Affiliate marketers are often overwhelmed by product catalogs. In this session Martin will look at ways to analyse data for opportunities in search, and how you can focus your marketing efforts. Experience level: Intermediate Target audience: Affiliate/Publisher Niche/vertical: Retail/Travel Martin MacDonald, Inbound Marketing Director, Expedia Affiliate Networks (Twitter @searchmartin)

1. Martin MacDonald,
Inbound Marketing Director
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2. Mining for Opportunity
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3. Affiliate Marketing with 1,000,0000s of products
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4. Lets size the current market
Example Industry: Travel>Hotels
Booking.com (Priceline) 230k
EAN (Expedia) 180k
Agoda 261k
HRS 250k
Compensating for crossover there are around 500k hotels globally available on the
common affiliate networks.
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5. Most common & best converting keywords
Example Industry: Travel>Hotels
[HotelName]
[HotelName] + [City]/[State]&/[Country]
“Hotels in” + [City]/[State]&/[Country]
Just these combinations would result in 4,000,000 potential keywords, covering
long tail property names, but crucially not covering long tail search terms.
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6. Keyword Conversion Rate vs Volume
Low Volume 8-12% Conversion
Hotel Name + City Name +
Reservations
City Name + Hotels
Hotels + Region Name
Hotels + Descriptor (ie.
“spa”)
High Volume <1% Conversion Hotels
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7. Low Hanging Fruit…
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8. Ingredients:
+
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9. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Organic Search (SEO)
• Rank check the top 10 results for
the top 10k-100k keywords
• Export the list into Excel
• Calculate the % of top 10 SERPs
which are subfolders or sub pages
• Sort the keywords by the number of
results on sub pages.
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10. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Organic Search (SEO)
Formula to calculate Folder Depth in a URL String:
=(LEN(B2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(B2),"/","")))-2
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11. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Organic Search (SEO)
Build a pivot table as per
the screenshot, summing
the total number of
subfolders/pages per
unique keyword.
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12. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Organic Search (SEO)
Sort the results by average number of
slashes descending.
This is now a good indicator of the order
of ease of ranking for keywords!
BONUS:
Download the source sheet:
http://bit.ly/ASWmm1
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13. “But that still sounds
like a lot of work…”
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14. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Paid Search (PPC)
Lets do something similar but
this time using Paid Search!
• Using the original keyword
list, re-run the rank check
using “Google Adwords
(USA)”
• Now export the data as a
“Top Sites” report.
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15. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Paid Search (PPC)
Lets do something similar but
this time using Paid Search!
• Using the original keyword
list, re-run the rank check
using “Google Adwords
(USA)”
• Now export the data as a
“Top Sites” report.
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16. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Paid Search (PPC)
This time we are going to just “count” the
appearances of results against each
keyword.
Add a second column, put the number (1) in
each of them.
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17. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Paid Search (PPC)
Pivot table the Sum of the
Count Values to give the total
occurances of each keyword.
Note: in the example
(screenshot & sheet) the data
is spread over 10 days to
improve the average and
accuracy of the results.
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18. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Paid Search (PPC)
Results that require the lowest
average CPC to rank <4
appear at the top.
Results towards the bottom are
the most expensive.
In a keyword list of 4MM terms
you uncover 10k-100k’s of
keywords you can bid minimum
CPC on and still appear.
DOWNLOAD:
bit.ly/ASWmm2
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19. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Paid Search (PPC)
Notes:
In given example, city names are often broad match – hence higher than average
competition.
The terms [hotels] and [cheap hotels] are often broad or phrase matched
Carry this procedure out on product names, and you can find a high % with
ZERO competition..
DOWNLOAD:
bit.ly/ASWmm2
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20. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Bonus: Scraping Google Results, at Infinite Scale.
AWR (or any other rank checking software) is limited by the
amount of requests you can send to google over time. This is IP
Limited.
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21. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Bonus: Scraping Google Results, at Infinite Scale.
AWR (or any other rank checking software) is limited by the
amount of requests you can send to google over time. This is IP
Limited.
Private Proxy Networks:
Pro – scale your scraping reliably, choose your IP Location
Con – can become very expensive to get speed into 100k per day
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22. Market Sizing & Opportunity
Bonus: Scraping Google Results, at Infinite Scale.
AWR (or any other rank checking software) is limited by the
amount of requests you can send to google over time. This is IP
Limited.
Private Proxy Networks:
Pro – scale your scraping reliably, choose your IP Location
Con – can become very expensive to get speed into 100k per day
VPNs & Anonymizers
Pro – massive scale, quick data collection
Con – you can burn IPs quickly, be sensible in your scraping folks!
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24. Thank you!
Want to get in touch?
Tweet:
@searchmartin
email: mmacdonald@expedia.com
Copyright notice: all images licensed via shutterstock except the AWR Logo, a Caphyon product, and the Excel Logo, a Microsoft Product. 24