James Bachini

Business

  • EWA Gone Under

    It’s not nice to see any company fail (especially when they owe so much to so many) but never in this industry have I seen it happen to a more deserving character. Goodbye Ryan Eagle and the joke/scam that was EWA.

  • Barcelona European Summit 2013

    Will be attending between the 1st and 4th March, staying in Sitges just outside of Barcelona where the show is. If you are going, see you there!! http://www.theeuropeansummit.com Spanish 101 Hello                    Hola Goodbye                 Adiós or Hasta luego Have a nice day             ¡Que pase un…

  • Las Vegas 2013, Affiliate Summit West, iDates etc.

    Four shows and countless parties in 8 days. Here are some pics from Las Vegas this January: Some takeaways I had from this trip: Don’t ever book meetings before midday and preferably later still. Even if you can party till 4am and get up and sober for a meeting at 10am the chances are the…

  • Display Marketing Logo Challenge

    Wow I don’t mind admitting half of these companies I’ve never heard of before: Display marketing infographic (from http://www.lumapartners.com a good blog actually looking at the industry from an investment perspective) They also have ones for mobile, social and search: http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/mobile-lumascape/ http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/social-lumascape/ http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/search-lumascape/ and my favourite, just in case anyones working on the next MyFace: http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/digital-capital-lumascape/

  • Direct Linking and Retargeting

    Here is how to do it, you’ll still need a server and a domain. Point all your traffic towards a php file i.e. http://www.mydomain.com/trackandforward.php Then place all your retargeting pixels in to the trackandforward.php file and put a meta refresh at the the end. The page will load the retargeting cookies will be placed and…

  • Out of Bounds Thailand March 2013

    Just had the email come through confirming a place! Looking forward to seeing everyone for Out of Bounds Thailand. The official dates are 13th – 18th March but I am thinking of going out on the 9th and staying till the 24th. Let me know if anyone else has plans outside of the OOB dates.

  • Firing a S2S tracking url from an image conversion pixel

    Use this on your landing page: setcookie(“cid”, $_GET[‘accid’], time()+7*24*60*60, ‘/’, ‘.mydomain.com’); This sets up a cookie so you can track a click id in www.mydomain.com?accid=123 You could also set this up track any other data you want, subid, affiliate id etc. Then setup your conversion image pixel as <img src=”http://www.mydomain.com/conversion.php” height=”1px” width=”1px” /> This code…

  • Merry Xmas from jamesbachini.com

  • Maxbounty setting an example

    Credit where credit is due this is awsome from Maxbounty: Hello James, For the past 8 years, MaxBounty has made it a tradition to give back to our community during the holiday season. This year is no different, and once again we are inviting you to help us out. On Saturday, December 22nd, 2012, we…

  • Stupidly Simple AB or Multivariate Testing

    Stupidly Simple AB or Multivariate Testing

    Here’s a simple way you can setup a simple multivariate or A/B split test without any software just using the subid variables provided by an affiliate network and some really basic php. <?php $out = ‘http://www.myaffiliatelink.com/page1.php?affid=123&subid1=’; if (rand(0,1) == 0) { $out.=’g1′; $girlimg = ‘1.png’; } else { $out.=’g2′; $girlimg = ‘2.png’; } // this…

  • Vegas Shows January 2013

    Have I missed anything? Anyone going anywhere else around this time? Any advise for surviving a couple of weeks in Vegas? The xBiz awards on Jan 11th are in LA I think so might miss them. Aff Summit West is booked, we are staying at Ceasers Palace between Saturday 12th and Sunday 20th. I hope…

  • Redirection Methods and Referer Passing

    The following are some methods you can use to redirect users from one place to another. I generally use 301 redirects for anything where I want the referer passed through because this is the fastest. Double meta refresh for anything where blank referer is important and a custom script which incorporates the form submit redirect…

  • Lessons learned from writing a bespoke tracking platform

    For a recent project I wanted to develop a tracking platform which was specifically designed to suit my needs. It needed to be simple to use, capable of handling seven figure audiences daily and built on technology I understand so it can be customised on the go. I decided to build it arround php /…

  • Is Facebook Going Live with Mobile Traffic?

