Ignite Pre-Show Networking Event
We'll be kicking things off at the Upper Deck Bar at the Novotel from 7pm (located directly opposite ExCeL). This informal evening reception is open to all delegates. Buy.at have kindly sponsored Ignite this year and will be offering a complimentary bar and hot food. You can also pick up your badge to save queuing in the morning -just bring along your booking reference and personal ID.
Registration
Please bring your ID (business card, credit / debit card) and your booking confirmation number which you will find on your invoice, this will be required to print your badge on-site. You must collect and wear the supplied wristband throughout the conference to gain access to conference sessions and networking parties.
Exhibition Opens
After collecting your Badge, Delegate Brochure, Bag and Wristband head up the escalators, read our conference brochure, grab a coffee and peruse the exhibition hall.
From Zero to Hero: How Red Letter Days Fast-Tracked A Successful Affiliate Programme
- Angela Greenwood, Online Marketing Manager
- Joshna Patel, Affiliate Manager
Red Letter Day was famously saved from administration by Dragon Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis in August 2005 - Since then the company placed a major focus on growing affiliates sales from Q3 2007. As a result affiliate sales value increased 60% from 2007 to 2008 and by 101% from January to June 2008 to June 2009. In this session Angela and Joshna identify the strategies that have driven this rapid uplift and resulted in their highly commended award at the a4uAwards earlier in the year. Topics for discussion include how to effectively create noise for your programme and grab affiliates attention, developing a flexible and workable commission structure, affiliate communication strategy, running programmes on multiple networks, effective de-duping policy, tailoring strategy based on the affiliate demographic and new angles such as the barriers to video content.
Affiliate Marketing Within The Media Mix
A discussion on how Affiliate Marketing fits within the online marketing mix. To assist affiliates specifically in understanding why decisions are made by agencies and merchants and how they are seldom made in isolation. Why merchants may even question the value of some of the internal channels such as vouchers, paid search or cashback and where and why affiliates are called into question. An understanding of these issues will enable affiliates to tailor their strategy to meet client demands and attempt to future proof strategy.
SEO Strategies To Make A Splash!
Entering a new niche or vertical? Up against established competition? – Dave will uncover some hot, new and innovative SEO strategies for both on-site and off-site SEO. You’ll be able to use these strategies to instantly give you a fighting chance against grandfathered competition within the SERPS. Like all sessions at a4uexpo, ample time will be given for questions at the end so get your thinking caps on to quiz one of Europe’s hottest SEO talents!
Time to explore the expo hall.
Voucher Codes – An Added Cost That Is Open To Abuse Or A Valuable Customer Acquisition And Retention Tool?
A research led presentation that explores the UK consumers approach to online shopping in a variety of vertical sectors. With the ever increasing volume of online voucher codes and money saving initiatives available to the consumer, has buying behaviour changed? The speakers will use real consumer information gathered by iCD Research to demonstrate how the customer journey and decision making process had changed during the credit crunch and how it has impacted the retailer.
Are Networks Dying?
Over the years affiliate networks have contributed heavily to the development of the affiliate marketing space, playing a crucial role in building relationships between clients and publishers to drive sales for the advertiser and, in turn, commission for publishers. However in recent years their role in the industry has come into question. With the recent downturn in the economy and marketing budgets being squeezed, many media agencies are starting their own in-house networks to drive revenue to their businesses and offer alternative solutions for advertisers. The question is, as advertisers and publishers forge closer relationships, are networks becoming obsolete? This panel discussion will feature contributors from all sides of the debate – an advertiser, an agency professional, a publisher and an executive from an affiliate network. The participants will discuss the changing role of networks and media agencies, and whether this poses a real threat to traditional affiliate networks. How are networks developing their offering to further add value to the mix and, most importantly, what is the view of advertisers and publishers?
Meet The Search Engines Q&A
- Matthew Trewhella, Google
- Dan Cohen, Microsoft
- TBA, Yahoo!
A technical SEO panel, giving the search engines the opportunity to present the latest updates within the algorithm and ranking models followed by the opportunity for the audience to Q&A some of the search engines own SEO engineers and Search Quality teams that work on the search engines on a day to day basis.
Coffee Break
Grab a coffee or cold drink and relax after the morning sessions by touring the expo hall.
10 Things To Do Before You Thrive As Affiliates: How To Get Even More Out Of Your Affiliate Marketing
Innovate, experiment and value everything you do...this session offers tactical advice for affiliates and merchants on how to develop their businesses looking to the year ahead, supported with new case studies.
The Affiliate Doctors Live!
