Sweety Rai
Digital Marketing Strategy

How to create a digital marketing strategy

Aug 31, 20132 min readBy Sweety Rai

How to create a digital marketing strategy

Our poll showed that many companies don’t yet have a digital marketing strategy:

But we believe that there are many reasons you need a digital marketing strategy.

Choose from a Quick Guide in our planning section for guidance on the main issues to think through when developing a digital marketing plan.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is still an essential digital media channel for many transaction eCommerce sites for retailers, travel and financial services. Affiliate marketing is also a revenue model to consider for site owners, especially online publishers. Here’s the issues to think about it to manage your site:

How to identify rogue affiliates using advanced segments

This post will explain a technique that online retailers can use to save some badly spent money. It will also be of interest to affiliates, to website owners, and may spark a couple of ideas for anyone looking to get more usable information out of Google Analytics.

The post covers 4 things:

  1. Rogue “Brand bidders” – what they are, why they cause a problem, and how they waste money.
  2. A few tactics rogue brand bidders may use to sneakily make thousands of pounds.
  3. How to spot the problem using Google Analytics.
  4. A couple of bonus tips on how you could extend & automate this.

Brand bidding

If you work in the ecommerce or affiliate worlds, you may know what a brand bidder is. If not, then here”s a 3-sentence summary that attempts to explain a fairly complicated concept:

  1. “Affiliates” are people who send visitors to commercial websites, in exchange for money whenever those visits result in a purchase (or a lead of some kind) – this money is referred to as “commission”.
  2. Some affiliates use pay-per-click advertising (AdWords) to send visitors to retailers” websites.
  3. The vast majority of sites that accept PPC affiliates do so on the understanding that those affiliates can”t use the site”s brand name in any shape or form in their PPC ads. Here”s some wording from Sainsbury”s for example:

Affiliates who place PPC ads targeting retailers” brand terms are known as “brand bidders”.