OBAMA CAMPAIGN ANALYTICS CHIEF OPENS WEB TESTING SHOP

Miami Beach, FL and San Francisco, CA (August 23, 2010) – Dan Siroker’s online analytics acumen helped win the White House in 2008. Now the president’s former website strategist has started his own company and his own campaign to show Internet publishers, affiliate marketers and retailers how to quickly and affordably increase returns on their online investments.

As director of analytics for the Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign, Siroker played a key role in what many regard as the first major “digital age” election. He has since returned to the commercial sector as CEO of San Francisco‐based Optimizely – a new company co‐founded with Pete Koomen, a former Google colleague – dedicated to helping businesses make better data‐driven decisions using website optimization and A/B testing.

“We’ve developed a website optimization tool at Optimizely that I wish we had during the campaign, because it makes setting up and running experiments on your website incredibly fast, efficient and easy,” said Siroker. “The ability to create variations of your website and run an A/B test is now accessible to online publishers who in the past may not have had the time or resources to invest in website optimization.”

The approach may have enormous implications for affiliate publishers and performance marketers because it enables them to conduct rigorous comparison tests quickly and affordably, and implementation requires just a copy‐and‐paste of one line of code.

“From my experience, small changes can have a big impact on a website,” said Siroker. “For example, in response to the earthquake in Haiti, last January we ran an A/B experiment on the Clinton/Bush fundraising website: On the donation form, we changed the language on the ‘Submit’ button to ‘Support Haiti’; our donation volume increased by more than 10%.”

A podcast discussion with Siroker about how small changes to a website can make a huge difference to affiliate marketers is now available on the Performance Marketing Expo blog.

Siroker will also share the lessons he learned working on the Obama campaign, as well as additional tips for website publishers, affiliate marketers and retailers at the 1st annual Performance Marketing Expo running September 27‐29 in Miami Beach, FL.

FINISHLINE.COM’S AFFILIATE MARKETING RACES TO THE TOP

High performance describes more than just the top name brand athletic footwear Finish Line, Inc. sells; it also applies to the retailer’s online affiliate marketing program, which is growing by record numbers annually.

According to Finish Line’s affiliate marketing manager, Rob Gough, the retailer’s affiliate marketing program has consistently outperformed annual growth objectives for three consecutive years and is now the retailer’s largest paid online marketing channel – outperforming even paid search.

“When I joined Finish Line three years ago, my task was to grow our affiliate program 15% annually,” said Gough. “Since then I have grown the affiliate business roughly 1000%. It’s generally unheard of for an affiliate program to become more of a volume driver than paid search and email, but at Finish Line affiliate marketing is currently our number one performance marketing vehicle.”

Gough emphasized that to succeed in affiliate marketing, retailers need to pay much closer attention to their affiliates. “These publishers promote thousands of other retailers, so making sure we’re top of mind is a constant challenge,” said Gough. “You don’t win that extra placement on their site or get them to devote an extra 30 minutes of their time to promoting you unless you understand their needs and enlist them as true partners.”

“I get to know our affiliates personally. I treat them as if they were part of our in-house sales team,” said Gough. “It’s like managing a department of 4,000 people. You need to activate, motivate, and excite them.”

Gough will share a number of tactics that have enabled Finish Line to effectively engage its affiliate partners with remarkable success at IIR USA’s 1st annual Performance Marketing Expo running September 27-29 in Miami Beach, FL.

Interested parties may also tune in to a podcast discussion with IIR USA about Gough’s presentation topic – using contests and promotions to maximize affiliate excitement – by visiting the Performance Marketing Expo blog.

AFFILIATE MARKETING SKYROCKETS AS RETAILERS SEEK ALTERNATIVE GROWTH CHANNELS IN THE NEW ECONOMY

Top Retailers Share Strategies for Web-Based Affiliate Marketing Success at IIR’s 1st Annual Performance Marketing Expo September 27-29 in Miami Beach, FL

With most marketing channels under-performing in the ‘great recession,’ online merchants and retailers are increasingly betting on affiliate marketing programs to shore up sagging sales and get more bang for their marketing buck – and the results are getting noticed.

While the affiliate marketing space is relatively new to many retailers, the concept is anything but new. And it’s heating up fast. Forrester Research projects affiliate marketing will achieve double-digit growth in 2010, to become a $4 billion market by 2014.

Affiliate marketing – also called performance-based or online referral marketing – drives traffic and sales for online retailers by matching consumers with products and services that may fit their interests through a network of bloggers, social media communities and forums, partner websites and online publishers (“affiliates”), who then receive a commission for making the connection.

Rich Scotti, program affiliate manager for Frederick, MD-based 123Print.com, credits affiliate marketing with helping his company become one of the web’s fastest-growing resources for custom-printed business cards and other professional stationary. “Getting into affiliate marketing – especially getting your offers published on deal and coupon sites – is a slam-dunk. At 123Print.com we’ve seen the traffic and revenue from our affiliate marketing programs grow by over 300% since last year,” he said.

According to Scotti, cash-strapped consumers and business-side customers are aggressively looking to cut costs; these comparison shoppers consult the Internet first. Along the way, they are discovering deal and coupon sites, most of which belong to affiliate publishers.

Rob Gough, who heads the affiliate marketing program for Finish Line (Indianapolis, IN), has likewise seen an impressive return: in just two years the billion-dollar shoe retailer’s affiliate business has grown more than 500%, making it their largest paid marketing program. “Our affiliate business is a revenue engine that has continuously accelerated throughout the recession,” said Gough. “Part of our success lies in our ability to evolve in step with our customers’ lifestyles, and our cross-channel strategy reflects this. Affiliate marketing has played a critical role in that strategy.”

Scotti noted the increasing popularity of affiliate marketing is not simply a product of tough economic times; it also reflects retailers’ ongoing desire to explore alternatives to traditional marketing channels and tactics. “Although affiliate marketing has been around quite a while as a direct sales channel, it’s still a wide-open frontier for new customer acquisition for online marketers,” he said.

“With so much competition and noise in other online advertising channels, it’s hard to ignore any space where you can put your name in front of people who could become your customers. That was one of our initial goals at 123Print.com and it has worked well; about 60% of the sales we get through our affiliates are new customers,” said Scotti.

As the buzz about affiliate marketing spreads, more and more retailers are looking for information and ideas to help launch their own affiliate programs.

To meet this need, Scotti, Gough, and affiliate marketing managers from a variety of other top retailers that have successfully deployed such programs will share their learnings alongside many of the world’s leading affiliates and performance marketing agencies at the 1st annual Performance Marketing Expo September 27-29, 2010 in Miami Beach, FL.

Organized by the Institute for International Research (IIR) – the world’s foremost provider of action-oriented trade conferences for business professionals – the Performance Marketing Expo boasts a one-of-a-kind program that combines in-depth, practical learning with facilitated networking to create new business opportunities for retailers, merchants, affiliates and network providers.