David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

May 2010 Archives

28/05/10 - Opt Out Of Behavioural Advertising

Behavioural advertising is a relatively new concept where some advertising networks track what you look at, displaying adverts relevant to what they think you are after based on what you have looked at. Here's a quick video explaining one company's solution:



The most common example is when I'm working on my travel deals or mini cruise websites. A visit to these then a website using behavioural advertising and I'm shown travel adverts, even on unrelated websites.

The logic used is that if I'm going to be shown adverts then I might as well be shown the most targeted adverts possible. By watching what I do online, adverts are tailored to the profile the ad agencies create about me. To me, this is irritating and it raises privacy concerns too. I'm also unsure of the profitability of such adverts.

There's quite a lot of information about behavioural advertising to follow so I'll split it into small groups. More

25/05/10 - Not All Affiliate Programs Are Created Equally

I've spent the last week creating a new Wordpress based website together with a couple of custom plugins, one to automatically post some content from a merchant (hopefully more to follow) and one to manage all the deeplinks and banners.

In doing so though, it's amazing to see how radically diverse the affiliate program landscape is. Jason's post about the 'interesting' reason for being kicked off a program got me thinking why is this so? Why are affiliate programs so diverse? Surely they should all be built on the same model?

Let me explain. More