The same Government that will soon require user opt-in for all cookies, wants to be able to monitor your communication habits on a much lower-level. Now I do not want to go into a long-winded post / article / essay about how this is a gross invasion of privacy and how I detest all these new rules about the Internet from people who don’t understand the Internet. No, I simply want to suggest, nay, implore you to deploy Tor to protect your anonymity online.

In essence Tor should be considered the way to browse the Internet. It will ensure what you view, watch and listen to on the web, remains yours to share as you see fit. I follow the law online as I do offline, and take great offence that those very politicians who are supposed to protect our freedom, seem intent on destroying it.

Therefore my advice is go and download Tor, it’s free, it’s safe and provides you with the privacy you hopefully strive for. Let’s send a firm message to the Government – don’t restrict and interfere with that which you do not understand.

Being the ever-helpful person I am, you can read up more on the Tor Project at Wikipedia for further information. I highly recommend it.

When picking through my Analytics I noticed a significant percentage of incoming traffic going to an introductory article I wrote on behavioural retargeting back in 2011, couple this with a deep interest in retargeting, and being at somewhat of a loose end, I’ve put together this article that may give you a better idea of what you can expect if you’re getting involved in this advertising channel.

This article won’t really be on the technicalities, or pros and cons of retargeting, or god forbid – on the privacy argument. Rather it’ll focus on commercials, a theoretical test case and hopefully arm you with enough information to make an informed decision.

Background & Commercials

I’m going to dive straight in and assume you’re familiar with the concept of retargeting, if not then as always there’s a Wikipedia article covering it to get you started, or of course – hint hint – my post on it.

When you embark on a retargeting program – depending on the provider you go with – you’ll work to either a CPC (where you’ll pay on the click), or CPA (where you’ll pay a commission of the sale), and never CPM despite what some people declare, this would result in a media company buying on CPM, then selling on CPM which makes little sense in terms of impressive margins, or indeed reargeting as a model at all.

If you’re working to a CPC agreement with a provider such as Criteo or Struq, you’ll pay for the click to drive a user back to your site. This is done on a bidding system with Citeo – similar to AdWords; I’d assume so with Struq as well but wouldn’t like to stake my life on it. Therefore depending on the competitiveness of your sector your Cost Per Click fee will vary.

If you’re working to a CPA with AdGenie or myThings then it’s far easier to arrange commercials through an affiliate network and treat them as any other publisher when negotiating commissions as in traditional affiliate marketing; both providers appear to still be working through Affiliate Window.

One important point to bear in mind on CPA arrangements is that in addition to working with your retargeting provider as a standard publisher on click-throughs, last-click and de-duplication, the provider will also claim everything that falls within a 48 hours post impression window. That is to say if a retargetting advert is served to a user, they don’t click it, they may not even see it, but they find their way back to your site through another means (SEO, PPC etc), the retargeting provider will claim this sale as theirs. It’s tough to swallow, but from their point of view it has to be done, as they’re buying the media on your behalf, therefore need to guarantee a return.

So, let’s build a theoretical case study from which we can explore statistics, the example merchant that I’m going to build is that of a jewellery website.

On a CPC

As you’re paying to get the lead in on the click, you’ll pay every time a user clicks on your creative regardless of whether they buy. As Criteo works on a bidding platform, it all depends on the competitiveness and aggression of the bidding in your sector. With a sector such as jewellery you’d perhaps be looking at about £0.50 CPC, therefore every lead that you’re bringing in to the site will cost you £0.50. Once they’re on-site it’s your job to convert and ensure you make your money back.

If for example you typically convert at 1%, let’s be overwhelmingly generous and say that as the targeted user has already browsed your site they’re likely to convert at higher than average. It’s quite unlikely that users will be converting at twice the average on a retargeting campaign, but for the simplicity of maths here, it’s the assumption we’ll be labouring under, so 2% is what we’re working to.

This means that as the merchant you’ll be paying £25 for every conversion made through retargeting. With CPC commercials, that’s it. You pay no more. No commissions on the sale or tracking / network override fees, just for the clicks. If your AOV is £100, once you take away the cost of bringing in that one conversion at £25 in total, you’re looking at a CPA of 25%. Now whether this is attractive or even acceptable to you, depends on how it stacks up against your other marketing channels, and above and beyond anything else: your margins.

On a CPA

CPA retargeting agreements will more often than not, include a 48 hour post-impression claim. Now there are far too many variables – volume of traffic, frequency capping, different marketing channels etc – in this particular area of retargeting for me to contemplate trying to tackle with solid numbers. Just make a note to keep an eye on how the post-impression claims are legitimally driving sales.

Post impression tracking ensures that if a user that you’re retargeting, is displayed one of your ads, doesn’t see it, doesn’t click on it, but re-enters your site through another channel within 48hours, you will pay the commission for it. So my word of advice is to simply keep a close watch on it.

The CPA retargeting programs that I’ve worked on, have always been through a network. I prefer this as opposed to going direct. Why? Well a network will take the hassle out of the setup, provides account management, and generally acts as an impartial third party between the merchant and the publisher – adding an extra degree of trust to the relationship.

What you – as the merchant – will pay will largely be defined by you. You will set the commission rate that you are prepared to pay, and perhaps have to negotiate with the publisher over it. Once this has been firmly established you will not pay another penny until a sale is made.

If the commission rate agreed is 10% and the sale made through retargeting is £100, then the commission payable is £10, taking into account the network override (typically 30% of commission paid) then you’ll be paying £13 for a sale, as it’s all CPA this seems more attractive than Criteo’s CPC.

