23 Musings

As we've all known for a long time measuring the success of online ad campaigns based on the last-click is not really representative of how engaging your advert or link is to users.

Finally Microsoft have announced a solution that may be the beginning of the end for these old advertising techniques.

Engagement Mapping will allow campaigns to be attributed to every click in the journey of a user, one suspects that means they will attribute percentages of sales to each click to end up with a weighted user journey.

This is good news and great progress but what is needed now is a tracking tool that will allow conversions to be tracked in this way across channels such as affiliates, paid search and banners and attribute sales correctly. Only then will online marketers really understand the ROI each channel is delivering.

AOL has bought Buy.at the affiliate network. This is the first affiliate buy I've seen by a major portal like AOL, there's been a lot of other ad network buys but it's good to see an affiliate network securing such a deal. Affiliates were always going to be huge in 2008 as technology advances and publishers get onboard more, perhaps this is a sign of things to come?

45% growth in the last year is being reported for the affiliate marketing sector (according to Marketing Charts). The total value of online sales by affiliates was around £3 billion in 2007.

While that's some very strong growth year on year it's still a drop in the ocean compared to total online sales. I'd expect to see affiliates continue to grow at a rapid rate and other referral marketing channels such as paid search slow or even begin to drop in a year or two. As affiliates hone their skills, and retailers get more strategic they are going to become a far more cost effective way to get leads and sales for your website.

Top sectors for affiliate marketing in 2007? Financial services, Retail, Telecoms and Travel (travel attributes nearly 18% of online sales to affiliates).