Pat Grady

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  • Pat Grady  I'm always amazed at how "they" are willing to sell their "simple" techniques that make "filthy" money... ok, not really. :-)
  • • 2 weeks ago
    •   The Hat Calling the Kettle Black
    •   Jangro
  • • 1 point
    • 0 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  I smell a MS buyout of VC coming, and VC clearing the decks of any roadblocks. Now that G has their aff network, MS and Y and maybe a few others will be considered to be missing a serious prong of online marketing today. So MS (or who ever), make sure you give this some deeper thought - clearing the pending legal issue is step one, figuring out how much income VC has derived from not policing this well (to put it nicely) should be step 2... they're worth buying, but bash them in the wallet a tad for their indirect admission here that a significant portion of their revenue was ill-gotten... and give walking papers to anyone there who has been involved in managing quality. Merchants and Affiliates depend in the network to do the right thing, and CJ has not - that eroded trust can be restored fairly quickly, we're not a grudge holding bunch, we just don't want our partners today gigging in the back with a shank to line their pockets.
  • • 2 weeks ago
    •   Commission Junction Adware Class Settlement
    •   Jangro
  • • 1 point
    • 0 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  Darn it, I was hoping one would fit in my pocket.
  • • 3 weeks ago
    •   My Big Fat Affiliate Paycheck
    •   Jangro
  • • 1 point
    • 0 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  Concerning loyaltyware, G's going to be in a very interesting position - one I think will determine and drive how they view and pitch and coexist with loyaltyware. I do agree with you, they are very unlikely to take a stance against it (too many consumers love it), BUT I do believe they have a high-level vested interest in properly tracking it's REAL value. If left to the blind (via split tracking buckets), loyaltyware takes credit for a lot of PPC costs that the merchant pays - so there's the conundrum that I'm counting on, to make G look at how they track and report these two channels, now under a single roof for the first time. If they are to position PPC to have value, I doubt they would disregard that in favor of cookie popping loyaltyware. What I guess will happen is an analytics crack in the loyaltyware lie (overstated value), where G will be in the new, never-before-seen position of providing both PPC and Affiliate tracking to their merchants. While separate (until now), merchants have been largely unable to put together the pieces, though try as they may via Omniture, et al. But now Scott, and this is what is new, the value proposition of these two competing channels (one, the loyaltyware, that I assert poaches from the other) are now being sold by the same entity to merchants. How does G argue that cookie popping loyaltyware caused / incited the sale and completely disregard their PPC's contribution? They can't. Question is, how will they position each within their quiver of overlapping services offered?
  • • 3 weeks ago
    •   Google Affiliate Network
    •   Jangro
  •   jangro  You're a smart man, Pat. It didn't occur to me that Google would have interest in digging into this, but you're right. The channel conflict hits them a little closer to home than in the networks who merely benefit. I'd believe that the networks haven't actually looked, either out of fear or ignorance. Though I've long talked about the fact that the networks have all the information to measure the impact of this channel conflict. Now whether Google and these two groups will actually get together and say, "hey WTF", is another question. Unfortunately, I doubt they'll share what they find. We'll be left to speculation based on their behavior.
  • • 1 point
    • 1 reply

  

  • Pat Grady  Silver stake driven through their AdWords PPA Beta with this news as well, after all, how many CPA mechanisms did they need. So I'd look for merchants in the Google Aff Network to be given the choice to push creative out through AdSense on a CPA basis soon. Will add a new wrinkle to managing an affiliate program. http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/publisher/index.html "Track conversions and member IDs for loyalty marketing" Smells like cashbacks and subaffiliate IDs, so we'll get to see what G's version of transparency is soon enough. Will they be like CJ and LS regarding junkware or will they be like SAS and Avantlink... whichever the case, the news of their phoenix rising probably should gravely concern CJ and LS, and hardly bother SAS and AvantLink given the tactics, costs, appeal to merchant demographics, level of service and such. Time will tell. One thing I do imagine coming to fruition is that when someone like Kellie Stevens post a video related to nasty tactics, the fact the G is involved, means the press will be very interested. This leverage could be the crevice that leads to opening wider change chasms regarding buttcrackware.
  • • 3 weeks ago
    •   Google Affiliate Network
    •   Jangro
  •   jangro  buttcrackware. LOL. I cannot imagine for the life of me that they'll take a stance against loyalty sites and their software plugins. My "wow" is at (and I am still in amazement) how they embraced the whole thing and put the Google name on it. There are so many acquisitions that they didn't touch the branding on (feedburner, picasa, etc.). I figured they were going to keep it at arms length, at least for a good long time. If they give this the treatment they gave to Urchin (now Google Analytics). Holy crap, watch out!
  • • 1 point
    • 1 reply

  