Although as always – there’s a caveat. As mentioned above, CPA agreements will claim all post impression sales made within a 48hour window, making this fall into somewhat of a grey area. Throw in the added variable of the CPC networks – Criteo & Struq – being larger, therefore having better buying power for media and thus giving you a larger reach. It’s truly a minefield and requires trialling, tweaking and consistent analysis. Also, never forget the network tracking fees that you’re required to pay, these are usually expensive so hard to miss.

Round Up

Perhaps you didn’t find the solid figures within this post that perhaps you were seeking to kick off your campaign. If that’s the case then I apologise Although with so many variables that play a part – your conversion, your CPC, your margins etc – it’s impossible to offer useful advice that are guaranteed to work for your business model. Rather I was looking to explain the differences in the commercials you’ll work to.

The key advice I will leave you with, is the same for every facet of web marketing, whether it’s SEO, PPC, affiliates etc: try it. You can read and ponder until the end of time, but until you test it, you’ll never know.

Once I came to realise that designing sat way outside of my skillset, building sites became much easier, more fun and more importantly – far more productive. No longer would I feel the need to be intimidated by a blank PSD, or write code from scratch, but rather I realised I could install WordPress in a couple of clicks, scour ThemeForest or Rocket Theme for a skin, apply it, and within minutes I’m ready to start writing content and marketing.

Essentially what was an incredibly useful revelation for me – that in all honesty should have hit me a lot sooner – was don’t try to do everything yourself. It’s remarkably rare to find someone who can design, develop, produce content and market at a professional level. So why waste time in tackling a field that you’re simply not meant for. Particularly when you can pay a few £’s, click a few buttons and have a professional, stylish skin active on your site in a matter of minutes.

I have spent hours upon hours scouring the web hunting quality skins and designs for my beloved WordPress and found ThemeForest to have the best selection of premium themes for the most up to date versions. However if you’re on the hunt for free themes, you can’t really beat the WordPress site itself, more basic but definitely do the job. Oh, also I can’t forget StudioPress – worth checking out and reading up on their Genesis framework alone.

Anyhow, that’s my advice – if you can design, then by all means produce ground-breaking interfaces. Although if your creativity lies elsewhere, save yourself the time and hassle by using pre-made themes. Although if nneither of these appeal to you, there are plenty of sites out there where you can simply buy a website.

Having written this post I realised I’ve only just re-skinned this site with its current (as of 11th March 2012) theme, which I designed and coded myself. What can I say? I’m a fan of minimalism and clean code, and none of the themes out there quite lived up to my needs. How contradictory.

The loose conclusions that I draw here could be entirely ridiculous, a lucky observation, or float somewhere between the two. After reading an article on ZDNet that details Google paying Mozilla to keep Google as the default search engine for Firefox, it triggered a recollection of a thought I had a few months ago when I bought a new laptop from Currys.

A little background – Currys is a consumer electronics retail store that is part of the Dixons store group (DSG), and within their glorious Putney store I purchased a Lenovo ideapad. After registering Windows (hopefully I’ll make the switch to Ubuntu soon), I fired up Chrome and this is where my curiosity was raised. Of course Google was set to be the default site I landed on, but instead of just being dropped onto the URL http://www.google.co.uk it had a tracking ID appended to it as can be seen in the screenshot below.

The web marketer in me kicked in straightaway – this session is being tracked by the id = ‘DSGQ’ which implies it’s being attributed to Dixons Stores Group, what are the financial arrangements here? Are click revenues paid on a split to Dixons for effectively delivering me repeatedly to Google’s money making machine? Is a flat fee being paid? What form of commercials exist here?

Having just quickly tapped out this article, it seems obvious that if all Dixons laptops sold default to Google that Dixons would reap some form of payment as they are effectively delivering repeat leads to a business.

Anyhow, just thought it may be worthwhile to share as every day new revelations are seemingly made over the reach of the dominant search player and penetration into Microsoft’s platform is really quite an interesting development.

I think some advice on PPC strategy may need to be dispensed. Good targeting by Google. Again.

Starting appropriately at the beginning of the beginning, Bryson takes the reader on a journey from the culmination of energies that created the universe and formed the planets, through to the creation of modern civilisation.

Throughout this fascinating text we are taught everything from early science’s attempts to weigh and give an age to the planet earth, through to academic rivalries that transcend time and geography. Each page delivers new learnings of human and epistemological endeavours that explore every branch of the sciences, whilst remaining entirely accessible to all with a thirst for knowledge.

Bryson’s exploration of time, space and purpose is utterly compelling; whilst new concepts are introduced and expanded upon, they never serve to overwhelm, but simply educate, inform and answer probing questions, such as how the tides of the oceans work, or how the marvel of volcanoes arose. Whilst the book explores the foundations and origins of our universe and our species, we are introduced to some of the most colourful and influential characters of science and history.

An absolute must read for anyone who has pondered where we came from and how we came to be. A Short History of Nearly Everything at Amazon.

About four months ago I stumbled across SEScout through a post in r/SEO saying how you can track up to 10 KWs on the free demo of their tool. So with nothing to lose but a few minutes of my time, I headed over, added in my KWs and thought nothing more of it until a week or so later when I decided to check in with progress.

To make this very brief; it’s a simple and beautiful interface, the tracking of the KW positions for the most part is accurate, and when not correct have found it to be out of place by a maximum of two positions in the SERPs (to date).

As mentioned above it’s free for your first 10 KWs and 10 domains (if you can cope on 1 KW per domain, then the pbest of luck to you). From there is’s priced as you can find here. I don’t wish to write it out as obviously it’ll be subject to change, and also there’s no need to when they list so cleanly and elegantly.

So, like I said – this is a quick post, and to clarify I’m in no way affiliated with them but just thought would share the love of something that’s clean, easy, accurate and to begin with – free

. Any others you’d suggest please just go ahead int he comments section, or get in contact.