The Hitflip UK Blog

The TU Munich and CJ/Valueclick have conducted a survey together on the subject of Affiliate Marketing. Everyone who took part received the findings in presentation form a few days ago. I’m going to take the liberty of making some comments on a few areas that struck me while browsing through the presentation. But first it needs to be said: Good Survey! It’s great that someone has again done a fresh and well-conducted study on the topic! Now to a few comments.

• At the outset, one must assume a bias, as some of the participants (as I was) were recruited from the CJ environment. It’s clear that Affiliate Marketing will be seen as more important to these participants compared to the general population

• Often the findings seem quite obvious: Banner ads provide more traffic, and Affiliate Marketing more sales :). Banner ads are created mainly for Brand-building, and Affiliate Marketing mainly to bring more Leads/Sales. But it also has a lot to do with the commission model of the Affiliate programme. A solely CPC programme would send traffic figures soaring, but not so much the sales and leads.

• The length of service and budget for Affiliate Marketing have a strong correlation – in the active areas obviously. It’s impossible to create an active Affiliate base with thousands of Affiliates overnight. That goes for Merchants as well as Affiliate networks (see the negative example of Adcatch in Germany, who closed their Affiliate network in April). And whoever uses Affiliate Marketing in the long term sees that it is worth it, and then invests more, for example in the form of continually rising commissions (like we do ;-))

• I find the results of the criteria for the choice of service operators/ affiliate programme networks very good: stability of the system in first place! Then quality of service, and tools for measuring performance. Directly after this is the most important point for me: Size of the network – from my perspective especially relating to the number of affiliates.

• Highly amusing: 17.4% believe “Affiliate Marketing is just hype, and will lose its meaning”. Hilarious! A hype lasting 10 years?

• Very nice confirmation for our blog post New Affiliate Marketing-related Web 2.0 Business model– 70% of those questioned have the same opinion.

• Fascinating: 24.4% plan to build their own affiliate network – aha! Here I’m curious, did they perhaps mean a (network-independent) Standalone Affiliate Programme?

• Affiliate Marketing is used mainly by small and medium-sized firms. - I didn’t know that, but interesting!

So, in any case, the study is well worth reading!

 

Tags:Affiliate, Affiliate Networks, Marketing, Online

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Affiliate Networks, Online, Affiliate, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.