  • Pat Grady  Just think of all the free stuff on the Internet that you can buy with that! Where do I sign up for the Janguru newsletter?
  • • 3 weeks ago
    •   My Big Fat Affiliate Paycheck
    •   Jangro
  •   jangro  Great, thanks Pat. Now I have to buy janguru.com so Jim Kukral or David Lewis doesn't buy it. There go my profits.
  • • 1 point
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  • Pat Grady  i think i need to get one of those browser based spel chevkerz tooo. :-)
  • • 3 weeks ago
    •   Whoa, Jangro’s Gone Green (and Blue)
    •   Jangro
  • • 1 point
    • 0 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  Nice improvement! I like how you tuvked the action stream in there so I can get to the posts easier, but still glance at the action. Those numbers in the bubbles, are those view counts? How about a rollover saying whether that's the views, replies, and some rating system or whatever. I just glanced at it, and missed what the represent, do tell. Aestehic and function both look great!
  • • 3 weeks ago
    •   Whoa, Jangro’s Gone Green (and Blue)
    •   Jangro
  •   jangro  ok, I went for the simple solution. should at least be more clear. thanks for the feedback, Pat.
  •   jangro  I agree on the bubbles, what they mean. They're # of comments. Integration with Disqus is tricky when trying to do something fancy like that. I need to somehow get the word comments in there. rollover is an interesting idea. Thanks Pat!
  • • 2 points
    • 2 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  Well deserved nomination! Congrats! And by the way, I was one of the many signers of that petition you got going so that our voice concerning LMI could be heard loudly. Thank you for all you've done as an advocate on our behalf.
  • • 1 month ago
    •   Nominated for a Linkshare 2008 Gold Link Award
    •   Jangro
  •   jangro  Pat, thanks very much.
  • • 1 point
    • 1 reply

  

  • Pat Grady  "an industry that relies on third party cookies to track transactions" I too appreciate the Lijit folks chiming in, and I certainly agree (as a consumer as well as a marketer) that cookies are good, and are relively benign, almost completely so. But "third party" is being used here too loosely, cuz it's both a noun and a technical term. Third party can mean someone else besides the visitor and the site their on ("on" being the key word) -or- we can be referring to whether a browser considers a cookie to be a third party. Yes, these things are closely related, but there's some nuance in there... aff tracking sends the person through the network / tracking domain, so when that cookie is written / read, it's not really a third party cookie at that point (hence no eye of sauron). True, when it's read on the merchant's cart, it's a third party cookie requiring a script to run to complete the sale's tracking, but a little different than running that third party script on every page that contains a widget. I'm not disagreeing that folks like Lijit provide useful and meaningful services, and that to do so means data collection is required, but I strongly suspect that the majority of visitors to this site today will block the Lijit cookies. So my question remains, what is the price that the website owner pays for this situation? I suspect, as others have posted here, that as long as your privacy policies are updated and followed, the impact is probably on the order of magnitude of a drop or two in a quart of milk. As a seasoned webmaster, I view my efforts as the summation of the roughly 10,000 drops that it takes to make a quart, and I seek to avoid any that may be sour ones. I suspect since cookies are innocuous, and because browsers can easily block them, that there's very little chance they can turn the quart sour... but I thought I'd bring it up with others. Lastly, it's not so much that I fear cookies of any sort (I don't), it's the view of relationships to other sites is our interlinked Internet world... folks like siteadvisor (by McAfee) use these relationships to make judgements about the nature of sites... http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/jangro.com So, if connected sites get in trouble, it will reflect on me. Mantra in all of this is... and it's SO very old school and brick and mortar'ish... and my Mom taught it to me way back... you are the company you keep.
  • • 2 months ago
    •   Third Party Cookie browser warning and it’s impact
    •   Jangro
  • • 1 point
    • 0 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  I'm an IE guy on my current office machines... what does firefox display (if anything) for these cases?
  • • 2 months ago
    •   Third Party Cookie browser warning and it’s impact
    •   Jangro
  •   jangro  Firefox doesn't display anything that I've ever seen.
  • • 1 point
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  • Pat Grady  "Eye of Sauron", hehehee, exactly! They could have made it clearer (spying ain't happening) and therefore less threatening. I like your take on making sure your privacy policy reflects these things, good call there for sure. As to the seo, I doubt with the prevalence of widgets, that it hurts seo directly... but what I worry about is that some seo algorithms use consumer stay time and activities as part of their scoring... so if consumers alter their behavior, some seo algo's may pick up the connection and incorporate third party cookies as part of their scoring. I'd guess any filter like that would be domain dependent, meaning if Adsense loads a landing page cookie, no repercussions, but the less mainstream the third party gets, the more likely it'd have an effect on both the consumer, the browser warning system and some seo algo's. In any case, thanks for posting about this, enjoyed reading your thoughts on it.
  • • 2 months ago
    •   Third Party Cookie browser warning and it’s impact
    •   Jangro
  •   Pat Grady  I'm an IE guy on my current office machines... what does firefox display (if anything) for these cases?
  •   jangro  Good point on the indirect impact that slow response and high bounce rates may have on quality scores and such. Widget slowness can contribute, but there's the added 'fear factor' I suppose.
  • • 1 point
    • 2 replies

  

  • Pat Grady  The two I interviewed that answered that way were, but my experiment was totally unscientific and certainly not representative of things. But, I want to mention again, that the vast majority of browsers will block these cookies today, so even if our loss is teeny tiny, it's in exchange for nothing. Not a good trade off for any marketer. With AddThis, I could have chopped their code to drop their widget, but I assume that wouldn't fit their terms. To put things in perspective, this problem wasn't important enough to me to even review their terms for that possibility. :-)
  • • 2 months ago
    •   Third Party Cookie browser warning and it’s impact
    •   Jangro
  • • 1 point
    • 0 replies