Official Blog

Right in time for the start of the Christmas business, we kicked-off our exclusive, weekly round-up of the most promising advertiser campaigns today. Starting now, we will present you the most attractive offers and deals at a glance. As a publisher, you will receive three recommendations in comparison every week, via your Account start page, our promotion page (just click on “promotions” for your country), the weekly newsletter and our zanox Blogs. Find out which advertisers offer the most attractive Christmas promotions, which products promise the greatest success or which product will lead to the best conversions. You’ll also get all the information on commissions, confirmation rates and times, as well as specials, such as expanded SEM facilities, search deep links, standalone newsletters and special ad media can be seen at a glance.

The selection of the Advertisers is done by our local zanox teams and will focus on the appeal of the exclusive Christmas promotions and the programme quality. This should give you a perfect opportunity to plan your seasonal activities to perfection and to achieve the best possible conversions. We are looking forward to a great year-end business with all of you!

Now that we have a zanox Wiki for all our countries, we would like to invite all of you to contribute! Our Wiki is now easily accessible via our single sign-on solution zanox Connect.  So everyone with a zanox publisher account is now able to write, edit or translate with just one click.

So what’s the zanox Wiki all about? The zanox Wiki is our central knowledge base and serves as an extension of our network: Our Wiki holds precise explanations of all the terminology and processes surrounding our services and products, as well as general affiliate marketing topics. And since it’s all about collective intelligence, it’s not just gonna be us who maintain it, but we would also love to have your expertise to perpetually expand it.

Contributing is easier than you probably thought: You can easily become a contributor and share your knowledge with our community. Simply log-on to our network with your zanox Publisher account via zanox Connect and start writing, editing or translating.

Feel also free to use the Wiki’s discussion board to all Wiki-related questions and feedback. For all other questions or if you need help with anything, let our First Level Support know or use our support platform getsatisfaction.com

The zanox Wiki supports the following languages:

• English


• Deutsch


• Français


• Italiano


• Español


• Nederlands


• Polski


• Svenska


• Chinese

To reward you for your efforts we’re also working on a compensation programme for regular contributors and we’ll keep you up-to-date on this. We hope you enjoy working with the Wiki and sharing information!

We are happy to announce that a new version of our sub-ID management is now available for our publishers. For those who are not too familiar with sub-ID management, let’s just explain what it’s all about: sub-ID management allows publishers to add a customised parameter to their zanox tracking code. SEM publishers for example are able to assign separate sub-IDs for different keywords, programmes, landing pages or search engines. Bonus- or cashback publishers can use sub-ID management to allocate separate identification numbers to their participants. These are just two examples how publishers gain better control over their activities.

So what’s new? Our new sub-ID management uses general purpose tracking parameters (GPP), which consist of a series of alpha numeric parameters. When a potential customer clicks a publisher’s ad media link and GPP parameters are filled in, the values are stored in the zanox tracking system. If the customer generates a conversion, the stored GPP values are retrieved from the zanox tracking system and placed in the statistics for the publisher. So GPP is basically a container which publishers can use to place their own tracking information onto conversions. From now on, all publishers are able to use sub-ID management without further activation.

If you want to learn more about our new sub-ID management with GPP, check out our Wiki documentation or download the PDF manual. It includes a detailed description and guides you through the process.

One of our most important Advertisers, a beautiful woman – and three happy Publishers. Konstantin Matern, Sascha Bartels and Andreas Gabriel today received their prize for having won the Alice SEO Contest: a meet & greet with “Ms Alice” Vanessa Hessler. Just to avoid any confusion upfront: Vanessa is not the daughter or sister of our CEO Thomas Hessler, whereas some people around here might have hoped for that The Italian top model is the face of Alice, a leading German broadband provider. Check out some pics of today’s meet & greet session at our Berlin Headquarters:

Now if that isn’t a great match with Alice’s tag line “The most beautiful connection” (“Die schönste Verbindung”). Well, we think the guys did pretty well, posing next to one of the world’s most beautiful women.

