There is often a great deal of talk about how merchants can optimise the “affiliate channel” to drive the best return on their investment. I tend to baulk at mentions of affiliate marketing as a single channel that can be treated the same as display, PPC or SEO.
3-4 years ago then yes, affiliate marketing could be viewed as a single channel and as a merchant you could get away with a one size fits all approach. Affiliates generally sat in 3 categories; content, price comparison or PPC; and all you needed to do was offer a few banners and a CPA and off they went.
The first sign of this changing was when affiliates began to be permitted to bid on merchant brand terms in the search engines. Other types of affiliates started to express concern that this privilege was allowing the brand bidders an unfair advantage in gaining the last click.
Fast forward to 2009 and the race to gain the all powerful “last click” has lead to the rise of many different methods of promotion that all fall under the affiliate umbrella. Now we have cashback/loyalty sites, voucher code directories, traditional online “publishers” moving into the space, rebate catching applications and other new technologies such as Trialpay etc.
To effectively manage an affiliate campaign nowadays, you need to understand all of these different promotional methods and offer a different approach for each one. A cashback site promotes a merchant very differently to a price comparison site and therefore require a bespoke approach. A cashback site requires different marketing collateral, a different commission structure and, dare I say it, maybe a different cookie too?
You need a distinct approach for managing how you operate voucher codes, specific rules on what PPC affiliates are permitted to do and a strategy for how to best engage the long tail. You need to understand not only how these affiliates interact with each other, but also the impact they will have on other online and offline marketing channels.
So you can see that we can’t view what happens in the affiliate world as a single channel. Running a sophisticated affiliate campaign is a difficult job, requiring the affiliate manager to juggle the requirements of the client with the desires of the dynamic affiliate landscape, and fitting all of this in to an overall marketing plan.
Getting this wrong can not only damage your standing in the affiliate space, but can cost you money in the real world.
