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IAB Affiliate
Marketing Guide
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Contents
3 What is affiliate marketing?
46 Glossary of terms
A Hand in hand with the growth of e-retail there has been a rise
in affiliate marketing. In 2006 E-consultancy estimated the value
exclusive of affiliate sales to be above £2bn and increasing on average
60% year-on-year. Affiliate marketing is the ideal partner to
online retailers as it works like a virtual sales team, paid only on
commission.
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What is affiliate
marketing?
4 How affiliate marketing began
B
4 Implications for advertisers
4 Making money and the importance
of tracking
New Products 1999 saw the birth of the affiliate network in the UK with DGM,
Commission Junction and Tradedoubler setting up within a few
months of each other.
The benefit for
C
campaign advice, independent tracking and maintenance of
relationships with the affiliate base.
Affiliates come in all shapes and sizes. Similarly many sectors from the behemoths
of the affiliate world ...
benefit by using a network of affiliates. Vertical sectors that
through to individuals
traditionally see great success through the affiliate channel
who produce a website
include financial services, travel, retail, telecoms, broadband
based around an
and gaming. This is far from an exclusive list and whatever the interest of theirs and
merchant is looking to achieve they will virtually always find look to monetise it
someone willing to promote them. - providing the price is right. through placing relevant
adverts on it. ”
Matt Bailey,
DGM
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Loyalty and reward websites build a loyal user base by marketing “With co-registration,
merchants to their users and then sharing their profits with them. PPC, e-mail, newsletter
They can share these profits by offering pure cash back to users marketing and classic
or awarding them with points that can be built up to contribute affiliate banners and
towards discounted online purchases through the website or skyscrapers on offer,
The idea is that by sharing profits with their users, these affiliates to them. Each option
results in a different quality
can build a ‘loyal’ database of users who are happy to make
and quantity of leads,
purchases online through the websites because they feel they
varying their incoming
are ‘getting something back’.
revenue streams.”
Nichola Halford,
Type 3: PPC and search affiliates Advertising.com
Pay per click (PPC) and search affiliates bid on words and
phrases in search engines to help drive traffic to a merchant’s
website by using the sponsored links on portals such as Google,
Yahoo, MSN and Miva.
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Remember, the more you put in, the more you get out.
There are thousands of affiliate programmes out there, so
to stand out from the crowd you need to create something that
is more attractive than your competitors are providing.
G
Marketing collateral
New Products
If affiliates are to be used to drive your traffic, they will need the
necessary ammunition to do the job. This will vary from one “There are thousands of
industry sector to another. For instance, while product feeds are affiliate programmes out
essential in travel and extremely useful for retail, they are of little there, so to stand out
use to a financial service provider. from the crowd you need
to create something that
Have a look at the materials your competitors are offering is more attractive than
affiliates and be prepared to listen and act upon the requests competitors are providing.”
affiliates make. As with any other channel, it means updating Mark Kuhillow,
R O Eye
your adverts in the same way you would for TV or press. Refresh
those creative executions as necessary, and by simply staying
up to date you’ll be ahead of the game.
Tracking
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Putting affiliate
marketing at the
heart of your
B
business
14 Metrics
14 Be selective
15 Affiliates: members of staff?
15 Summary
Be selective
J
Also, choose an agency that considers all aspects of the sales
and marketing mix. Affiliates need to be placed at the heart
of the direct response and media schedule, to get
the best out of all channels.
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Daily checks
Check for emails,
The SoYou! AM logs in to their online interface to review the network enquiries
performance of their programme. The OMM checks that sales and online affiliate
are tracking correctly and that the top performing key affiliates
discussion forums
are on track to achieve their targets.
for posts that
Both the OMM and the AM check for emails, network enquiries specifically relate
and online affiliate discussion forums for posts that specifically to your SoYou!
relate to the SoYou! programme. programme.
Data-feed
L
By refreshing their data-feed on a daily basis stock levels,
product additions and prices are kept accurate on affiliate sites.
The AM checks that the latest version has uploaded correctly.
PPC Arrangements
Newsletter feature
Voucher code
SoYou!’s OMM sets up the code and informs the affiliate that
they can launch the promotion. The results will be observed
over the next four weeks before a commitment to roll out a
boarder discount code scheme is made.