For the SEO contest, the publishers were asked to rank on Google top positions with the key word “Alice internet connection”. It was  www.grundlagen-computer.de, www.datenregal.eu and www.dsl-flatrate-abc.de who came first. Congratulations to the winners!

The market research company AffiliateBenchmarks is conducting an international publisher survey to identify market trends and current challenges for affiliates. All our publishers are welcome to take part – and of course there’s something in for you: Each participant receives a free copy of the results, which is worth  $199 after all and which others will have to pay for later.

The 2009 AffiliateBenchmarks survey includes a wide range of questions about topics such as publishers’ experiences with different types of ad performance, site visitor demographics, technology and communication preferences, motivations for joining an affiliate programme, experiences with emerging technology, and more.

If you would like to participate in the survey, get started here. Enjoy!

Twittering has become so much more than just answering the question “What you are doing?” – especially for businesses. Of course it’s probably quite entertaining to let you know that somebody just suggested painting our coffee machine orange or that the Web Services team just scored at the after-work table football match in our Campus (that was probably just luck anyway ). But for us as a business, Twitter is all about listening and, at the same time, reaching out to the community.

So Twitter is a great way for us to keep up to date with what the international affiliate marketing industry is talking about. It’s all about people, their ideas, needs and perception of latest trends – and there are quite a lot! And of course, all companies are interested to see what people think and talk about them, no doubt. So Twitter is a perfect way to listen to and, at the same time, reach out to a large number of people in our business. Sure, there is promotion on Twitter, but we think that it’s an easy and direct way for you to keep updated on what’s new.

Since by now we have established several different and also local Twitter Accounts, we thought that it’s a good idea to give you an overview of our zanox Tweets:

twitter.com/zanox: Our first zanox Twitter account: It’s in English, international and, similar to our blog, keeps you up to date on what’s going on within the online marketing industry and our company.

twitter.com/zanox_affiliate: zanox_affiliate bundles all international news on the latest afffiliate programmes.

Our zanox country Tweets provide you with updates on local company news and also on the latest afffiliate programmes in your country:

And last but not least, we love to set up Twitter walls during our events, so everybody gets a chance to  comment on panel discussions or ask questions during a Q & A sessions. Oh, and tweets are also a great indicator on whether a party rocked or not: If there are tweets coming in around eight in the morning on the day after, it didn’t seem to be all that great – so glad our zanox Summer Party after-tweets sounded more like “Almost noon, time to get up eventually, still dizzy but wow – thanks, zanox for the amazing party last night!” Now that’s feedback we love to receive

If you are using iGoogle and are keen to be kept up to date on the latest zanox news, affiliate programmes and promotions, you should definitely check out our new zanox News iGoogle gadget! It offers you real-time information on the zanox news from our blogs and press centre, our latest programmes and advertiser promotions as well as all zanox events. Simply choose your country and language by editing your gadget settings to get all the news that are relevant to you. The zanox News iGoogle gadget is free and you can get it from the zanox Application Store here. Enjoy – we hope you like it!

Following the great success of our Berlin-based zanox Campus, we now decided to open a second Campus in the heart of Silicon Valley! It will serve as a new open meeting point for publishers, start-up businesses and developers. Designed as a Think Tank for modern web-based business models, projects and partners in Silicon Valley, we created it to support new online talents. We would also like to use both Campuses, Berlin and Silicon Valley, as an open exchange space for all our partners across the US and Europe.

With our first US-based zanox Campus, we would like to invite the creative community in Silicon Valley to help us promote and pursue innovation within our industry. In return, we will offer access to our affiliate network’s infrastructure, our partners and last but not least attractive investment opportunities for the most promising business models. This is where our just recently launched  $2 Million zanox Application Store Contest comes in.

If you are interested in learning more, just drop by from 5 pm onwards today at the Plug & Play TechCenter in San Francisco: Our CEO Thomas Hessler will officially announce the new zanox Campus during the cocktail reception. Some first pics and impressions are to follow shortly! Hope to see you in the Valley soon!

