An advertiser should have complete freedom to choose which partners they work with.
It’s a statement that very few people in the affiliate industry would disagree with.
And in almost every case that’s the way affiliate marketing works. Advertisers choose the partnerships that best suit their brand. Affiliates choose the brands they want to promote.
Just as partnerships in affiliate marketing start, they also end. When an advertiser <> affiliate relationship ends it frequently lays bare one of the industry’s biggest challenges – that affiliate marketing isn’t properly in control of the advertising that it supplies.
If we think of other channels like Google Ads, whether the medium be Search, Display or Shopping, advertiser spend is directly correlated to the supply of advertising. When the advertiser increases or decreases spend the advertising exposure changes accordingly. And if the advertiser removes their spend from the channel then the supply of advertising stops.
In affiliate marketing that proportional relationship between spend and supply doesn’t work in the same way, because when an advertiser removes spend from the channel it’s far from guaranteed that the supply of advertising will be affected.
In practice, an advertiser removing spend normally happens because:
- The advertiser decides to stop working with an affiliate, or an entire type of affiliates
- The advertiser reduces commission
- The advertiser removes commission on a product group or customer type, such as existing customers
The natural response from affiliates, and to some extent affiliate networks, in these scenarios is to push back on an advertiser that wants to reduce spend, citing the potential for lower performance, broken relationships and critically removal of advertising.
But the last point in practice rarely happens in the tangible way necessary to deliver the lower performance that the advertiser’s reduced spend deserves.
While some affiliates might remove ads or pages, many affiliates just aren’t able or willing to take such definitive action.
The most common example is advertisers that decide to stop working with the industry’s traditional ‘conversion-orientated’ affiliates like vouchercode sites. Rarely do these sites remove pages when an advertiser reduces or removes their spend. The net effect…
Advertisers continue to receive traffic and sales from that partner…for free
For people more used to the responsive automation of channels like Search and Display, the idea of an advertiser not losing ad placements even though they have reduced spend will seem bizarre. But there are some common reasons why spend has such a threadbare relationship with promotion in Affiliate.
It’s often left very much unsaid in the affiliate industry, but it’s a fact that an advertiser’s brand plays a very important role in traffic generation for large affiliate sites.
This means that in some cases the brand’s very presence on an affiliate website is at least as important, if not more important, than their spend. It’s why many of the industries large voucher and loyalty sites have continued to list Amazon in the UK, often without payment.
SEO is a very important factor in why affiliate sites are often extremely reliant on listing major brands, regardless of commercials. Affiliate websites receive a lot of traffic from brand searches, like My brand cashback or Mybrand discount code. To put this into context, one of the industry’s biggest sites relies on advertiser branded searches for 58% of its total traffic.
It is a very complex strategic decision for an affiliate website to give up a page that ranks prominently on a high traffic, branded search term. Ironically, it’s often easier to convince an advertiser to reinstate their spend than it is to get back a high ranking organic search position, especially given competition for those search placements is incredibly intense.
User experience is also a significant reason why spend just cannot forge a direct link with promotion in affiliate marketing. On a news website that runs Display ads the desire for a user to visit or remain on that website isn’t likely to be affected by which brand’s name is in the leaderboard banner. But for affiliate websites simply listing a major brand to a browsing consumer could be the difference between securing that consumer as a long-term user or losing them. The industry’s top 5 partners all have an advertiser’s brand name search term in their top 3 organic referring keywords.
Most of the major affiliate websites in the UK build dedicated pages to promote brands. Resource is dedicated to keep those pages up-to-date, and consequently be it for SEO, user-experience or strategic reasons there is a deep reluctance to remove or delete pages if an advertiser removes or reduces their spend.
I’ve heard some affiliates claim that lower spend equals a broken relationship with an advertiser, where removing over and above promotion like homepage exposure or newsletters will hit the advertiser’s sales. The truth is, outside of the top brands, search pages are far more important than homepage exposure to driving sales.
The loose connection between spend and advertising is a problem that people managing affiliates programs, like agencies and networks, wrestle with daily. Ad automation is one thing. But when your channel can’t even show a genuine downturn in performance based on reduced spend, proving the channel’s incremental value can be extremely challenging.
I’ve seen networks and agencies plead with affiliates to remove links or pages when an advertiser has cut spend. I’ve done it myself. I’ve even taken matters into my own hands and stopped paid links on affiliate from redirecting to the advertiser in the hope of stopping an advertising benefiting from a relationship that is no longer paying the affiliate.
This often leads the affiliate site to remove the network links entirely, so the affiliate starts to send traffic directly to the advertiser’s site. With this last vestige of control gone, the affiliate’s traffic then effectively becomes inbound, organic traffic for the advertiser. Unmonetised, unaccountable and free for the advertiser.
With attribution tools becoming increasingly popular the temptation for advertisers to juggle spend is only going to grow. Which makes it more important than ever that affiliate marketing shows a proportionally controllable relationship between spend and advertising. What does this mean in practice?
- Affiliates have to be prepared to remove ads, links and even brand-dedicated pages if an advertiser removes spend
- Affiliates need to create more ways to shift traffic from one brand to another based on spend
- Networks and agencies need to do more to prevent advertisers benefiting from partnerships where spend has been significantly reduced or removed
- More industry automation to shut down / switch trackable links based on reduction in spend