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Considering a 12
month strategy
B
for merchants
21 Will affiliate marketing work for you?
21 What do you want to achieve?
22 How will this fit in with your annual media and
marketing plans?
You must consider how you will validate sales, review affiliate
performance, provide creative updates and ensure prompt You must consider
payment. The affiliate community is very vocal so any slips could how you will
cost you dearly, especially if you are not on relevant discussion validate sales, review
forums to respond.
affiliate performance,
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Although these are direct response metrics on one level, it is New Products
interesting to see advertisers starting to utilise the channel for
goals that are less sales focussed, and which have additional “Although recruiting a third
brand value above the traditional CPA model. party to sell your product
does mean devolving
Brand control control to a certain extent,
it doesn’t necessarily mean
In allowing affiliates onto a programme, you are giving them compromising your brand.”
permission to promote your product within the context of their James Briscoe,
Unique Digital
site(s). So the thinking goes, your products or adverts could
appear next to any type of content, on any old site. Although
recruiting a third party to sell your product does mean devolving
control to a certain extent, it doesn’t necessarily mean
compromising your brand.
R
Programme terms & conditions (T&C’s)
New Products Using terms & conditions, a merchant does have a degree of
control over where their brand is appearing. Although affiliates
“Keep your friends close are generally well behaved, these rules do need to be policed
and your affiliates closer!”
and their effectiveness will come down to the vigilance of the
James Briscoe, network or affiliate manager.
Unique Digital
Merchant approval
S
Brand benefits of an affiliate programme
more knowledge and insight an affiliate has into your brand, the a programme is to
better they will be able to align with your vision for the brand and open dialogue with
how best to promote it. There would be no harm in including
your affiliates.
affiliates in a brand brief!
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Managing affiliates
and pay per click
B search
29 Search – the areas you need to focus on
30 Protecting your brand using brand term and
generic keywords
31 How to maximise your keyword activity
32 Working with trusted affiliates
32 Managing your affiliate program
Recent reports indicate that Google alone now has an 80% market
share of all search activity in the UK (Yahoo! and MSN making up
a further 15%). Search is now viewed by many in the industry as
T
a reputation management system. This is due to its ability to
dictate both awareness levels and business dealings!
Here are a couple of It’s therefore unrealistic and risky for any vertical
examples, both from the industry, whether it is B2C or B2B, to rely on a single
financial sector:
channel of promotion such as organic search. In fact,
the figures prove that a brand’s visibility and ability to
drive transactions can be greatly enhanced by adopting
a combined search marketing approach (organic, PPC
search and affiliate).
How to maximise your keyword activity Now compare this to “Zurich car
insurance” in Google. Zurich has
a complimentary affiliate program
Most customers have a feel for where they want to that works to supplement the
go online, and typically perform multiple searches, but brand’s Search strategy and
research by Onestat also shows the importance of thus manages to optimise the
covering generic longtail keywords: exposure so there are multiple
branded messages for Zurich
displayed. This gives Zurich a
• 2 word queries currently account for 30% of Search greater reach and increased
queries share of space powered by this
• 3 words: 27% unique affiliate strategy.
• 4 words: 17.1%
• 5 words: 8.25%
• 6 words: 3.7%
Number of keywords
So remember, your affiliates are your ‘virtual sales force’. You would
not let anyone work for you promoting your brand without a proper
interview, probation period or one who’s not equipped with the
right tools to sell, and the same applies to your PPC affiliates.
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Making affiliate
marketing a
sustainable
B
channel for sales
and marketing
34 In-house v. affiliate network?
35 Bringing advertisers and publishers together
35 Selling it to the board
36 Case Studies
publishers is fundamental
Selling it to the board
to accelerating affiliate
buy or
reserve
Case Studies
Play.com study
B
Play.com is a leading online retailer
offering books, CDs, DVDs, computer
and console games at competitive
prices. Because of the way Play.com
manages consumer orders to comply
with UK VAT regulations, standard
affiliate network pixel tracking could
not deliver real time sales reporting,
meaning that affiliates would have
had to wait a week before they could
access to their sales statistics. As a
result, affiliates were not able to be as
reactive in their promotional efforts for
the Play.com programme. By alerting
their affiliate network of this problem,
their network was able to create and
deploy a new server-to-server tracking
solution. At the end of the purchase,
Play.com’s server makes a secure
connection to the affiliate network
server, passing the purchase value
and transaction ID details back to the
network. This means commission
is now calculated and allocated
accordingly, with real time statistics
So much more online being made available to the affiliate.