    Is Facebook getting ready to go live with mobile traffic? There are options for mobile operating systems and devices in broad categories now. I still haven’t seen any ads other than sponsered stories on m.facebook.com yet… This screenshot is from the power editor in Chrome, highly recommended if you are uploading lots of similar ads.

  • Loading a conversion pixel on click through

    Mobile campaign optimisation throws up a number of issues in regard to tracking. One thing I’ve found really useful is to load a conversion pixel on click through from the landing page to the offer page. This can be a traffic source pixel which can then be used to give some indication of site/device/carrier quality…

  • Mobile Multivariate Testing with SubID’s

    Due to slow page load speeds it is advised to keep tracking software to minimum when running mobile campaigns. This caused me a problem when trying to develop and optimise a mobile landing page. Because I wasn’t using prosper or any other tracking software I couldn’t plug in my custom multivariate testing scripts. I was…

  • Neverblue Out of Bounds Whistler 2012

    Some photos from the Whistler trip with Neverblue. Top of Whistler Mountain Neverblue Party Crew Ice bar View from ATV ride Victoria home of the Neverblue offices It was a great opportunity to spend time with the Neverblue team, other affiliates and spammers alike. Alot of fun, left handed drinking, good food and all the…

  • Prosper202 Mod – Set preferences before crashing server

    Had a bit of an issue with Prosper crashing once the database got too big. I would log out and leave the analysis preferences set to my biggest traffic source and when I logged back in the server would crash as it tries to pull a report before you can modify the search critieria. I…

  • Romania Advertising Agency – Oops Media

  • Reasons to Love Neverblue in 2012/2013

    Looks like Neverblue are taking their affiliates to Phuket Thailand in March 2013! Wow!

  • Anyone planning on running $15,000,0000 to Clickbooth this Summer?

    I know there are other prizes further down the list but really… That works out at $166,666.66 USD a day in revenue. If Mark Zuckerberg is reading stick some 300×250’s on your site and you could keep the new shareholders happy and get yourself an island. For everyone else if you can get their offers…

  • Cupid PLC Kildermorie Lodge Scotland

    Thank you so much to all the team at Cupid PLC for organising an amazing trip to Kildermorie Lodge, near Inverness, Scotland. I’ve never been so surrounded by forward thinking people and whiskey. Here’s some photos from the trip: Fishing, shooting, Glenmorangie tour, great food and possibly the darkest game of charades ever played! Thanks…

  • Ideas for Banner Ad Split Tests

    Here are a few ideas for split testing your banner ads. You could quite easily use these to take a single ad and knock up a 100 variations. Test them optimise out the losers and see what works best. There is no single best banner advertisement, everything needs testing and optimising continuously.

  • Googler Helping Affiliates…. in 2012!

    Just when you think everyone working under advertising at Facebook and Google has been treated to a common sense bypass I get a lovely message like this. Hello James, Thank you for writing in. Hope you’re doing well! I’m Jaya, from the Google AdWords Support Team and I’ll be assisting you with your queries today.…

  • Virgin Media Blocks Piratebay.se

  • Internet World London 2012

    Earls Court, London was home to Internet World 2012 and on a wet Wednesday morning in April I jumped on a train to check it out. It was my first visit to this show and I came away with mixed feelings. I was hoping it was going to be like ad-tech but there was only…

  • Direct Response Marketing Pushing CPC Prices Up – The Future for Google Adwords

    I was asked to setup a little campaign for an offline electrical company on “The Google”. The business they operate in is electrical testing or PAT testing as it is known here in the UK. It’s the kind of industry where I wouldn’t expect to find much competition when it comes to online marketing. That…

  • The Neverblue Velo Bankruptcy Saga

    On April 3rd Velo Holdings the parent company of Vertrue which in turn is the parent company of Neverblue (have I got that right?) filed for bankruptcy. Performer insider released an “affiliate marketing is dead” post and I’m sure alot of affiliates, myself included, panicked. A generic email followed which stated “we intend to make…

  • Engage BDR – Self-serve RTB

    Have you seen these ads all over the internet? Chances are pretty high it was probably served by Engage BDR. Up until now their minimum deposit just to test a campaign was $25,000 USD. Which for most affiliates is completely out of reach but now they have released a new real time bidding platform which…

