Nearly seven years working for affiliate networks, currently Strategy Director at Affiliate Window with responsibility for research and best practice. I'm also the current Chair of the IAB's Affiliate Marketing Council.
Is the role of the affiliate network changing?
Anyone working in affiliate marketing will tell you it’s a complex channel. Typically the day to day grind of an affiliate network is to try and make sense of this complexity, juggling priorities and conflicting interests, resolutely performing the role of middleman and arbiter.
Yet as the industry matures and grows in both value and influence, is the role of the affiliate network changing?
Retargeting's place in the affiliate channel
While the general discussions about behavioural retargeting have concentrated on the thorny subject of privacy, for affiliate marketers the debate has a different focus, challenging some fundamental and long held practices.
Six great reasons to engage with affiliates
Matt Bailey wrote earlier this month on the problem that affiliate marketing seems to have in shaking off negative connotations.
His points are entirely valid; affiliate marketers continuously have difficulties in effectively communicating the strengths of our channel.
Attributing value in affiliate marketing
For those working in affiliate marketing it genuinely feels after a handful of false dawns that our £4bn industry is at a crossroads, poised to develop genuinely more intelligent and intuitive commission modelling.
Affiliate marketing is at the coalface of online, premised on converting traffic to valid leads or confirmed sales. The past 15 years have seen a significant portion of online disciplines worked to cost per acquisition, falling within the remit of performance based marketing and rewarded on the same ‘last click wins’ discipline.
But as de-duplication becomes commonplace and analytics’ packages provide a wealth of data so the clamour for a ‘fairer’ reward system has gained momentum.
