I’ve been in performance marketing for about 3 years, which as online professionals go means I’m about as long in the tooth as sabre toothed tiger. However for me it’s still only a fraction of my professional and web based career.

I remember in my first interview with DGM, I referred to the business throughout as affinity marketing. Either they were hard of hearing, or were so desperate to employ anyone they just skipped over it.

Anyway I got the job, and started working in affiliate marketing for the first time. It was wild and exciting, especially since I knew next to nothing about it.

People would talk about something called search groups, which I thought must be related to some sort of treasure hunt (not so far from the truth in a way.) And brand bidding which had to a reference to eBay.

I was soon immersed in a new world, where the most important things were Google trademarks, control of the bidding group and the allocation of the page positions. The positions were of course of vital importance to how much traffic generated and how much revenue made.

In those days the Google trademark process allowed brands to control all brand based biding. In the UK all this changed in May last year when Google allowed competing brands to bid on each other’s brand terms.

This removed much of the control from the brands themselves, but wasn’t the end of the strategic search group as through affiliate networks they could still control who was going to get paid. What it did do though allow a more perfect market in bidding on brand terms.

This meant that competing brands and their affiliates could bid, pushing the overall CPC rates up, especially on the more popular terms. CPC rates would also vary according to the landing pages quality score, relevancy etc, but what it did mean to those affiliates working in the space was that margins were squeezed, giving Google more money and driving up efficiency for those brand bidders who remained.

Google was in my opinion the big winner here, but it did consumers more choice and also highlights the overarching importance of brand based searches in the performance/affiliate industry. Despite many reports of it’s demise, brand based searches and the subsequent conversions will remain substantial beneficiaries of the growth of ecommerce.

The question is though how many of these brand searches will continue to convert through PPC and how many through other more subtle ways of reaching the potential customers of their favourite brands.

Rob

MD on-e