  • Handling large volumes of data with Prosper202

    IMO the default version of prosper202 isn’t really designed to handle large volume media buys. The latest version 1.7.2 does make it easier with a simple click to clear click data button but it can still prove difficult to pull off reports once the ammount of data you are analysising exceeds a certain limit. The…

  • Rotating Offer Pages and Landing Pages in Prosper202

    It is really easy to setup rotation of urls in Prosper but if you actually want to track which url is doing better or you want to test different landing pages it can be a little more challenging. One way to do this is to set each url or landing page up separately and then…

  • SiteScout RTB – A Walk Through

    Update 23/08/12 – If you are interested in working with Sitescout make sure you check out their superb knowedge base. Sitescout is a great traffic source for display advertising. They basically act as a reseller for remnant traffic from some of the biggest ad exchanges in the world. There is needless to say massive volume…

  • Jim.am Acquired

    With more than just a slight nod of the head to my favourite online marketing blog MrGreen.am I have moved the blog away from the business website to jim.am OK 3rd best might be a little bit of an exageration but if I can get the content flowing and get some interest I think it…

  • In-Text Advertising | Ultimate Guide

    In-Text Advertising | Ultimate Guide

    Updated April 2020 In-text advertising is a form of digital advertising that replaces words on a website with links paid for by advertisers. An advertiser bids for keywords and provides a destination URL. These keywords are replaced with links using a Javascript snippet on the publishers website. In 2020 the leading in-text advertising networks are:…

  • Tracking CPS Networks With Prosper202 and CPV Lab

    In the UK alot of affiliate marketing is done through cost per sale networks. The big ones being Tradedoubler and Affiliate Window. Here is how to integrate their backend systems with a performance based tracking system such as prosper202. TradeDoubler add &epi=[[subid]] Affiliate Window add &clickref=[[subid]] Affiliate Future add &tracking=[[subid]] Commission Junction add &sid=[[subid]] nb.it…

  • Prosper 202 Mods 2012

    Prosper202 mods 1) increase session life – stops it logging you out every five minutes when you are trying to work add the following line just before session_start(); in 202-config/connect.php ini_set(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’,99999); 2) bypass adverts on first page – bit naughty but I prefer to jump straight into the spy section to see whats been going…

  • Big Thank You To Neverblue for Out of Bounds Dominican Republic

    Just like to say a big thank you to Neverblue for organising Out of Bounds Dominican Republic. It was an amazing experience to be surrounded by like minded people and have all the luxuries the Neverblue team laid on. Sun Rise Punta Canna 2012 My main takeaways from the trip were:- Mobile advertising is expanding…

  • Google confirms SEO value in Plus One

    The following snippet was displayed in our Adsense account this morning: Does this mean the plus one is affecting searches carried out by people socially linked to your gmail account or does it mean there is a global SEO value in plus ones. Probably both so why isn’t the plus one button as widely spread…

  • Custom Facebook Share and Twitter Tweet Buttons as WordPress Widget

    The following is the php code to make your own dynamic Facebook share and Twitter tweet buttons. Just place the images in the root directory and install the Samsarin PHP widget. Copy this code into a Samsarin Php widget and drag it to your sidebar. <a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php echo “http://” . $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]  . $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’]; ?>”><img…

  • Using Adsense Section Targeting

    If you are getting lots of Groupon and Three ads on your adsense niche site the chances are it isn’t optimised correctly. By simply writing a short, keyword rich, snippet of what your site is about and surrounding it in the following tags you can manipulate which ads are shown. <!– google_ad_section_start –> Jet internet…

  • Googles Panda Update, Brands and Negative PandaRank

    More information has been coming out about the Panda update. Google have released a article on their webmaster blog describing how they see quality content. There were a few things that really stood out:- Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name? This seems to be a big hint towards…

  • Affiliate Network and Payment Terms

    There has been news this week of Epic/Azoogle stopping all weekly payments to affiliates. This has sent rumors of financial difficulties and cash flow problems circling the forums for one of the giant CPA networks. Just when the dust settles Maxbounty sends out a network email informing all affiliates they are improving their payment terms…

  • Slow Site Speed Prevents Google Indexing Pages

    We had a problem with one of our database sites not getting indexed as well as we have come to expect. After about a month it still only had arround 10% of the urls indexed from the sitemaps. We looked at the differences between this and other sites we had which were all going well.…

  • Domain Trust Ranking Sites Without Backlinks Or Social Network Indicators?