Once again our new publisher statistics will be enhanced by a very fancy feature, literally visualising the generated reports: the graphic charts.

With this advanced new feature you can comfortably visualise sales, leads and commissions and get a much better feeling for trends and tendencies than just by numbers. Due to different chart designs (bar or pie) you have the possibility to visualise a report’s numbers just the way you need it. Apart from that you can individually define the parameters for x/y-axes or the measures of a pie diagram. In case of the bar chart it is even possible to define a second y-axis creating a direct comparison between two values. Additionally to displaying the whole report, the tool also offers the visualisation of single table pages, generating a better overview for special sections of the report.

More information is available in our Wiki.

You may have noticed that we are continuously working on the improvement of our new zanox publisher statistics. Now we have another feature, particularly exciting for our international publishers: the statistics display the original currencies in which a transaction was tracked.

Up until now all ‚commission’ columns of a report table had been displayed with a selected “display currency”. Other currencies had been re-calculated into this. But this way of dealing with currencies has its disadvantages – especially for international publishers: Due to daily exchange rates the original amount of a transaction could not be tracked. With last weeks’ release of our new publisher statistics there is now an additional column connected with a certain ‚commission’ column – showing the corresponding amount in the original (tracked) currency as well, when grouped by “currency”.

More information is available in our Wiki.

Great news for our publishers: Yet another enhanced version of the new zanox publisher statistics is online. With release 0.3.0 we improved performance of the statistics and implemented some more helpful features, such as the sorting on lower table levels: Until now only a global sorting on the main grouping level was offered. With the new feature you are able to sort the first and second drill down independently from the global sorting – therewith you have one more striking possibility of analyzing your numbers. More information is available in our Wiki.

Our Web Services team has worked really hard over the last couple of months and finally THE day has come: Today we launched the open beta of zanox Web Services! Some of you might be wondering what you can do with zanox Web Services and how you can benefit from the new features. So here you go: First of all zanox Web Services are an innovative solution for both, web developers and our professional publishers. Web Services offer you access to a wide variety of new functions within our affiliate network and our infrastructure. Have a look at our Web Services video to learn more:

With zanox Web Services, you will now benefit from three key advantages when it comes to monetising your business ideas: a new automated process for managing your interaction with zanox, specific targeting opportunities including product search, geo targeting and contextual product matching, and the freedom to create your own innovative monetising models such as mobile applications or widgets. If you want to learn more about Web Services in practice, have a look at our showcases.

Two of our German closed beta testers, the team Karsten Windfelder and Frank Schulze, already published a detailed review on their blog 100partnerprogramme.de. “It’s a pleasant development that more and and more affiliate networks offer Web Services. They allow useful applications to be developed, updating one’s website in real time and the external evaluation of statistics,” Frank writes. “For the open beta launch, zanox Web Services look really good.” Read the full review here (in German).

If you want to know more about zanox Web Services, have a look at the zanox Web Services Blog, the Wiki documentation or the new Web Services Landingpage.

About a week ago we closed our publisher survey, and we are really overwhelmed by the huge amount of responses and the great feedback! Thanks again to everyone who participated for your time and your honest opinion.

Now we will analyse the results to see how we can improve our products and services for you. Of course we will keep you updated about the main findings of our survey and about the further developments.

As you know we drew prizes among all participants. The lucky winners have just been chosen – here they are: Our main prize, the MacBook Air, goes to Werner (Canary Islands). And the winners of the communicating Nabaztag mini robots are Yann (Fontainebleau/France), Alice (Valladolid/Spain) and Tobias (Gothenburg/Sweden). Congratulations! We hope you have loads of fun with your prizes.

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.

