Official Blog

Congrats to our VIP Publisher Momondo! The Danish flight search engine has just been awarded the “best overall” flight search website by The Sunday Times in a comparison test that included seven of the words largest travel sites. The test will be published in the September 2010 issue of The Sunday Times’ travel supplement. In the test, all travel sites were given points out of ten – and Momondo came top scorer with nine out of ten. “Over multiple searches, Momondo consistently gave the best prices for long haul”, writes the Sunday Times and praises Momondo for “searching more airlines than all the others”.

Our VIP Publisher Momondo is a travel search engine that finds and compares fares from more than 800 websites. Momondo was launched in 2006 and in three years has grown to become one of Denmark’s top websites across all categories, not just travel. The company is also active in the UK, the US, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Sweden and Turkey.

Nextperformance is one of our most successful publishers in France – that’s why they have been chosen as one of the few VIP Publishers in our network. Nextperformance has also been labeled as an OSEO innovative company and provides valued-added services – including targeting, retargeting, and social apps – to advertisers and agencies. With 200 active clients, 50 million profiles categorised, 1 billion monthly views and 31 million unique visitors per month, Nextperformance ranks among the five largest advertising networks in France.

Since we believe they are really doing a great and innovative  job, we wanted to introduce you a little more to their business model. That’s why we spoke to Vincent Karachira, co-founder and CEO of Nextperformance about their success, the company strategy and their cooperation with zanox.

Vincent, would you please introduce Nextperformance and its strategy?

Nextperformance offers dynamic targeting and retargeting solutions, more specifically by tracking an internet user’s path and providing this user in real-time with customised content in the form of dynamic banners in the browser window. Our promise is to optimise our clients’ conversion rates on our premium network. To this end, Nextperformance leverages a proprietary adserver and has developed algorithms based on 50 million behavioralized profiles. With a team of 20 people in France, our company is also active in Spain and will soon be in Germany.

How do your solutions operate?

Dynamic retargeting is very simple: when a user leaves a retailer’s website in the Nextperformance network without making any purchase, our algorithm remembers the user’s path and analyses browsed products, and then it searches for affinity products as well as current promotions. The next step consists of finding the user later on while browsing the internet, and displaying customised advertising banners in real time—about previously browsed products or affinity products–which will redirect the user directly to the relevant product pages, thus facilitating conversion.

We also provide targeting solutions which make it possible to deliver advertising banners to those internet users who best match the advertised product or service. With our Next RT (Real Time) solution, we deliver quality volume through CPC or CPA campaigns on 85,000 categorised websites, with the ability to track visitors further downstream and turn them into buyers by getting them back to the initial site.

What are your main objectives?

By multiplying click rates by four and conversion rates by three, or over 300 percent, Nextperformance maximises conversions and highly contributes to ROI. This exposure allows each brand to be better memorized, and each message to be customised, whilst maintaining user data privacy. Nextperformance has built an extensive network, which is one of the two largest networks in France with 31 million unique visitors per month.

Our network’s reach is therefore extremely wide-ranging. Nextperformance’s goal for our clients can be summarised as follows: optimising conversion rates over a premium media network.

What does zanox bring to you?

We have been collaborating with zanox for one year now. We provide our targeting and retargeting solution to their advertisers, adding real value in terms of conversion rate optimisation, and we benefit from zanox’ installed base and expertise as a trusted third party.

We have also developed privileged relationships with zanox due to their international structure. This will enable us to enter the German market soon in close partnership with a leading historical player recognized for its efficiency. We particularly value zanox’s fast delivery capacity. Our contacts are very responsive and provide relevant advice. In addition, the zanox interface allows us to control our operations easily.

After only two years of activity, we are proud of having been labeled as zanox VIP Publisher, which reflects the high performance of our solutions and rewards our capacity to innovate.

Today, we announced the merger of zanox and Digital Window: Our common shareholders, Axel Springer AG and the Swiss PubliGroupe AG, bring their majority shareholding in Digital Window – the UK market leader for affiliate marketing – into  zanox. Combined, we comprise the European market leader for performance-based online marketing under the umbrella of the zanox group.

