23 Musings

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).

An interesting and fairly persuasive call for affiliates to be shunned by the online travel market was posted on the Travel Rants blog yesterday.

I agree wholeheartedly that anyone masquerading to be ABTA or ATOL bonded/protected should definitely be shunned and in fact the affiliate networks should be policing this themselves. Being associated with a website which pretends to be bonded could blow up massively in the face of a tour operator one of these days.

I also agree that travel providers should be more careful in their selection of affiliates and avoid the spam laden, pop-up bearing sites (of which there are many) and be more selective in their choices of affiliates to partner with.

Of course, this is difficult in practice. Most travel companies work through affiliate networks where there is little to no screening of affiliate websites and practices. The only way to do this properly is to control your own personal affiliate network. How to do this?? Get a really good and trusted tracking tool, approach the kind of affiliates you want to work with yourselves and work out commission deals that are attractive to both parties. This can work really well if you can devote the manpower to manage the network of partners, resulting in higher quality traffic and higher conversion rate (which at the end of the day is what we all want!).