Marketing Sherpa Special Report: - Affiliate Marketing 2005

[Linda Buquet]

I participated in this survey and have been anxious for them to publish the results. Here it is, hot off the press.

Special Report: Affiliate Marketing 2005 -- Do Merchants & Affiliates Have Unrealistic Expectations?

"MarketingSherpa's December affiliate marketing survey results are in -- and the results are stunningly different from our expectations.

2004 has been a particularly tough year with merchants' fears of cookie stuffing and dishonest adware/spyware, CAN-SPAM legalities, and paid search arbitrage.

Many experts, including us, worried these factors would drive the estimated $1.5 billion affiliate marketing industry into a decline.

Guess what? According to our survey results, affiliate marketing is alive and well. Overall 91% of surveyed merchants and 82% of affiliates expect revenue growth in 2005."

Read the rest, then come back to discuss it:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sampl...contentID=2878

FYI, at the end there are some good tips for merchants with 5 ways to increase your affiliate revenue from Shawn Collins.

[scallihan]

As an affiliate marketer, I've had significant revenue increases in 2004 over 2003, both from increased overall traffic and improved search engine placement. If anything, my percentage of search engine traffic coming from Google has only increased. Before Yahoo stepped away from Google, I was getting about 70% of total search engine traffic from Google vs. about 17% from Yahoo. I'm now getting more than 80% from Google and less than 7% from Yahoo -- my total traffic from Google has increased about 40%, while my traffic from Yahoo has dropped about 40%, since Yahoo walked away from Google. If there's been a loser so far, I'd say that it is Yahoo.

Based on current placement of my search keyphrases, it looks to me like Yahoo and MSN Search are now trying to become more alike to than different from Google. Yahoo's clear weighting of paid inclusions over the free freighters, so to speak, may have backfired on them, hurting their credibility in providing unbiased results -- they now seem to have shifted away from that to follow more of a Google model (open to all). The latest MSN Search seems to have done the same.

I was concerned about my over-reliance on Google for traffic, but am now less concerned now that I'm placing well in all three major search engines -- thus, I'm less likely to lose traffic if Google loses market share to their competitors, since I would hopefully stand to gain close to what I might lose.

The biggest area for expansion, it seems to me is international marketing, in Europe and Asia, etc. One of the merchants I'm working with, for instance, is setting up European-based sites and fulfillment centers.

I think the affiliate concerns are more with advertising campaigns. There were lots of rumors that Yahoo was filtering out affiliate sites, but that is clearly not the case now (if ever). It would also be difficult to implement a blanket filter, since there is no commonality in affiliate linking methods. Plus, all that a merchant would need to do would be to change their affiliate linking method to get past a filter, or affiliate marketers would simply resort to link cloaking (using CGI scripts) to conceal the link target. Just not a very productive road for the search engines to go down, it seems to me.

As an affiliate marketer, all I ask is a fair chance to gain visibility for the value-plus services and resources I provide, which hopefully make it easier for a visitor to find what they're looking for. I'm primarily interested in targeted traffic (buyers) rather than untargeted traffic (lookers). That can be a win-win situation for search engines and affiliate marketers, while outright exclusion of affiliate marketers would be a lose-lose proposition, it seems to me.