Our CEO Philipp Justus says: “With Digital Window, the zanox group becomes the largest company for performance-based online marketing in the UK. Combined with our leading position in Continental Europe, we are now also the leading performance marketing network at European level. As a result, we offer our advertisers even greater reach, as well as direct access to all European markets. Our publishers benefit from new and attractive programmes.”

Get our latest company figures at a glance and more details on the merger in today’s press release.

No, we haven’t killed, dried and fried psychic octopus Paul yet – although many of our Berlin colleagues were close to, after it picked Spain over Germany this week… Anyway, today Paul picked Spain, but we don’t want to take sides here That’s why were are proud to present both of our two new blogs here, the zanox Blog Nederland and the zanox Blog Espana!

Expanded filter and search options, full flexibility and better performance:  Today we launched the open beta phase of our new Programme and Ad Media Search for publishers. As of now, you will find the new application via the tab “New Programme Search (BETA),” directly next to the old programme search.

The launch page offers you easily-handled templates, which are based on the most frequent publisher search use cases and deliver an instant overview of results with just a single click. The ad media search, in particular, has been drastically shortened: Besides the programme search, you can now also launch your own searches for ad media and have these shown in a separate result view. Here, it is possible to download the code for an ad medium directly from the search result.

Power users can find expanded filter options for the Programme and Ad Media Search via a separate tab in the “Advanced” section. On the one hand, filter and search functions can be individually customised here, and on the other, search results may be formatted in accordance with your individual requirements. Overall, the new search functions offer you great dynamism, as well as absolute flexibility. In addition to this, we improved the results overview and added practical shortcut functions, which enable retuning of selected filters.

Here again the most important benefits at a glance:

• “One click to results”: Instant overview of the most important results


• Individual filtering of data


• Storage of frequently-used filter combinations as search templates


• Flexible design of search results, which can be adjusted as required via an easily-formatted interface


• Display of the search results in dedicated results tables, split by programmes or ad media


• Individual refinement of search results

At first, the new and old versions will both be available in parallel. To start with, our New Programme Search (BETA) is available in English; the other languages will follow at a later time.

We are very much looking forward to your feedback which sure will help us to optimise our open beta version. Enjoy exploring our new Programme and Ad Media Search!

With today’s new release of our Advertiser Statistics, views and post views will be listed separately. This means, advertisers can now find out at a glance, how many views have been generated via our zanox True Post View Tracking, or TPV.

For advertisers, zanox True Post View opens up additional partnerships with zanox classified partners, international marketers and advertising networks. Post view creates high display reaches on a performance basis.

You can find more information on zanox True Post View in our press release or the zanox Wiki.

In addition, advertisers will receive a “Post View User Guide” from their personal zanox contact, containing information on all issues surrounding the post view subject, as well as tips for successful implementation.

With the OMExpo Latino in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Latin America hosted its first Online Marketing Exhibition. zanox Hispania took this great opportunity to further dive into the potential of this huge market.  Altough the OMExpo Latino clearly focused on Performance Marketing, it also included representatives and sessions on Search, Social Media and Mobile Marketing. Although we think that the number of exhibitors is yet to grow, the high quality of the discussions and key note speakers, such as Cris Anderson or Michael Kleindl, definitely set the bar high.  zanox participated in two sessions: Rodrigo Genoveze, our Executive Sales Director, discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the Latin American market in a round-table talk with advertisers and agencies. Later, our Regional Manager, Chechu Lasheras, shared his point of view on  “Where is digital advertising heading in 2010”. He also had the opportunity to introduce “Innovation in digital advertising”. Both enjoyed a great and interested audience.

The sporting event of the year will be under way in a few weeks. We are awakening the thrill of soccer anticipation and launched the zanox Publisher Cup. During this competition for our publishers in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, we will be looking for the Performance Champion: The publisher whose revenue increases by the greatest percentage will be rewarded with great prizes – such as the brand new Apple iPad, a flatscreen TV or a Playstation 3, holiday vouchers and even a VIP trip to South Africa!

Advertisers in our network will be offering masterful promotions throughout the zanox Publisher Cup: They support the zanox publishers in enhancing their performance with exclusive end customer benefits or higher commissions.

