Snap shots Affiliate Marketing US Bench Market Report
Survey was conducted by Affiliatebenchmarks.com
A division of www.Netx.com
July 2011.
Methodology
“AffliateBenchmarks™ reached out to a broad array of affiliate networks for recruitment support. In addition, some of the most prominent advertisers and industry news sources in this medium also assisted in recruitment to ensure a diverse pool of respondents. These various promoters helped enhance the outreach for AffliateBenchmarks’™ fourth research report by directing potential respondents to the highly intuitive, best-in-class platform developed by SurveyMonkey between the survey’s opening on July 1st and its official closing on September 1st. With their involvement, we were able to maximize the number of participants and ensure the report would be based on a representative sample of the entire market. Each participant was only offered access to the raw data; no rewards or payment were offered, which could have created answer bias. This report contains data from affiliates and advertisers around the globe. We thank everyone for their support. Due to data integrity issues, we have not included the agency/consultant data in this report and will release that data later once the issue is resolved. Questions can be directed to AffliateBenchmarks@Netx.com. We apologize for this inconvenience.” There were in total 7,279 respondents.
Survey shows that of the respondents the largest percentage of people categorized themselves as Affiliates/Publishers. The next largest percentage of respondents categorized themselves as Advertisers/Merchants with Agencies|Consultants|OPM representing the lowest percentage.”
Where are the women in Affiliate Marketing?
The survey shows us that the affiliate marketing industry is still predominantly made up of men and what is remarkable is the percentage of male/female split is almost the same as the UK demographics in the 2009 UK Affiliate Census. By the way the UK have just closed their survey for the 2011 Affiliate Census so it will be good chance to compare using current data. I still don’t know why the overall ratio between men and women is so great. As I have stated before, it’s the perfect industry for women with children who want to generate income, be able to work from home and choose their own hours. I rarely come across Female Directors of our industry companies but more often than not, the marketing roles seem to be predominantly women as employees.
Over 65’s active in Affiliate Marketing
It was so great to see that 3.2% of the respondents were over the age of 65 which is in line with Royal Pigdoms social network research that the over 65’s represent 3% of social network groups. http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users/ According to Nielsen , although the over 65 only represent 10% of internet users in the US, the numbers are rising and it’s good to see that our industry is on the map within this age bracket.
Are you qualified?
The survey asked the question about the highest level of education that the respondent had.
28.6 percent of the respondents said that they had a college degree or equivalent. I would have liked to have seen an additional question asking respondents how much of their college studies had any relevance to what they were doing now. Affiliate marketing from an affiliate’s perspective is one of the few industries whereby no one needs to hold any qualifications at all. It’s all about experience surely? All any publisher really needs to know is how to set up an affiliate link, those clever techs out there have and are designing sign up and go platforms that can be used in place of a traditional website, example Blogger, Facebook, ,wordpress and so on. The technical skills of having to have a website in the early days are now a thing of the past.
Affiliate marketing is a part time career.
Again by comparison to that of the UK Affiliate Census in 2009/10 half the respondents In the US affiliate marketing survey did affiliate marketing as a part-time job. No surprises there, but what the survey did reveal is that the highest percentage of respondents only came into the industry in 2011. By contrast only approximately 1% had begun in 1994 (I’d like to shake their hands).
So is affiliate marketing profitable?
The majority of respondents got less than $10k per year with the top 2.7% earning over $400K per year. On first glance at these figures I immediately equated these figures as affiliate’s/publishers being in the less than 10k bracket but upon reflection with the likes of the high profile affiliate companies here in the US and UK they almost certainly would have to be in the over 400k bracket. It’s a shame the survey did not split this out. To put this in to context it should be noted that a high percentage of respondents did not or could not reveal their earnings.
What Affiliates look for before joining an affiliate program
I was bemused to read that Affiliate’s, when deciding on which affiliate program to join, the number one choice was the commission amount offered followed by relevancy then product & Price, with EPC (Earnings per click) coming in fifth place. Fair dues, EPC was the only metric of choice offered to the respondents, I’m still surprised that it was not the second highest when deciding which affiliate program to join. The amount of commission becomes meaningless unless the advertiser’s website converts. Most affiliate networks offer publishers the overall conversions of the Advertisers affiliate program allowing the publisher to make an informed decision before they join, however this metric can only be displayed to publishers if the Advertisers/Merchant has an existing affiliate program. Terms and conditions were third from last, I had expected this to be in the top three.
Which affiliate networks do you belong to?
The respondents were asked which affiliate networks they belonged to, the top six Affiliate Networks that most had joined were Cj.com, Google Affiliate Network, Click Bank, LinkShare.com and Shareasale.com, however the respondents only had a choice of fifteen affiliate networks to choose from. In the USA there are between thirty eight and forty five Affiliate Networks.
