Comparing Affiliate Networks in Germany and UK
There has been a survey initiated at the UK-Affiliate4U-Forum regarding the usage of different affiliate networks. That survey inspierd a german forum regarding affiliate marketing programms (called 100partnerprogramme.de meaning 100 affiliate programs) to initiate a similar survey. The A4U-Forum claimes to have more than 12.000 users and still the poll had only 17 participants. The german forum has only a little more than 1000 users but so far 95 people participated in the poll. The german issue of the poll has also been mentioned in a few affiliate marketing related blogs. Here’s what both polls look like at the moment.
Even though the rate of participants in both forums is really low and especially poor at A4U the results still support the impressions that I gathered during AdTech and Affiliate4U-Get2Gether. In Germany there are only two class A players: Affili.net and Zanox. All the rest ist far, far behind no matter what they state. The UK affiliate network market is far more fragmented. There are more strong players and the others are not very far behind.
As a merchant / publisher we tend to stick with the market leaders as they will have the biggest number of affiliates. In Germany we have our affiliate programm at Affilinet and Zanox and in Austria we only have it at Affilinet. In UK we’ll probably go for Tradedoubler and CJ but we are not certain yet.
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January 4th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
You are forgetting that in terms of maturity the UK is probably about 2 years ahead of Germany and probably attracting a great deal more investment from foreign entrants than Germany has seen yet. Give it two years and doubt that both affili.net and the rather obnoxious Zanox will maintain the same percentage market share as they do now, although it is fair to say that of course they will increase their turnovers.
In particular the only real advantage Zanox has over typical networks is it was an early starter, if you look throughout the whole of Europe and indeed the USA the larger networks are the ones that most often started first or not long after. Zanox (and i will use the capital Z as i am not pretentious like they are) offer nothing in real terms that you cant get from most other networks.
Starting at the ground level, the very basis of affiliate marketing and yet Zanox still do not release epc figures, preferring to opt for a pretentious, self indulgent “adrank” which basically means nothing, not just a little bit obscure or subjective like “epc” values are, “adrank” is without doubt meaningless junk that i am not entirely sure they even understand themselves.
Keeping to the very basics, sub id tracking, its a joke, you have to store each and every click id yourself as what you send to them can only be a certain length and only numbers. A joke when EVERY other affiliate network can handle whatever the affiliate wants to use, of course affiliates get by because they have to, but when you have emerging networks like belboon for example that allow affiliates to add as many additional paramaters and values as they like then you can see that slowly these networks will start to creep up the ladder.
I could go on all day but i think too often people look for parrallels between German and UK markets that they get too indulged in it
January 13th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
[…] 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? […]
January 15th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Hey Mr Me. Thanks a lot for the valuable input. Gives me something more to think about.
I see you are not too much into Zanox
I agree that they might be a bit away from perfect for affiliates but their stuff is quite fine for merchants. Just my 2 Eurocents regarding that…