Affiliate Marketing in Germany
These days I am reading a lot of affiliate and online marketing blogs (here’s a good selection of links by Fraser) and one of the articles I found very informative is the dissection of affiliate marketing by Lee. Because I find it interesiting to figure out how affiliate marketing works in the UK I thought it might be interesting for people from the UK to know how things work in Germany. Of course I do not now everything but I have some insights and experience so I allow myself to assume my estimations are close to the truth. (You know we Germans are overmodest, right? ;-)) Not only does the affiliate network market differ but also the way affiliates generally work. I’ll try to stick to Lees nomenclature to avoid misunderstandings. Three of seven ways of affiliate marketing mentioned are not an issue in Germany (Web Spam / Made for AdSense / Blog spam / Email Spam Spyware / adware / malware) as most merchants and networks do not allow you to do it and you will get kicked out of the affiliate programm or affiliate network if they catch you doing it. Affiliate referral does exist but of course it is naturally a niche market. That leaves three areas uncovered: PPC, (respectable) SEO and Community Sites. PPC seams to be the biggist thing in english affiliate marketing in all it’s different variations. In Germany it is a niche! When German companies want to appear in paid search results they either do it themselves or hire an online marketing agency specialized in keyword buying. This marketing via paid seach / keyword buying is seen as something independent of affiliate marketing. Of course when you have an affiliate programm some affiliates might also do some AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Miva or whatever but that is a very, very small fraction. If I’d had to guess a number I’d be 10% or less. Most of affiliate marketing in Germany happens in a mixture of community sites and SEO if I stick to Lees terms. Affiliates have their “projects” and they optimize it so it appears as far up as possible in the natural (non paid) search results. Then the webmaster/affiliates and the users of their websites add content to make the site more unique, bigger and important for more topics. So this kind of websites / projects are 90% of German affiliate marketing! Quite different, don’t you think?
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January 14th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Yes, I very much think so, too (see my today’s entry which you’ve already read).
It feels like as if affiliates as well as networks seem quite conservative compared to the UK (maybe a little behind? Or just differen?).
As far as I know most German merchants allow their affiliates keyword marketing however they just don’t do it so much. As a result of this German keywords are cheaper so there’s potential.
January 17th, 2007 at 12:13 am
[…] Right after Andre and me were philosophising about PPC affiliates in the UK Keith Bond, earning his income from PPC marketing, stated his point of view today. Not surprisingly he’s convinced that there are advantages for the merchant in giving the whole SEM subject to their affiliates instead of doing it on their own. He concludes: Basically the PPC Affiliate does the majority of the work involved in PPC advertising but only makes money if it’s done right, thus minimising the financial risk for the merchant. Leaving the merchant free to use the budget saved in other areas of the business. […]