30th January 2007

New Look Tradedoubler! … Same Old Attitude?

posted in Affiliate Marketing |
Spread the love

Following rapidly after Buy.at’s overdue overhaul of their interface (a good improvement) plus rebrand, Tradedoubler (aka The Borg) have just launched theirs, with an interface facelift, as well as redefining their market offerings.

The product range caters to advertisers and affiliates who are looking to utilise the various marketing and advertising opportunities presented by the internet. TradeDoubler’s range of marketing solutions now have a clear & concise distinction to accommodate advertisers across multiple industry sectors whether they are looking to generate increased brand awareness or drive direct response in the form of clicks, sales or registrations.

The portfolio / product range is now defined as:

  • td Pull (Affiliate network)

Long-term partnerships between advertisers and publishers. Publishers are paid a commission by an advertiser when advertising on their website results in an actual sale or registration for the advertiser.

  • td Push (Campaign network)

Short-term activity with pre-defined deliverables. TradeDoubler will create a bespoke network of targeted publisher sites to meet the advertiser’s specific objectives.

  • td Reach (Ad network)

A plug and play network with extensive reach. An advertiser ‘plugs’ into the existing network of publisher sites and ads are rotated across the network reaching a wide target audience.

  • td Talk (Pay-per call network)

Advertisers can use the reach of the internet to drive sales and registrations over the phone. td Talk allows publishers to easily promote more complex products and services on their website and receive a commission for phone calls generated.

  • td Toolbox (Marketing interface)

A tracking and ad serving interface. Advertisers and publishers can track, analyse and optimise the performance of all online marketing activity (advertisers) or advertising carried on their website (publishers).

My Opinion:

td Talk (Pay-per call network) – is what caught my eye the most. We have had a trials with a few of merchants in the past, so it’s far from being new yet still remains unexploited, and those we had made a real concerted effort on had reaped dividends indeed. With the increasing untake of VOIP, and traditional use of ordering by telephone still prefered by a good proportion of internet users (especially holidays), this will help plug the leakage where potential customers reach for the phone rather than ordering online, whereby previously an affiliate would have lost out on the commission. Unfortunately, though fairly much in it’s infancy, the market requires a greater uptake by merchants / advertisers of this option if they wish to be taking seriously by high revenue generating affiliates, frustratingly so many merchant / advertiser sites still have prominent order numbers displayed. Therefore, I do hope a lot of energy is focused in this area not only by Tradedoubler but other networks too by encouraging their clients to adopt & embrace this option … Maximising revenues to affiliates who can create landing pages with improved monetisation … The downside of where it hasn’t worked particulalry well so far is Miva UK, the quality of advertisers being poor in our opinion and the uptake of only a few in the finance sector. Still this is an exciting avenue to pursue / explore and one we will be keeping a keen eye on.

Their strap line “Market like you mean it” has more of a buzz to it, rather than the previously mundane “The European Affiliate Network”. As for the logo, well take it or leave, it simply looks like the typical pebble dashing after a few too many beers & a dodgy kebab. More likely they have let a kid loose with with one of those old spiral drawing kids sets. You know the one, where you create beautiful designs using cogs, stencils and colouring pens. Tradedoubler should have commissioned my kids. To be fair it is an overall improvement.
At first glance, the functionality of the interface seems fairly similar to before, the colour scheme reminds me very of DGM.. is that a good? The first thing I noticed was that our so called publisher manager had changed without notification … nice of them to let us know … It used to be Nick Roveta, and over the past year despite many attempts to contact him via email or telephone, little was ever returned. I used to have a lot of respect for him, unfortunately this has somewhat withered with our zero respect for the network. On the whole their rebranding will work out to be a good thing for them and the industry as a whole (pending if the proposed takeover from AOL materialises), but scratch beneath the surface of the veneer / make up and it’s still the old mutton dressed up as lamb Tradedoubler. A leopard doesn’t change it’s spots and I see no commitment or genuine conviction from them that this will change. If I ever had the deciding vote on the takeover, I would have gone against the boards recommendations who I feel have reached their exit strategy of looking to cash out with their cash cow.

On a minor note they claim a be “network of more than 100,000 website publishers”. This really needs to be taken into perspective on a market by market or country by country basis. This number simply blinds prospective clients. Realistically most of the main players in affiliate marketing are signed up to most networks anyhow, the figure you really need to examine is how many cheques a network actually cuts per month, then you will quickly determine that’s it’s fairly similar across many of them. They have over 1000 advertisers which is true .. so quickly looking at this, the ratio of publishers to advertisers is 10:1, then surely the dedicated account managers looking after affiliates should be a similar ratio you would expect wouldn’t you? So if there 100 account managers looking after merchants, then there should be 1000 publisher managers as a rule of thumb, therefore I think you’ll find that the ratio in relation to affliliate / publisher : merchant support is somewhat inverted.

Leave a Reply