Better late than never here are May’s tips of the week.

“Shakespeare may have said that rough winds shake the darling buds of May, but SEOs will tell you code bloat blows aways the likelihood of prominent rankings in the SERPs.

Software like Dreamweaver, as handy as it can be, generates line upon line of erroneous code which gets in the way of search engine bots finding what they are looking for. Therefore analyse the source code on your pages and ruthlessly cull anything unnecessary.”

Florian Gramshammer

Senior Sales Manager

“According to a MarketingSherpa report, an astronomical 48% of customers abandon a purchase at the checkout phase. It is therefore critical for merchants to take a long hard look at their shopping cart process and get others to offer feedback. No business can afford to lose half their customers at the point of purchase in an economic downturn.

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Daniel wrote a while ago about the importance of the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council to help regulate and drive best practices within the industry (see here).

The IAB is running a seminar on Affiliate Marketing on Wednesday 24th June at its offices near Holborn in London. The event is a quick look into affiliate marketing – an introduction by Matt Bailey (AMC Chair) covers what the industry is doing to standardise and self regulate. This is followed by two short case studies, one of which is with Daniel Powel from CJ and Lina Patel from lastminute.com who recently won the best use of affiliate marketing within the travel&leisure categories.

Daniel and Lina are also speaking as part of a panel which closes the event. Questions for the panel are submitted beforehand to dan@iabuk.net.

Full details of the agenda can be found on the IAB site here

Claire from existem sent around the promotional buttons for a4u award winners yesterday which acted as a reminder that I had not yet blogged about it. So I will  take this opportunity to congratulate:

• Argos - who won in both categories they entered; the retail award and best use of affiliate marketing as part of an integrated campaign
• lastminute.com who won in the travel and leisure category. Fingers crossed that they also win at the NMA awards in a couple of weeks. Lina will also be presenting this at the IAB affiliate marketing seminar on the 24th of June. I will blog about that shortly
• Payday who were shortlisted in the Finance section
• Hildegunn who was shortlisted as Publisher’s Choice of Account Manager

Congratulations must also go to all of the other winners, advertisers, affiliates and agencies alike.

I was actually at the awards, kindly invited by Payday UK  which is a rare treat for a marketing person in this industry (boo sob). The event was great  – loads of people, lots and lots of CJers from over the years who have gone on to do great things at networks, agencies and affiliate companies. A bit of a family reunion.

I did attempt to take photos to show you all and whilst I would never claim to be the best photographer in the world I can usually do a bit better than a blurred shot of the floor which is what my camera is now full of. I toyed with uploading a photo to show you how very poor they were but then I felt this would diminish the outstanding success of the award winners and shortlisted companies. So I am not going to!

Well done everyone. Thanks A4U. Over

There is a fantastic special offer on A4U Expo tickets. The first 50 to register receive not only the early bird discount of £100 but also an additional £100 off which is over 50% off for affiliates. The early-bird discount is available until the 31st August. Register here

Commission Junction are sponsoring the event for the third year in a row. The conference has always had top-notch speakers and the networking has always been extremely useful. If you need convincing you can see the post about last years A4U London here and the posts about A4U Europe here and here.

Also – a quick good luck to everyone (ummm….perhaps I don’t mean EVERYONE ) at the awards tonight. Looks set to be a great evening – I am already dreading tomorrow.