    For the last decade or more the SEO community has been obsessed with backlinks. Whether it be filling out profiles to get a quick link such as the famed Angela and Pauls packages or automated tools such as Xrumer and SENuke. Blog commenting, shout boxes, wordpress templates, sql injection, website widgets are just some of…

  • The future of MFA (Made for Adsense) sites after the Google panda update

    The big content directories such as ezinearticles, hubpages, articlesbase etc. All took a big hit with the Google panda update. It seems Google targeted low quality article databases with heavy blocks of adverts. These article directories have been abused by black and white hat link builders for the past decade. They allow people to post…

  • Facebook Share button more effective than Likes?

    A recent post at SEOMoz suggested that their research has found a better correlation between facebook shares than Facebook likes. The full post is here and makes for an interesting read. One of the things that really caught my attention was in the comments and I quote: “After chatting with our Google rep it seems…

  • Custom WordPress 404 Page For SEO

    I have recently been purchasing used domain names from Godaddy Auctions and Dropcatch. When I get the domains the first thing we do is look at what traffic they were pulling for what topics via google cached web search. If there is some good content on there and things we want to keep we will…

  • Setting up twitter feed to post to Twitter and Facebook accounts

    If you don’t already have a facebook and twitter account for your company they are really easy to setup. On facebook remember to click the “Create a Page for a celebrity, band or business” link on the homepage. Once you have those accounts setup head over to twitterfeed.com and sign up for an account. Enter…

  • Setting up custom facebook and twitter buttons using php

    The canonical tag has been a god send for us helping to get pages indexed and clean up site structures. In many sites we use the same php variable for our share buttons. This is a great way to setup custom twitter and facebook share buttons for your pages. We always use an external template…

  • Perfect Site Structure

    It is widely accepted that Google places the most weight on the first 100 links it finds on a web page. With that in mind we can design a website that is optimised so that every single page is as close to the root domain as possible. Even with a 1,000,000+ page website you can…

  • Two php functions for scraping content and extracting links

    ////// Grab webpage ////// function webFetcher($url) { $crawl = curl_init(); curl_setopt ($crawl, CURLOPT_URL, $url); curl_setopt($crawl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); $resulting = $resulting.curl_exec($crawl); curl_close($crawl); return $result = $resulting; } //////////////////////////////// //// extract links //// function extract_links($text) { preg_match_all(‘/<\s*a[^<>]*?href=[\’”]?([^\s<>\’”]*)[\’”]?[^<>]*>(.*?)<\/a>/si’, $text, $match_array, PREG_SET_ORDER); $return = array() ; foreach ($match_array as $serp) { $full_anchor = $serp[0]; $href = $serp[1]; $anchortext =…

  • CPA Tips

    Maxbounty tracking with subid in prosper202: /tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&subid=#S1# The standard conversion rate I use (probably out of date): //$ > £ = x 0.64 Note that what you buy and sell dollars for is very different, 2-4% Consider setting up US bank account. Not possible without visiting the states to the best of my knowledge. Phi…

  • Prosper202 Hacks and Modifications

    Prosper202 Hacks and Modifications

    JiM’s Prosper202 mods 1) increase session life (stops it locking you out every few minutes) add the following line just before session_start(); in 202-config/connect.php ini_set(‘session.gc_maxlifetime’,99999); 2) Cchange the first page you see. edit 202-login.php line 80: header(‘location: /202-account’);  to   header(‘location: /tracking202’); or /tracking202/spy/ If you are doing email submits or any volume loging into spy…

  • Welcome to the blog

    Welcome to the blog

    Thanks for visiting this is the first post at JiM’s Blog. To tell you a little about why we are starting a blog could take a while but in short we are trying to improve our communications throughout the industry and this is one method we are using. If you are interested in getting in…