Nada Collar

I’ve just checked out the new Google Analytics and while I haven’t really spent much time with it, I have to say that I like it. I was an easy convert, I really hated the Google Analytics GUI before.  But now it seems to be more contextual, from most reports you can click on almost everything and drill further down into the data.  I hated that about the old GUI, sometimes what you wanted was there, but other times it just really didn’t make any sense (to me).

I suspect the original interface was designed for a certain user (the marketer), but then when Google took over it suddenly became for everyone, and as a result the interface wasn’t quite what most people wanted. It seemed bizarre to me that it took me a ton of time and finally a help search to find who my referring sites where.  But on the new interface it took me all of 10 seconds to find.

Maybe marketer’s will be writing about how they hate the new system, but I’m hoping they got that right too as I am slowly (very) but surely creeping towards being able to call myself that.

I’ve just added a new blog to my Google Reader. Zac Johnson is a “Super affiliate” who has just started a blog about affiliate marketing. I enjoy Zac’s writing style as he often seems to slant towards a high level “running a business” article, as well as the usual affiliate news and ways to make money. I am a partner in a reasonably successful business in a completely unrelated field (but in technology) and I find that most high level business concepts carry over well, so its a nice mix for me.

My blog originally started as pure Revenue Sharing, but the more I look around and see concepts such as Zac’s Review Me and Make Money (taken from John Chow’s similar Link Love campaign), and his Top Commenters Competition, the more I realize that there are many, many types of revenue sharing. As I’ve mentioned before, even just removing rel=nofollow from your links is a form of revenue sharing.

Anyway, back to Zac’s blog. I am trying to learn as much as I can about the affiliate industry and so Zac’s site will stay on my RSS feed. Its well written and I am sure he will continue to write some great articles. Its good to get some fresh ideas if you have been reading from the same people over and over.

Tumri Cornerstore launched some time at the beginning of this January. But there hasn’t been much information about it around the place. Perhaps the most information is over at 5 Star Affiliate Programs, especially in the forum there.

The idea of Tumri is similar to MyPickList and FavoriteThingz, although from an initial look it appears to be implemented better than those two. It also seems that Tumri is marketing itself towards publishers rather than social network users, so that might help them.

Apparently for users that signed up in January receive 70% revenue share, but I haven’t been able to find out what it is now.

User Experience

One thing I found interesting was that on signing up I had to select my target audience based on gender, education level and average household income. I guess this will help target the widget, but I would have thought that this information would be better to be added when the widget is created. It would seem that I can only have one widget per account, which is not perfect if this is being targeted towards publishers who likely have multiple places (with different targets) they would like to use this widget.

On signing up the site seemed to hang, but I got an email and was able to access my account, so just some small hiccup. On signup there was also mention of a conditions for a “widget sweepstakes”, but the link didn’t seem to have anything related, apart from a small box stating that every 100th signup would give me a free iPod shuffle. I assume a signup is a new publisher (found from my widget) who creates a widget, but who knows.

Once inside the publisher portal Tumri has a very clean looking user interface and creating a widget is fairly simple, however I found that I could not target my widget any closer than a category, unlike the write-up which said I could “select or block CornerStore offers by item, brand, keywords, product category, price break, location, and many other criteria”.

Conclusion

Overall it looks like a product that could be useful with some more work. But given the apparent success of MyPickList and FavoriteThingz they are going to have to work hard.

What does it need? Firstly a blog to inform people of updates (there is a news page on the publishers section which kind of resembles a blog), secondly some decent help (any help at all would be good), and finally and most importantly the ability to actually target certain products like they promised.

View my widget here.