As we are big fans of Twitter you can now get the latest global programme starts as tweets

If you wanna know what else is going on at zanox check out our official tweets

All our programme starts and promotions are available via RSS

And by the way, this is an update on our last post on the zanox promotions and press feeds.  See you all on Twitter

Great news for our publishers: We are proud to announce that we offer more than 900 GAP-enabled partner programmes now. With the latest enhancement of the zanox GAP technology we were able to triple the number of GAP-enabled partner programmes at one go: with more than 900 we now provide our publishers with an enormous range of programmes to choose from. Even more GAP-enabled programmes will be added gradually.

The zanox GAP technology allows full integration of the publisher’s own tracking into the zanox technology so that it is embedded directly in the advertiser’s page. As a zanox GAP publisher you can select those programmes easily in the zanox User Interface: using the programme search function, make sure you tick the option “only GAP-enabled programmes”.

If you are not a zanox GAP publisher yet but want to use the special 3rd party tracking, just go to www.zanox.com/gap and register.

It’s been only a few months since we first announced the start of the closed beta phase for our new generation of publisher statistics. We promised a whole bunch of new functionalities which will make it easier for you, our publishers, to monetise your websites’ traffic. And of course we keep our promises and are proud to say: here they are!

With the launch of the open beta phase, we now offer you a wide range of new convenient analysis and control tools. The essence of what you can now benefit from is full flexibility in whatever you do! You are now able to freely create your own custom report templates by picking and mixing from a wide selection of reporting elements and parameters. And no, you don’t have to do this every time you log-on to get your reports – you can save your customised templates and even export everything to Excel. Of course you are still free to choose from more than a dozen of pre-arranged 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. Once logged-in, it just takes you two clicks to access any of your reports. And here are some screenshots so you can take a first look:

And by the way, this is just the first bunch of new functionalities that come with our publisher statistics – basically the kick-off of a whole series of efficient reporting tools which are created to make your life easier. We are working hard to provide you with more functionalities and will implement them one by one. So soon you will be able to include graphs and images, set up asynchronous reports or receive automated reports on a regular basis.

We are more than keen on hearing what you think of our new publisher statistics. Three of our German closed beta testers, the team Karsten Windfelder/Frank Schulze and Markus Kellermann, already blogged about their experiences: Frank Schulze published a detailed review on Karsten Windfelder’s blog 100partnerprogramme.de. “The new statistics are well thought out and clearly arranged. The functional enhancement was successful and the filter functionalities allow a lot of flexibility,” Frank says. Markus writes on his Affiliate Marketing Blog: “The statistics are dynamic. You can adjust them in many ways, create your own report screens and save them.” You can read Frank’s and Karsten’s full review here and Markus’ article here (both in German).

Let us know what you think and we’ll be happy to discuss and answer your questions. We are looking forward to your comments and hope you will enjoy exploring the new generation of publisher statistics!

You are a zanox publisher and you want to win a Macbook Air or one of these funny talking W-LAN Nabaztag rabbits? Then go ahead and take part in our zanox publisher online survey! It would be great if you could invest a couple of minutes so we can get to know you and your needs better.

We need your honest opinion and feedback so we can improve our products and services according to your wants and needs. And no worries – this survey shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to complete, and of course the data will be evaluated anonymously and confidentially.

We count on you and your help! If you want to take part in the publisher survey and win one of our cool prizes, you can start the questionnaire here: www.zanox.com/survey. It will be online until 12 January 2009.

Thanks a bunch for your help and good luck with our lottery!

Only six more weeks to go until Christmas! You want to make sure that you don’t miss out any of the special promotions? Then you should check out our latest promotions for your country by clicking on the flags below. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed and get daily updates on new offers.

Our RSS feeds are fully customisable – so you can choose your favourites within a selection of countries, industries and promotion types for both, customer and publisher promotions. Just make your preferred selection, get the list of promotions and save the link to your RSS feed reader.

You can also subscribe to our international programme news feeds at affiliate.zanox.com – which are of course also customisable by choosing the industry and the promotion type.

Need a feed reader? Have a look at our previous post on how to get one.

Have fun checking out our latest Christmas promotions!