The winner can be any registered publisher in the respective country who, during the comparison period has generated a certain amount of revenue, depending on the country. To determine the winner, each publisher’s percentage increase in revenue is multiplied by their zanox AdRank. Naturally, fair play is also important in the zanox Publisher Cup: By taking part, publishers are bound by the guidelines of the zanox Code of Conduct.

We are looking forward to an exciting zanox Publisher Cup and wish you all best of luck!

The zanox teams from Germany, Italy, UK, the Netherlands and Eastern Europe arrived last night in Munich for the a4u Expo Europe. We started off with a great networking event last night. Today, we continue with the conference and can be met at stand # FB2.

In his key note our new CEO Philipp Justus introduced to a large audience of online marketers his perspective on “The Evolution of Online Monetization”. Social Networks and Mobile Marketing are the big trends to watch and work on in the future – there should be a lot innovation coming up in these fields.

Additionally, he will join a panel  on the future of performance marketing featuring the CEOs and MDs of the main affiliate network players. Be part of the panel tomorrow at noon in Ballroom B.

Keep updated on a4u Expo follow us on twitter and facebook.

The latest zanox Academy Italy was dedicated to our Publisher community: Based on the idea “Work Together, Stay Together”, we invited everybody to our zanox Campus in Milan, an open meeting and work space for all zanox publishers, advertisers and the zanox team. Before having a glass of beer or champagne for the happy hour at the end of the event, our Italian team presented the advanced features of the new zanox Publisher Statistics as well as some latest innovative synergies among publishers, developers and advertisers in our Application Store – such as the widgets of Europecar and SOS Tariffe, which were introduced by their developers. Participants also got some more insights into the zanox Publisher Cup, the competition for our top publishers with great prizes and exclusive promotions.

Check out some pics of the zanox Academy Italy and enjoy

We thought it would be a great idea to give you some insights into how our most successful publishers work. So we visited our VIP Publisher advanced STORE in their Berlin headquarters. The result is a great video in homestory style: CEO Marc Majewski shows us how his team works, indroduces the application ad4mat for publishers and advertisers and talks about being a successful publisher. Enjoy watching!

In downtown Amsterdam, at the unique Heineken Experience, 130 participants were getting inspired and updated on performance-based marketing during the sixth zanox Expert Day Benelux last Friday,  16 April. With key note speaker and affiliate marketing authority, Kevin Edwards, strategic director at Affiliate Window and chairman of IAB, participants were in for a seriously engaging and enlightening story.

Like most European countries, both the UK and the Netherlands were affected by the dust cloud created by the volcano eruption in Iceland. That’s why Kevin shared his views on performance based marketinggave during an interactively video conference. Another appealing speaker was Christiaan Solcer, a successful Dutch publisher who filled us in about the tough competition and challenges today’s affiliates face. Obviously, the sixth zanox Expert Day Benelux in the Heineken venue also offered the perfect environment (and beer) for informative and informal chats between zanox people, our publishers and advertisers.

Do you want to get some more insights about what was going on at the event? You can check out all tweets on the zanox Expert Day here.

We want to say a big thank you to more than 1,000 publishers, advertisers and agencies, who took part in our zanox partner survey in the last two weeks. We received some really great feedback which will help us a lot.

As promised, we will invest two Euros for each completed questionnaire into international microfinance projects – which makes a total of around 2,200 Euros! Of course we’ll keep you updated on the projects on our blog as usual.

Of course the survey was not the only chance to tell us your opinion. If you have any comments, suggestions or feedback you would like to tell us – please e-mail us anytime at info@zanox.com.

Today, the International Wikimedia Conference 2010 kicks off with the Developer Workshop at the zanox Campus Berlin. This five day event is expected to hosts more than 150 participants from over 30 countries. Besides the exchange of experiences and ideas between Wikipedia’s international representatives, the event will also provide a platform for discussing the future strategic alignment of the global Wikimedia movement.

One of the highlights will be the press conference on Friday, 16th April where Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, will announce the future strategy and international goals of Wikipedia.

We are more than happy to host this international event at the zanox Campus and we are looking forward to some great exchange of ideas and networking throughout the next days.

UPDATE: Some first impressions and pics of Friday’s press conference!

