Can This Creative Get DGM on The Map?
3 Comments February 12, 2010 / Posted in NetworksOne of the things I’ve found with affiliate marketing of late is that it all seems so much faster. Blog this, tweet that, email the other! The days of leisurely adding content and then having a week before the next email from a network have gone forever. So, when new tools are released by networks they have to be usable from the off… I don’t want to be messing about with APIs, or spending time writing code, especially as we have a system in place to use feeds already.
I’m more interested when content creative is released by a network. If it’s something I can use straight away, perhaps around our own written content, then that’s infinitely better than any techno techno techno stuff that gets churned out by networks. Yes we can do the API coding if needed but there just isn’t enough hours in the day to do everything.
The new creative from DGM utilises Google Maps and are called DGM Travelmaps. They’ve taken all the locations of their travel merchants hotels and holiday parks and stuck them on a map. Click on a locality and you get a description and affiliate link to the merchant site. Pretty cool!
A quick example is shown below.
I say a quick example as all I’ve done is resize one of the options from the creative suite. When I first looked at DGM Travelmaps admittedly my heart sank as all sizes with 600×800. For some reasons all networks seem to provide content units that are infinitely bigger than most websites. However, there’s good news. DGM allow you to resize the units to fit your page. Good work.
But it gets better. By playing around with the settings you can zoom and focus onto the map to highlight particular areas you want to show to your visitors. There’s an explanation on the DGM interface how it all works.
There are some minor niggles! For example, I’d like to be able to remove the legend as on a resize it kind of overpowers plus an option to not include a merchant would be cool. Not being too demanding, I’d also love to be able to include the code via PHP rather than an iframe, but these options could possible be included in a future release?
Travel affiliates perhaps may have their own in house versions of this kind of creative and include feeds from other networks, however for other affiliates this kind of creative is a useful additional extra when perhaps writing about a local region or promoting a special offer from one of the travel merchants included.
DGM Travelmaps is pretty much a usable straight out of the box solution and more importantly it’s functional. Even better it isn’t all API techno trousers and therefore doesn’t take up valuable time to implement.
Thanks for highlighting this tool Jason it does indeed look very good. I going to have a play with it later and see what it can do for one of my sites.
I agree about the legend although I think it would be great if the legend could be resized and the affiliate links added to the legend also would be good as an extra option.
Looking forward to this being made available in Australia. Odd that all the coolest tools in affiliate marketing are restricted to UK market
Nice bit of creative there. I hope DGM and the included holiday parks get some nice bookings as a reward for the innovation.