Articles & Insights

As the way we use the internet has evolved, the philosophy of most online businesses has become increasingly customer-centric. Brick and mortar businesses have always known that this is the secret to success – many of them have actual face-to-face relationships with their customers. For too long many online businesses behaved as if they were pulling anonymous fish out of the ocean; if some got away there were always more…

Performance marketing is one of the most effective ways to acquire new customers in today’s digital world – and yet a surprisingly large number of businesses don’t know what it is. For those late to the party, performance marketing involves a customer visiting content on the website of an affiliate, such as a deal, product review, discount, etc. The customer then follows a link on to that business’s website. Affiliate…

SEO is time-consuming work; success can only be achieved by building content and engaging visitors over the long-term in accordance with the rules and recommendations of the search engines. It will come as no surprise, then, that some sites attempt to circumvent this hard work by employing what are known as ‘black hat’ tactics, the goal being to vault a site to a high ranking with a minimum amount of…

As everyone in the marketing world knows, attribution is one of the hot topics for 2013. Our friends at RhinoFish Media, a PPC consulting firm, have written a guest post explaining the problems with outdated models of attribution. A simple travel metaphor illuminates just how wrong these models can be. The number one thing we do here at RhinoFish to ensure affiliate revenue (or any revenue) is incremental is to…

I’ve recently led several panels at industry conferences where I posed the question of whether there is an inherent conflict of interest with network-based affiliate program management. The result is usually a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance from those who are engaged in these services, making me even more concerned that there is a general failure to acknowledge this problem and that it’s far from being addressed by the affiliate…

The news that Google is suddenly shutting down the Google Affiliate Network (GAN) came as a shock to many in the performance marketing industry.  GAN, which was formerly known as Performics and inherited via Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, had not been in growth mode for a while. However, it was tightly integrated with Google’s advertising technology platform and was certainly a viable business that did not need to…

Video optimization is a relatively new aspect of SEO, but as video content becomes more prevalent, it is an increasingly important component of successful search engine optimization. As lots of written content slowly disappears and is replaced by video content, how a page and even how entire sites rank is going to depend more and more on how videos are optimized. Optimizing Videos for Search Engines Videos can be a…

In light of yesterday’s announcement that Google is shutting down GAN, we’re offering GAN clients a free audit of their current program. While we are surprised to hear about the Google Affiliate Network shutdown, it presents a significant opportunity for GAN users to reevaluate the success and profitability of their affiliate programs. The Acceleration Partners affiliate team is highly specialized in performing affiliate program audits and migrations, with a focus…

One aspect of paid search marketing every online business has to grapple with is what’s known as trademark bidding. Trademark bidding occurs when one company bids on the name of a competitor or its trademarked terms so that its own ads show up alongside the competitor’s. To use a Tax Day-appropriate example, consider the search term [TurboTax]. A searcher who types that term into Google will be served ads for…

Last year was one of amazing growth for Acceleration Partners, thanks in part to success with clients like Tiny Prints, which won an Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Exceptional Merchant and One Kings Lane, which cracked the ShareASale Top 5 in November. We also forged new relationships with top consumer brands like adidas, Craftsy, ModCloth and Stella & Dot. The first quarter of 2013 is proving to be just as…