Join some leading Affiliates and Industry observers as they offer frank advice on issues within affiliate marketing, start-up strategy, conversion, blogging and SEO. We’ll be splitting the session in half with questions posed by the moderator and from the audience.
Feeds Can Do What? - Defining How Feeds Are Used In Affiliate Marketing
Fact: Publishers have different needs. Fiction: Feeds come in a one feed fits all package. There is little more frustrating for affiliates than a poorly constructed or incomplete feed. Precious time is often wasted sorting vast amounts of data into the required formats meaning that feeds are often a differential between advertisers. Getting your feeds right sounds like such a simple objective, but across the affiliate industry it’s a real eye-opener to see that until now no-one has managed to offer a solution for everyone. This can cause problems for affiliates which usually results in lost revenue for both affiliates and advertisers, only then you can begin to understand just how important this is. So what difference does a feed actually make? What does the perfect feed actually look like? And what percentage of affiliates would not promote a merchant who didn’t have a feed? Join Fusepump Fusepump and TUI as they dispel the need for a one size fits all feed, taking you from theory to practise in an interactive session, using a real-life case study from TUI to put all the pieces together and to understand the conversion benefits of getting your feeds right.
Networking Lunch
This year we've binned the sandwiches and will be serving Hot food 'on the go' which will be served within the expo hall and on level two - Grab a lunch box and either explore the expo hall or attend one of the two 45 minute bonus lunch-time sessions.
Landing Page Success Story: How We Increased SEOmoz's Sales By 170%
Over the past four months, Conversion Rate Experts have increased the sales of the web community SEOmoz by 170%. In fact, in January, a single split test grew the sales by 52%. During this session, we'll show you the page before and after the test, and explain all the techniques that were used, and how you can apply them to your own business today. This will be followed by moderated questions from the audience and an opportunity for your site to be critiqued!
Lead Generation Strategy
This session will examine how the Lead Generation market has developed over the past year, what challenges and opportunities the current economic climate is providing for Affiliate marketers and how newcomers and experts alike can prosper from the world’s fastest growing category of online marketing.
The session will provide industry insight from Lead Generation networks as well as panel contributions from Lead Buyers and Lead Sellers. The industry panellists will share their Lead Gen experiences and give advice to Lead Experts and Lead novices alike!
The session will cover the following: Examine the role of Lead Generation before, during and after recession and explore how the shifting global financial markets have affected the industry.
How online marketing can be made to work harder for both the Finance and non Finance industries alike
What is and what isn’t premium lead generation, e.g. co-reg/free ipod type vs. real time search, display and emails leads and how you can make money from both.
The role of different lead categories – financial vs. Non-financial – where are the best opportunities?
Regulation – how will new Mortgage legislation effect lead generation and what are the current pain points that Affiliate marketers are experiencing because of tighter rules.
What are the benefits of working through a Lead network like LeadPoint or LeadBay?
How do you get started? Are there examples of best practice?
Lunch-time sessions to finish - still 15 minutes to explore the expo hall.
Beyond Link Bait: Getting Authoritative Mentions Online
Link building is crucial, but link-bait tactics that worked this year may not be as effective next year. This panel session includes 3 diverse presentations outlining the many facets of link building and analysis which focuses on the underlying quality as well as ingenuity needed to get other websites to link to you early and often. It will also explain how you should approach journalists, bloggers and other authoritative sources to enhance your company's online reputation, whether or not you get links.
Third Party Applications: The Future Of The Affiliate Marketing Industry?
In terms of B2C business, the Apple AppStore has become a best-practice example for the strong innovation and monetization power of third-party applications. How can the affiliate marketing industry take the immense potential of this business model to the next level? The affiliate network zanox just launched its Application Store, a B2B marketplace for third-party applications and the first application store for the affiliate marketing industry.
What do publishers and advertisers get out of applications? How can the challenge of leveraging all the different partners – developers, publishers, advertisers, networks – be taken on? What kind of apps are considered to be the most promising for the industry and how can they add real value to the business? And finally: Are third-applications really the future of the affiliate marketing industry or just a nice-to-have gimmick?
The panel discussion wants to show different perspectives on the meaning and impact of third-party apps for the affiliate marketing industry and give answers to the questions above.
The Truth Will Out: Disproving Common Misconceptions In Affiliate Marketing
Voucher code affiliates steal sales from other affiliates and 'last click wins' is an outdated and unfair reward mechanism for affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing is full of these and other assumptions yet rarely has any in depth research been carried out to show whether these accepted truths are actually the case.
