At Affiliate Window we always like to talk about new and innovative ways that affiliates are driving sales for advertisers and when we saw Easy Content Units was celebrating its first birthday we thought it would be a great idea to talk to the brains behind the outfit.

John Lamerton is the Managing Director of Big Idea Media Ltd, which is a posh way of saying he’s a bedroom affiliate and helps him pay less tax according to his accountant!

This year John is celebrating both ten years in Affiliate Marketing and the success of his hugely popular Easy Content Units.

Easy Content Units (or ECU) is a tool that enables affiliates to search the product database of almost every merchant on every network in seconds, and create fully customisable content units showcasing those products with the affiliates IDs and deeplinks automatically created for them.

Why did you start ECU?
ECU was born out of a desire to utilise multi-network price comparison on our shopping site – During a conversation with our techies it was mentioned that we could pull the price data in from the feeds and display via JavaScript. This was the lightbulb moment that led to the question “what else can we do with the feeds?”
As the system came together it became very apparent that this was something that other affiliates would probably love to use, so we built in the capability to let other affiliates use the tool too, and opened private beta testing in October 2008. As the first units started being displayed and the sales started coming in from real people I don’t think any of us got much sleep for the next couple of months as we were so excited!

What were the challenges along the way?
The main challenges we’ve faced over the first year involved simply keeping up with the rise of ECU – We never envisaged it being anywhere near as popular with affiliates as it has been, and what started out as a very simple system to display some prices on one of our sites has seen literally hundreds of tweaks, additions and new features as nearly 1,300 affiliates use it on their sites in hundreds of different ways.
Even now, a year on from the public launch, our “to-do” list of features that people have requested has over 30 jobs on it, as well as some huge upgrades and different areas we’d like to work on – I think just to finish what we’re currently got planned will take us another 3 years – and that’s before either ECU users or ourselves come up with any more ideas!

How important are good quality datafeeds in how you showcase merchants’ products?
We are certainly able to iron out most of the common issues/problems that datafeed affiliates face, as we tend to “clean up” the feeds before uploading them to ECU, removing problem products, and ensuring that al the fields are mapped correctly.
Feeds have come a long way from where they were a few years back, when merchants used to stuff them with HTML, or keywords (or both!), and I think most networks have now educated their merchants on the importance of providing a good quality feed.

If you could ask merchants to make one improvement that would make your lives easier what would it be? Actually can I be cheeky and ask for two? 1. Image uniformity/quality. If you use images in your product feed, then please ensure they are all the same size (or at least remotely similar sizes) – we ensure that all ECU images are the same size (users can specify anything from 50×50), which means that any images that are much smaller/taller/shorter than the rest look pixelated, stretched and simply out of place. How do most affiliates deal with this? Simple – they delete your product from their ECU, and you’ve just lost a potential source of sales.
2. Update your feed! We had so many people complain over Christmas because certain merchants weren’t updating their feeds to reflect price changes or stock levels. You only need to do this once per day – but including out-of-stock items in your feed (even if they are coming back into stock fairly soon) won’t win you any affiliate friends, and out-of-date prices annoys both customers and price comparison affiliates.

What has the feedback on ECU been?
The feedback we’ve had has been nothing short of phenomenal – We knew we had a decent system on our hands when we launched it last year. To have 1,300 people actually using it a year on is amazing. People are building entire sites around ECU now, and it’s a great feeling to be able to help some of the more newbie affiliates get started in their AM career – if only something like ECU had been around when I first started out!

Can you share some of the results and successes for us?
Certainly. We’ve gone from 0 to more than 5 million monthly impressions of ECUs in 12 short months, during which time more than 30,000 units were created. We’re currently sending around 420,000 UVs a month to merchants across all the main networks, and these figures show no signs of slowing!
ECU works cross-network, enabling affiliates to promote products that sell well and are on-topic regardless of what network they are on (as long as they have entered their ID for that network). And the network that most ECU users work with? Affiliate Window of course, with 58% more affiliates than their closest rival!

What have you got planned for ECU in 2010?
We’ve got no plans to slow down in 2010 – we’re going to be unleashing a US version of ECU in the next month or so, and have plans to tackle other territories as the year goes on, as well as working on some ECUs in different sectors.
More than anything though, our key aim for 2010 is to keep on listening to what ECU users want, and to keep helping new affiliates get started in this great Industry. That’s what brought us success in 2009, so more of the same is in order!

How can merchants and affiliates find out more?
You can sign up for ECU here
If you need any help or guidance getting started with ECU, or Affiliate Marketing in general, then you can grab John via one of the following ways:

Twitter: lammo77
MSN Messenger: john@bigideamedia.com
email: john@easycontentunits.com

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This entry was posted by Kevin Edwards on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 2:36 pm and is filed under AWin Advice, Technology, Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.