buy or
reserve
C
Gala Bingo know their cost per
acquisition target from their own
analysis of customer lifetime value
and other channel costs. Gala
Bingo worked with their affiliate
network to ensure that they
offered the best commissions to
affiliates, providing competitor
landscape feedback and
negotiating with key affiliates in
order to deliver new members
well within this target.
buy or
reserve
Case Studies
buy or
reserve
E
Harrods case study
buy or
reserve
Case Studies
buy or
reserve
buy or
reserve
Case Studies
Results
December 05–October 06
compared to December 2004–
October 2005:
buy or
reserve
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Affiliates add a
new element to
B
your online
marketing mix
45 Maintain regular contact
45 Affiliates working with your brand
45 Affiliates and PPC campaigns
45 Caveats
45 Timescales
Affiliates will also have to be policed to ensure that they are promoting
the right message for your company. You will need to keep check
on what pages your ads are running on, if keyword restrictions are
being followed, new creative has been updated etc.
Timescales
I
CPA, or Associate of an advertiser
Program) Any type in exchange for a
of revenue sharing commission. C
Impression -
program where a
The viewing of an
publisher receives
advertising banner,
link, or product on
a commission for
generating online
R
the Internet. Real-time - No delay
activity (e.g. leads
or sales) for an in the processing
advertiser. of requests for
L information, other
than the time
Pay-per-lead -
pg 19
Lead - When a The commission necessary for the
visitor registers, structure where the data to travel over the
signs up for, or advertiser pays the Internet.
downloads something publisher a flat fee
on an advertiser’s for each qualified D
S
site. A lead might also lead (customer) that
comprise a visitor is referred to the
filling out a form on advertiser’s website. Sale - When a user
an advertiser’s site. makes a purchase
Pay-per-sale - from an online
Link - A link is a form The commission advertiser.
of advertising on a structure where the
website, in an email advertiser pays a pg 26
or online newsletter,
which, when clicked
percentage or flat
fee to the publisher W
on, refers the visitor based on the revenue Web-based -
to an advertiser’s generated by the Requiring no software
website or a specific sale of a product or to access an online
area within their service to a visitor service or function, E
website. who came from a other than a Web
publisher site. browser and access
to the Internet.
P Publisher - (also
referred to as an Web-portal - A
Pay-for- Affiliate, Associate, website or service
Performance Partner, Reseller that offers a broad
Program - or Content Site) array of resources
(also called An independent and services, such as
Affiliate Marketing, party, or website, email, forums, search
Performance-based, engines, and online pg 30
that promotes the
Partner Marketing, products or services shopping malls.
Acknowledgements
The IAB would like to To contact or for more information on these companies,
thank the Affiliate Council please visit the IAB membership directory at
for their important www.iabuk.net/membershipdirectory/
contribution to this report.
Particular thanks to the Key IAB contributors
chapter contributors:
Jack Wallington, Programmes Manager
Advertising.com Dan Redfearn, Membership Manager
Affilinet
Commission Junction Further Info
DGM
For further information regarding this handbook or other
Affiliate Window
IAB activities, including research, events, seminars,
Mvi
presentations and training, please visit info@iabuk.net
buy.at
Pigsback
R.O.EYE
Stream:20
Tradedoubler Design & Artwork by HBM Communications
Unique Digital www.hbmcommunications.com
Customer
Information
Useful links
The affiliate sector is an active
one. If you have any questions
www.affiliates4u.com about your programme or are
www.affiliateblog.co.uk in the process of becoming
www.mooseontheloose.co.uk an affiliate or merchant the
www.affiliatemarketingblog.co.uk IAB recommends visiting
these key industry blogs for
more information and useful
advice.
Affiliate Marketing guide Handbook Series
IAB Affiliate
Marketing Guide
w w w . i a b u k . n e t