Having trawled the Affiliate Window database, chopping, splicing and scrutinising the reams of information available, Affiliate Window presents our findings on some generally accepted affiliate marketing assumptions and asks whether it's time to revise some of these commonly held beliefs.
Using actual merchant examples to illustrate how different variables can impact the performance of your programme such as what effect introducing vouchers, paid search activity and cashback sites can have on your campaign or whether rewarding all affiliates involved in a sale rather than just the last referrer is a fair and viable alternative, Affiliate Window will be offering some key considerations for merchants looking to take their programmes to the next level.
Aimed at affiliate managers and merchants who are looking to understand the value of their affiliate traffic within the wider online mix AffiliateWindow will aim to provide plenty of food for thought.
Afternoon Break
Cold drinks will be available at all refreshment centres – Plus time to explore the expo hall or simply give your brain a much needed break.
My 12 Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes in 12 Years
Affiliate marketing expert Nadeem Azam provides an in-depth, informative and sometimes humorous insight into the biggest mistake he has made each year since starting out in affiliate marketing in 1997. "I often see people coming into affiliate marketing making the same misjudgements and it frustrates me because I don’t want them to waste weeks or months of their precious time as I have done," says Nadeem. "Hopefully, by learning from the mistakes I have made, people will be able to generate a healthy income from affiliate marketing a lot quicker than I was able to!" Topics covered will include: building too many websites entering too many niches/verticals lack of delegation and outsourcing poor ECRM; lack of mailing list or newsletter promoting low CPA/CPS merchants being too dependent on certain merchants for income Poor time-management Q&A Session.
Google Site Clinic
- Matthew Trewhella, Google
- Kaspar Szymanski, Google
- Fili Wiese, Google
This session will give you the chance to ask some of Google's top US (yes they have flown over from Mountain View especially for us!) and European Traffic Quality Team anything you like about problems you are encountering with your website and search engine optimisation on a daily basis.
Advanced Site Architecture And Product Feed SEO
You’ve got your site, done your research, got feeds coming in but you still aren’t making enough to retire to the south of France. In fact, you don’t seem to be pulling the traffic and... nope, you just aren’t ranking. But your site is HUGE and should be ranking – why isn’t it?
This session will look beyond SEO 101 to the specific issues affiliates face with large sites, product feeds, architecture and optimization. By examining beyond the basics, this session will build on existing knowledge about SEO to help those with larger, more complex sites requiring more bespoke solutions to rank well and beat the ‘affiliate penalty’.
With topics covered ranging from uniqueness, madlib, linking, and monitoring to site architecture, vertical selection, roadblocks and more, this session is going to be crammed full of interesting tips, tricks and insight.
Time to switch rooms or head to the expo hall
Risk Management For Affiliates
Andrew has more than 10 years experience in Affiliate Marketing - He'll be examining why its critical to manage risk as affiliates in an often turbulent industry. Covering the promotion of different niches, multiple sites, build methods, hosting and IP addresses, traffic generation techniques, email and profit maximisation.
The Affiliate Programme Life Cycle
Affiliate Programmes often stagnate over time - this session will reveal a typical programme lifecycle and offer strategies for merchants who want to reinvigorate their offer or who have inherited an existing and potentially mediocre programme.
Get practical advice on surviving the mid stage of a programme by innovating, employing effective programme management strategy and what you should be doing to analyse the value of your affiliates internally. Ewan will finish the session with questions from the audience for this merchant driven session.
You want to Tweet What!? - Social Media, Twitter and Affiliate Marketing
Join this panel of social media addicts as they uncover some of the strategies they use to build profile, brand, and traffic with Twitter. They’ll expose proven strategies to engage with customers and convert conversation into sales either as a Merchant or an Affiliate.
The panel will be offering three diverse quick fire presentations followed by a moderated discussion between the panel and the audience.
Networking Reception Drinks
The Networking reception will be held within the expo hall on the first day – we'll be providing complimentary wine, beer and soft drinks to all delegates and an opportunity to talk to our exhibitors and sponsors and discuss the affiliate marketing industry with fellow delegates.
Breakout Party
The O2 (The Dome) is a quick hop on the DLR / London Underground (10 mins) from ExCeL. We've given you time to satisfy your taste buds with other delegates at the mass of restaurants to suit all budgets at the O2.
After you've lined your stomachs, ensure you have your a4uexpo wristband and head to the Inc Club - We'll have complimentary beer, wine and soft drinks whilst the hefty bar tab lasts and to ensure you can network, we'll have two rooms for you to peruse - One with chill out music for networking and a more lively room where we will be voting on Affiliates & New Media's top DJ! - The Party comes to a close at 3am and is co-sponsored by DFDS Seaways.