Did Affiliate’s have a favorite affiliate network?
Cj.com is without a doubt a monster in the industry and longevity has most certainly helped and we were not surprised with it being number one, followed by Google Affiliate Network and Click Bank.
Affiliate Techniques
It was encouraging to see that a huge proportion of affiliates are still using a myriad of techniques in order to get traffic and not just relying on one or two techniques. When asked about their pay per click spend, 44% said they would invest less than around $5k with approx 2% who said they would invest around $60k or more. But natural SEO search came out as the top choice followed by social networks.
What Merchant offers do affiliates find work best
We had a problem trying to interpret this section, from what we can ascertain it would seem like affiliates get a better conversion when a merchant offers free shipping, this could be the top most liked promo. From our own research, free shipping + coupon works well.
What a great question!
“Are all of the websites you indicated above revealed in your affiliate profile?”
Only half of the respondents said that they reveal all of their websites and just under half said that they did not. If we take out the 5% that said the affiliate network does not support multiple URL listings then we see that a lot of affiliates do not display their multiple websites. What this means for an affiliate manager who has to approve affiliates before allowing them to join the affiliate program is that he/she is making a judgment call based on the site that the affiliate submitted when he/she joined the affiliate network. It’s a split second decision that could mean the difference between accepting or denying a potential gold mine for the merchant. How many affiliates have had emails saying “sorry your application was denied…” If the affiliate networks offer affiliates the option to list multiple sites, then in the affiliates own interest to list all of their sites. If the Affiliate Network does not support multiple listings then they should add this feature as it is in their own interest. As the survey reveals, there are some affiliates who have up to twenty five sites and up.
Why do affiliates stop working with an Advertiser/Merchant?
The top answer was because the affiliate was not generating enough revenue, which links into what do affiliates look for before joining an affiliate program see above. If the Affiliate Network has the metrics to show an existing affiliate program’s overall conversion / EPC (Earnings per click) then affiliates can make the judgment call before joining the affiliate program. If an Advertisers website simply does not convert or has low conversions for anyone, then no amount of traffic the affiliate sends will convert any better than without the use of affiliates. Most Affiliate Network tracking works, some better than others, but basic sale tracking works, so the affiliate network can’t be blamed here for poor conversions. It is black or white, either the affiliate is not sending relevant traffic, or the merchant does not know how to convert the traffic he/she gets. Affiliate Programs that do well are the ones where the Merchant has a good user friendly website with product demand and the right prices.
Don’t call us we’ll call you
Overwhelmingly, affiliates prefer to be emailed when being contacted by Merchants/Affiliate Managers and Affiliate Networks with only 2% opting for a phone call. Why? Because Affiliate’s are busy people and want to do things in their own good time. If just half of the respondents work part time on their websites, I would imagine that some affiliates will be working outside of office hours and at weekends where the only means of communication would have to be email.
Erm you don’t live here!
When asked “Where are you located?” 51% said that they were from outside the USA. This is an example of how affiliate marketing from an affiliate’s perspective has no country restrictions. The internet has facilitated the affiliate for just about every obstacle that may get in his/her way including language and currency. By contrast when Merchants were asked about their location over 70% said they were based in the USA.
In conclusion
By comparison to other affiliate surveys across many years, what we know is… Affiliates come and go like waves. Most of the big money making affiliates of today will in time be replaced by new big money making affiliates. The small affiliate generating one or two sales per week or month is just as important as the big affiliates as they represent a significant proportion of revenue for the merchant. The majority of affiliates are still part timers and prefer to be left alone to read their newsletters, this is not to say that some don’t prefer the phone call its horses for courses. Affiliates do read Affiliate Network and Merchant specific emails providing there is news in it, I bet that’s a relief to some people. Affiliates do use their own website analytics in order to monetize their traffic and Affiliates use social networking as a means to promote their Advertisers and represents a very large proportion of revenue.
Affiliates look at the commission percentage before anything else when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, so merchants take notice of this. I’m hoping that affiliates will continue to look at the Advertisers overall website conversions too before making their decision to join a program and if the network does not display or facilitate this metric, contact the merchant before joining the affiliate program and ask them what the overall website conversion is, average order basket and what the customer retention percentage is.
We already knew that Affiliates come from all walks of life and now from all around the world, they are diverse and many have the skills and knowledge which they use to drive targeted traffic to the merchants website.
Affiliate Marketing is global and it can only get better.
For more information about this survey please go to
http://affiliatebenchmarks.com/
AffiliateProgramAdvice.com and The Noise Farm Inc now have the results of the UK Affiliate Census and we will be comparing UK and US after we get the green light from our friends at Econsultancy.com We already have some staggering differences, stay tuned.
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