As the year 2009 was coming to an end, I was approached by the Revenue Performance magazine’s editor-in-chief, who asked me to share my thoughts on how I envisage the affiliate marketing landscape in 2010, what I believe to be the main areas growth, as what will be the areas of challenge.
My article came out in January 2010:
The 6 predictions I have made were:
- Social media will blossom, contributing to the growth of affiliate marketing;
- Following the spread of the mobile Internet, mobile marketing will also grow quickly;
- Transparency will be central, and consumers will continue their active participation in shaping brands;
- It will be the year of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), and those affiliate marketers that aren’t yet actively involved, should be;
- Online video (no matter what quality; content is key) is set to boom;
- More legislative fights should be expected.
Today mThink has published that article of mine online, and you may read it in full here.
Hi Geno,
I would love to see an article on the subject conversion rate optimization. Working in a large company we have dedicated people who are constantly A/B and multi variable testing what converts better in our shop.
But as an affiliate marketer, what role or input can you give? Currently We are discussing posibilities of customized landingpages on the basis of the referrer. We also make sure the communication in our promotiontools is the same as on the landingpages. But which options do you see more for AM’s?
Kind regards,
Ralph Remkes
Ralph, good question, and I may very well write a separate article on CRO in the context of affiliate program management. Several key principles illustrated by real-life case studies would make it a really nice one… At this point, to answer your question, I think advertiser’s constant improvement of the landing pages that their affiliates are sending their traffic to is a must. On the merchant side you want to continuously test, tweak, and re-build/improve based on the successes registered. Landing page optimization for affiliates should be treated by merchants just as seriously as any other landing page optimization that they may already be doing (be it for your paid search, or email campaigns, or any other traffic-generating channel).