (and make sure that they open in a new browser window – users will then have to decide to close your landing page if they want to leave it).

The idea is to implement a conversion funnel that directs the visitor to your call to action in the least steps possible, and ultimately, boosts your conversion rate. Generally, this kind of funnel will guide the design of the landing page, optimizing the visitor journey and pushing them from awareness to action.

Test, Test, Test, and Test Again

As with most SEO techniques, landing pages require a long-term approach, and a lot of trial and error. Create more than one version of your landing pages, and use A/B testing techniques to perform comparative campaign studies. It’s a good idea to work closely with a responsive design team that can implement changes quickly; this will allow you to produce different designs (and messaging) to see which one performs best.

There are many platforms you can use to track your results. If you wish to do this with publishers or general campaigns, your affiliate platform can offer valuable insight. At Share Results, we use our affiliate program to track landing page tests with direct linking to measure our conversions. We are then be able to test campaigns with different groups of affiliates, as well as manually switch campaigns on different days, time of the day, etc.

Keeping these basic ideas in mind, you should be able to get started on the right foot. To go even deeper, here are 101 landing page optimizing tips.

What other suggestions do you have? Leave your comments below.

Affiliate and digital marketing management firm Share Results will be hosting the first Affiliate Summit Montreal Meetup of 2013. The meetup is set to take place at Hurley’s Irish Pub (1225 Crescent St., Montreal, QC.), on February 26^th, from 6:00-8:00pm.

The Affiliate Summit Montreal Meetup is designed to educate and inform local affiliate marketers about the industry, its developments and advancements, general news, and a whole lot more. Most importantly, the venue provides a great opportunity to meet up with like-minded affiliate marketers, merchants, publishers, start-ups, and digital entrepreneurs from Montreal!

The theme of this quarter’s event will be affiliate marketing and networking. As such, this will be an open-ended get-together that will prominently feature audience contributions and participation. The floor will be open to all comers – and this is your chance to prod the minds of experienced industry leaders on a number of topics, including:

• Breaking into Canadian online retail
• Affiliate programme rejuvenation tactics
• Increasing brand power through affiliate marketing
• SEO tips of the trade
• And more

In the past, the Montreal Meetup has been used as a platform for panel discussions, with many distinguished guests (representatives from Beyond the Rack and Plan B Digital, for instance) making appearances. In addition to guest speakers, the event is well known for facilitating partnerships. Many members from the Affiliate Summit online community have taken this opportunity to get to know one another, in person, with prosperous results.

The Affiliate Summit Montreal Meetup promises to be an engaging, yet casual open forum, with the simple goal of sharing industry knowledge and opportunities with peers. If you’re in the affiliate marketing industry, or you’re curious about entering it, and are in the Montreal area, come join us for a fun night of business pleasure!

Sign up here to RSVP to the Montreal Meetup.

To make topic suggestions for the event, contact info@shareresults.com.

Scotiabank is one of North America’s premier financial institutions, in operation for over 175 years. Scotiabank and its subsidiaries serve nearly 19 million customers in more than 55 countries around the world with a broad range of products and services including personal, commercial, corporate, and investment banking.

Scotiabank offers a wide range of VISA* and American Express® credit cards to suit a variety of customer needs, including flexible rewards programs and attractive special offers for new credit card customers. Scotiabank is currently the only Canadian bank to issue American Express credit cards.

Scotiabank Affiliate Program

The Scotiabank affiliate program offers generous commissions with monthly bonus potential for new credit card account acquisition. Affiliates will earn $50-$75 CPA per new approved credit card account with the potential for an additional 10-20% monthly volume bonus. Scotiabank offers 12 industry-leading credit cards, many with special sign-up offers available in the program, including travel, cash back, and entertainment rewards cards. Payout varies based on the type of credit card acquired. Applicants must be Canadian citizens or landed immigrants and at least 18 years of age.

Program Details:

• Banner Cceatives in Flash and GIF
• Text ads
• 30–day cookie duration
• Special, time-sensitive sign up offers for each card, varied by season
• Available exclusively through Share Results

For more information on Scotiabank credit cards, please visit their website.

To sign up to the Scotiabank affiliate program, click here.

——————–

®*Registered trademark of The Bank of Nova Scotia.
* Visa Int./Lic. user, The Bank of Nova Scotia.
® American Express is a trademark of American Express. This credit card program is issued and administered by the Bank of Nova Scotia under license from American Express.

Has your affiliate program got you down? Do you feel like it’s in a rut? With 2013 just beginning, now is the time to jumpstart your program, and you can work to boost overall performance throughout the year!

So how do you rejuvenate your program? By starting fresh. A great way to wipe the slate clean is to assess your program’s current standing, making changes based on an evaluation. This can easily be accomplished with benchmarking.

Perform Benchmarking Analysis

Benchmarking, an increasingly popular tool among successful affiliate managers and OPMs, is designed to measure and compare program effectiveness against both your competition and industry best practices. Benchmarking can offer inclusive insight, drawing on comprehensive data from a number of crucial program elements, including: banners, content, advertising, commission structure, individual affiliate performance, new customer and retention strategies, system marketing, and of course, profitability.

The knowledge gained from benchmarking can help identify program strengths, but more importantly, it will highlight areas that need improvement, in turn offering you a wealth of growth opportunities. Discovering your program’s current weaknesses can help you focus on areas that need work, and make it easier to re-launch your program.

Motivate your Affiliates

One of the most common ways to execute a successful ‘rejuvenate your program strategy’ is by offering an affiliate bonus.

So what should you offer affiliates? There’s always straight-up money incentives for affiliates that drive traffic, clicks, sales (in dollar amounts), and ad placements for specific spots on websites; these are the norm. However, if you really want to get creative, and go that extra mile for them, you could also offer your affiliates:

• Contests, like paid trips to conferences
• Bonuses based on earnings
  • First sale bonus
  • Tiered bonus
• Site evaluation and mentoring
• Gifts and prizes

Affiliate bonuses go a long way in maximizing your program’s success, although, if you really want to ensure that it’s running at peak performance, an affiliate program audit is required.

Administer an Affiliate Program Audit

An affiliate program audit is the perfect complement to round out your rejuvenation efforts because it will provide you with effective management tactics. Such an inspection will provide actionable recommendations to improve ROI, including: strategic guidance for a tailored action plan; recommendations on how to organize and better segment your affiliate database for more efficient program management, communication, and ongoing analysis; and identification of top-performing affiliates.

Much like with benchmarking, an audit looks at the current state of your program (but not its competition nor the industry) to find specific areas where profitability can be improved and optimized. In addition, audits assess the state of your affiliate deals (and bonuses), streamlining them to maximize current dates.

All in all, the affiliate program audit acts as a “checks and balances” system to ensure that your program is working at max capacity.

You Can Ask for Help – 911 a Network or OPM agency!

If you’re like most marketing coordinators, managers and VPs, the thought of the above strategies may blow your head off, especially if you’re a one-man band or are responsible for a myriad of other online marketing campaigns. So why not outsource this work to an OPM (outsourced affiliate program manager). These accredited professionals can do the analysis based on your direction, prepare the report, and if you’re really strapped for time, help you out for a few months to get the initiative moving.  Once up and running you could then consider taking it back in-house!

And there you have it – your program is rejuvenated! Now, isn’t 2013 looking brighter already?