We are happy to present our Best of Aspen 2010 video, featuring the zanox teams from around the world! This year’s event in Spindleruv Mlyn was a special one for everybody: The zanox leadership was officially handed over, the zanox founders had their great farewell bash, everybody had a great time in the snow and of course all of us celebrated 10 years of zanox!

Watch more and enjoy!

Today is the day: our new publisher statistics are now live and we finally removed the little “beta” tag. So from now on, you’ll be automatically led to the new statistics via the “statistics” tab in your User Interface. You will still be able to access and use the real-time statistics as well as the old statistics, but we think that the new ones should definitely be your first choice. And here is again why:

Our new usability allows you to get straight to your results with just one click. You have also full flexibility in whatever you do: create your own custom report templates by picking and mixing from a wide selection of reporting elements and parameters. Just save your customised report templates or export them to Excel or as .csv-files. Of course you are also free to choose from more than a dozen of pre-arranged report templates based on most common publisher use cases. This saves you even more time and effort and gets you detailed insight as to how your programmes and advertising spaces are performing. You’ll be also able to see separate results for the statuses “open” and “approved”.

One click to results: Choose from more than a dozen of pre-arranged report templates based on most common publisher use cases.

Those of you who want to customise your own reports will now find the filter selection options under the tab “advanced”.

We are now also able to provide the new statistics in different languages: English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Last but not least, you will be free to include graphs to comfortably visualise sales, leads and commissions and to get a much better feeling for trends and tendencies. With our different chart designs (bar or pie) you can visualise a report’s numbers just the way you need it.

Feel free to let us know what you think and enjoy exploring our new statistics!

This year’s zanox Aspen in Spindleruv Myln was a really special one: The zanox leadership was officially handed over from the old to the new board, the zanox founders had their great farewell bash – and all our colleagues from around the world were celebrating the 10th anniversary of zanox! With our annual conference, party, networking, and the traditional fun activities in the snow, everybody had a great and crazy time! And of course we took many, many pictures Here they are:

It’s been a great decade for zanox: It was exactly ten years ago that Thomas Hessler, Heiko Rauch and Jens Hewald founded zanox – the beginning of a huge success story that kicked-off in Berlin and soon spread all over the globe. Just in time for the 10th anniversary of zanox, we created a video story which gives you insights in the early beginnings, the continuous growth, the zanox spirit and of course its people. We really think that this is a great documentation of the amazing development that zanox has been going through in the last ten years – and also an exciting snapshot of impressions you have probably never seen before. We proudly present: “10 years of zanox” – enjoy!

The video had its premiere show just a few minutes ago at zanox Aspen 2010, our annual company event with colleagues from around the world. This year, we are all gathering in Spindleruv Mlyn, a ski ressort in the Czech Giant Mountains. Aspen 2010 is a special one: The zanox leadership has just been officially handed over from the old to the new board, the zanox founders will have their great farewell bash tonight – and zanox has  its 10th anniversary!

More impressions, pics and videos will follow shortly

Congratulations to our winners! The financial community Sharewise and the crowdsourcing platform humangrid won our $2 Mio zanox Application Store Contest.

With more than 100 participants, choosing the top candidates wasn’t an easy task for the jury. However, the winners’ innovative monatisation models as well as their conversion-oriented approach to the crowdsourcing idea were the most important factors that fully convinced the jury.

humangrid’s “people as a service” SEO Text Create enables publishers to use more than 10.000 international clickworkers to create unique, search engine optimised texts for their website. With Adibility, Sharewise created an app that increases the credibility of ad media by adding  matching Twitter feeds.

We are looking forward to more great ideas by our winners and wish them best of luck with further developing their businesses!

Last week, we were happy to announce the finalists of our $2 Mio zanox Application Store Contest. With more than 100 participants, choosing our top candidates wasn’t an easy task. During the past ten months, we were looking for the best monetising applications and we are really close to having found the most promising ones! So, what we can tell so far is that we decided to award more than just one winner

It’ll be this Friday, 26 February, that we announce the winners of our $2 Mio zanox Application Store Contest! They will receive a total of 2 million US-Dollars in growth capital for their businesses. You can check out the finalists again here – we wish them all best of luck and of course will keep you updated!