Value Attribution – Is Sharing The Wealth Amongst The Touchpoints Of A Customers Journey A Realistic Solution?
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
The traditional payment model in affiliate model is one of ‘last referrer wins’ or ‘last click wins’, with the final site that pushes a consumer through to the purchasing site being rewarded. But this model fails to take into account the vast array of sites that can influence a consumer up to the point of purchase. These can include price comparison sites, voucher code sites, other retailer sites, forums etc..
Nowadays & in the near future, marketers will want to know the exact route of how a consumer reaches their end destination. Eg – From Website A > Website B > price comparison site > voucher-code site > retailer site. There are different touchpoints consumers have en route to an online purchase and the following questions can be asked:
- Should payment be shared around sites more evenly, to reflect the whole journey?
- Will this lead to more incentive to push web users through to brand sites? Will it lead to more online sales?
- What are the benefits of tracking in this way to a marketer? Is it worth doing? How does it work best?
For the idealists it’s maybe the utopia, but for the realists it’s probably impractical. With different touch points consumers have en route to an online purchase, there will unlikely be a universal agreement as to which point of a consumers journey, truly influenced the purchasing decision and it would be too complex for networks to implement alternatives across the board.
One point I must raise are those merchants & agencies who already de-dupe & don’t credit sales from affiliates who were the last referrer because one of the previous touch points was another source. This needs to be eradicated, together with merchant / agencies own PPC activity on brand which ends up as the last click when the affiliate did the pre sell.
Last click referrer is now too engrained in a mature affiliate industry for it all to change swiftly & smoothly to a model wholly acceptable.
We read & hear a lot of discussion about what is & isn’t unique content & that one source should maybe be attributed more commission than the other. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and a lot of debate comparing one site to another is very subjective. Perhaps there should instead be more focus on when an affiliate link is clicked it actually pre-fills the shopping cart or basket on the merchant’s site, rather than the consumer being pre-sold twice, this might actually improve conversions.
In other words, the variables are too numerous, which raises another question of who possesses the data on all the touch points. This would probably be only the merchant if they had sophisticated analytic tools at their disposal or an agency. Multi point’s payments will potentially see the demise of cashback sites & first cookie would a stuffers paradise. If new models were introduced there would be potentially more possibilities for opportunists to take advantage of.
However an incremental step towards an acceptable solution would be the introduction of hybrid commission structures by including a CPC in addition to or factored within the CPA. This would reward each of the touch points, granted this could be open to abuse if distributed to all affiliates, but merchants & networks can easily offer this option to trusted affiliates, implementation is straight forward as well as recording since clicks since they one of the uniform statistics appearing on reporting interfaces. The downside is trying to persuade merchants, because they had previously been sold the concept of performance marketing where they only pay a percentage commission on sale completion.
Another alternative is a queuing system for cookies where one cannot be overwritten for say 7 days, but goes next in a queue until the previous one expires. i.e. multiple cookies in place.
The whole discussion of this subject seems to have escalated since the rise & popularity of voucher code & cashback sites, but that is a whole discussion within itself.
Another problem is do affiliates trust some agencies? Media Agencies are not key to seeing commission splitting working as there does seem to be a white collar, blue collar divide & trust issues with some of them.
I was speaking with a network who I was surprised on how open & candid they were, they said “most so called bigger agencies may set a priority to how sales come in and will give more “value” to CPM and SEO than to Affiliates and that the software is kicking about to be able to do this. They are really only out to make money for themselves & affiliate revenue is secondary. The problem with some agencies who deal in snake oil is they need to show it has worth so if they “help” decide the customer path to give affiliates a percentage of commission then they will take some for branding advert campaings that cost thousands and are a total waste of money, for 50p a click PPC campaigns on brands that affiliates could do for 20p etc.. these people are smoke and mirror experts”
So to summarise perhaps we should look at queuing systems for cookies & hybrid commission structures, these are realistic and simplistic steps towards appeasing most parties in rewarding the various touch points of a consumers journey. For myself personally I would be considerably more incentivised if there were hybrid commission structures in place.
