Kowabunga Unveils MyAp 9

My first inkling of MyAp 9 (Kowabunga’s My Affiliate Program) came from Theresa Farmer over drinks at Affiliate Summit. I had a terrible cough and, unfortunately for Theresa, kept leaning in closely to hear what she had to say about advanced tracking and new metrics. It sounded pretty cool, even if she will never sit next to me again.

Yesterday afternoon I got my first view. Jeff Doak of Kowabunga led a conference call/web presentation about MyAp 9. Here is a screenshot of the new interface.

Click here for a larger image.

Here are some more images:

It looks pretty cool. More visually appealing than the current MyAp interface, which is less than beautiful. This notwithstanding, I’ve always been pleased with Kowabunga’s level of service and happy with their technology. I look forward to working with this.

The bottom line seems to be MyAp entering the web analytics game with functionality to track offline advertising, channel confluence, and consumer behavior.

Here are a list of points from their material and my thoughts:

• Determine how often a specific affiliate’s cookie overwrites another affiliate’s or another source of traffic and determine which affiliates tend to cookie the user seconds before the sale occurs – possibly indicating they are either using adware or some other piece of software to take credit for the sale.
  Hmm. Bet this one pleases Ben Edelman. I believe some of the networks currently run reports on cookie overwriting/swooping but I don’t think any of them offer this functionality as interface reports.

• Slice ‘n Dice Analytics:
  • Determine what percentage of transactions driven by a loyalty site are from new versus repeat customers.
  • Determine your effective CPA, CPC and CPM for different affiliates.
  • Compare between two pieces of marketing material that rotated in the same CPM slot.
  • Determine performance of a keyword or natural search term over time.
  • Determine total revenue generated from the natural search channel for a category of products.

  
  These and others are nice functionalities, though they are more convenience features as you can use other means to divine such information. One thing that is cool is that you can auto-run reports and have them emailed to yourself.

• Determine what percentage of affiliate sales actually involve another ad channel.
  Unfortunately, Web Ex didn’t let me in until these slides were past, but this seems like great functionality to have as well. I’m not sure how well you could measure this for offline campaigns, though. I know that some of my own purchase decisions are influenced by odd things and am not sure how I could be measured. But something is probably better than nothing in this regard.

What this seems to boil down to is that Kowabunga is nicely expanding their functionality. This will likely position their product as a more attractive solution to smaller companies which might be able to manage all their advertising through it. Of course, it’s also a viable option for larger companies. I’m interested to see if Kowabunga creates a relationship with larger companies such as Omniture and WebSideStory similar to the one it currently has with Commission Junction and LinkShare. My own perception is that Kowabunga’s most direct competitor is and will continue to be DirectTrack.

About Brook Schaaf

You can find Brook on Twitter @brookschaaf.