No, Affiliate Marketing is Not Dead!

Launched by Amazon in 1996, affiliate marketing has rediscovered the path of growth since 2016 after a small loss of speed recorded in 2014. Boosted by the growth of M-commerce and online sales, now better tracked, affiliate marketing points to perennial growth.

Affiliate marketing is starting up again

After a year of weak performance in 2014, affiliate marketing has regained strength! Yet the trend over the last few years seemed to reflect a loss of interest. Although affiliate marketing had seen a constant increase between 2011 and 2013, the year 2014 was marked by a decline of 5%.

Thus, investments in affiliate marketing in France increased slightly in 2015 from 208 to 210 million euros. An upturn which is confirmed by a new increase of 8% observed in the first half of 2016.

The rough patch observed in recent years can be explained by the democratization of mobile use.  This trend is disadvantageous to advertisers who use affiliate marketing. Mobile advertising formats have long been neglected in favour of messages optimized for desktop, while at the same time, browsing time on smartphones and tablets has strongly increased.

As a consequence of these new modes of consumption, Internet users juggle between several devices. For example, they read their e-mails on the mobile when they wake up, find out about their favourite sites from a computer during the day and consult social networks on the tablet in the evening. The relevance of the campaigns disseminated mostly on a desktop is thus in question.

Cross-device tracking to the rescue of affiliate marketing

With these new habits, advertisers are faced with another problem. how to track users from one device to another throughout a single affiliate marketing campaign? Kwanko responds to this demand by implementing cross-device tracking that evaluates the weight of each medium along the purchase path.

Advertisers now have reliable and specific data concerning their campaigns. They know at what time of day the conversions are the most numerous or what is the average basket of the Internet user. They also know the customer’s entire path, media by media.

Result:  campaigns can be optimized in terms of cost, message and targeting, which gives a much better ROI from one operation to another. Another advantage is that the conversion funnel is gaining visibility. The advertiser is able to pay the publishers more fairly based on its actual contribution in the purchase process.

ROI at the heart of affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a means of promotion that is not only effective and relevant but also oriented towards optimizing the ROI. And with good reason, the advantage of affiliate marketing resides in its founding principle “You don’t pay money until you get money”. In other word, you only pay for results. The remuneration of the affiliate is only made after the conversion. Your ROI is therefore guaranteed and protected by this principle.

This pattern also applies when we do not achieve online sales. For example, you can collect leads regardless of your field of activity. The mechanics remain the same. You pay your affiliates only when a prospective client validates a request for a quotation or downloads a brochure after filling in a form.

Thanks to reasonable budgets, affiliate marketing makes it possible to reach many Internet users, easily and very quickly. As a result, your products are offered to thousands, even tens of thousands of prospects without you spending a penny!

As opposed to traditional advertising campaigns, which are often expensive and whose impact is still difficult to measure today. You get free access through your affiliates to the web to boost your sales.