EASY LINKS | AUGUST 2008



EASY LINKS for ADVERTISERS

Product widgets are gaining popularity amongst publishers who are looking for engaging content Ads to place on their site and earn revenue. As a leader in the pay-per-action marketplace, LinkShare is always looking for new and innovative ways to tap into the value of our broad publisher network while making it easier for your publishers to sell your full product portfolio.

Contextual Product Ads
Easy Links are contextual product Ads that use data from your LinkShare Merchandiser file. When a publisher places the code for your Easy Link on their website, our contextual technology will determine keywords on the publisher page. We then query your LinkShare Merchandiser file and display products relevant to those keywords and therefore to the publisher page.

With Easy Links, LinkShare makes it easy for you to reach the “long-tail” or niche publishers looking for specific or unique products. More importantly, you can reach niche customers on long-tail websites who may already have an interest in your products. Many affiliate marketing programs cannot support the broad distribution of product links because there is no compelling link type that can be used by a wide range of publishers. Typically, product feeds are often utilized by publishers with programming skills. With Easy Links, there are no programming skills required! Publishers copy and paste Easy Links onto the page just like any other link type. LinkShare Easy Links can become a compelling publisher recruitment tool offering publishers a “set it and forget it” contextual advertising solution and an easy way to generate commissions from pay-for-performance product ads.

Predicting Conversion
After Easy Links determines the right keywords on the publisher site, we use knowledge from the LinkShare Network and your LinkShare Merchandiser file to serve the product ad that is most likely to convert. This is accomplished by giving each product a score. The score is based on the performance of your product links in the LinkShare Network. Publishers no longer need to guess which products are most likely to convert because Easy Links automatically does all the work!

• Harness more value from your LinkShare Merchandiser product feed
• Make product links widely available to your publishers to help drive higher conversion rates
• No additional work required! All you need is a LinkShare Merchandiser feed and Easy Links will be available to your publishers
• Reach more niche “long-tail” publishers, improve your publisher activation rate, and recruit more publishers into your program

If you are already in the LinkShare Network and would like to be enabled for Easy Links, please contact your LinkShare representative.