As we face a cost-of-living crisis, and general economic fragility, consumers are having to constantly evaluate the value of products and services they use. There has been a genuine fall in income for everyone, and this is having a knock-on effect for brands – some of which are benefitting, while many others are losing their customers.

What value means to brands

We’re seeing German discount grocery chains, Aldi and Lidl, growing their market share, while services like Netflix are losing subscribers. Brands are having to prove their products or services to provide consumers with the much sought-after value they seek, and marketers are having to re-evaluate what value now represents for them.

The current economic climate is proving to be a far bigger challenge for brands than what they faced during the pandemic. As a result, value has become one of – if not the – most important aspect of their campaigns. With marketers increasingly unsure of who their target customer is, many are struggling to find the value they are desperately looking for.

Nonetheless, it’s not the time for marketers to reduce their budgets – it’s time to continue investing and show them why your brand provides value to their lives. To do this, marketers must see value as being closely tied to brand and performance, with all three working together to get the most out of their campaigns.

The changing face of value

Marketers must look beyond the transactional media investment and consider the role that improving their brand and driving performance have to play in providing value.

When looking to protect or grow market share, insight and creativity must be at the heart of the campaign. Insights help understand audience behaviour to form the strong foundations for the campaign, while creativity ensures that audiences are engaged and interested in the advertising being served to them.

Performance should be driven by utilising KPIs that matter, with a particular focus on attention metrics and how these can help brands to produce the most effective and efficient advertising. Ultimately, every campaign is different and brands must focus on the performance indicators that are more relevant to their needs. Value can’t be found in viewability continuing to be the standard metric for measuring the quality of impressions.

Getting brand and performance right will automatically create value for brands, because they’ll be able confidently identify who their target customer is, and ensure these are the people that are being reached at the right time. This will help to encourage current customers to continue buying from the brand, while proving to new customers that the brand can add value to their lives.

Understanding the link between value, brand, and performance isn’t just about generating value for the brand, but also delivering value for the consumer, both in and out of difficult economic climates. Tying brand and performance to value will ensure that both consumers and advertisers benefit, even as the definition of value evolves. 

The post WTF is Value and Why Should Marketers Care? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

To stay ahead of the curve and meet customers’ ever-growing expectations, many brands are beginning to re-think how they measure the success of their campaigns by looking inwards at their own internal measurement frameworks.

However, there may be a cause for concern. According to a new report from McKinsey ‘Prediction: The Future of CX’, only 6% of leaders revealed they are actually confident that their current measurement system ‘enables both strategic and tactical decision-making’. 

In principle, it’s very simple. Without clear measurement of the correct metrics, you’re unable to see how far (or not) you’ve come. This can then risk falling short of the brand’s vision, as well as ultimately threatening the overall success of the business. However, when done correctly, measurement can be a powerful driver of change across an entire organisation. 

As part of our 2022 Customer Experience Imperatives, we explored how brands can create a more effective measurement framework, from focusing on what you can measure, to what you should measure. And, how this in turn, can make the world of difference for those brands competing for the top spot. 

The importance of a measurement framework

An effective measurement framework is not about reporting or dashboards. Instead, it provides a solid foundation for understanding what activities are meaningful to the business, and how teams should prioritise them. This then allows brands to easily identify the core focus areas for the business and ensures everyone within the organisation is working towards clearly defined goals that are tied to a common purpose.

Unifying a brand’s vision is not only important for both customers and employees, but it also breaks down business silos, rather than reinforcing them. If for example, one team is working towards a set of goals that differs from another team’s, employees may feel a lack of direction from higher management. This can also cause disjointed brand interactions for consumers and could be just the thing to drive a once loyal customer into the arms of a competitor. 

A clear measurement framework, however, enables brands to deliver more seamless, cohesive, and relevant experiences to their customers, and ensure employees stay on track by translating the CEO’s vision into concrete actions. 

A four-pronged approach

Ensuring that the core business objectives tie into a brand’s business purpose, is an important first step. Once the above is in place, brands will need to develop a framework that will effectively track whether activities and inputs are driving positive movement towards these objectives. There are four phases to that process: align, access, analyse and evolve.

1. Align

Measurement, like many other elements of business, changes and matures as time goes on. Even if an organisation’s strategic objectives set the course and direction the business wants to take, often its KPIs and measurements do not align with those objectives. 

The first step for brands is to create a unified strategy that aligns strategic objectives to measurable outcomes, and to the actions and decisions needed to drive results. Brands should then benchmark how the business is performing and understand what capabilities it has to deliver those measurements. 

2. Access

Successful measurement requires mature capabilities, application, and adoption. Therefore, brands should benchmark how and what they are measuring, as well as the capabilities needed to successfully define, develop, and utilise measurements. 

However, benchmarking is an ongoing process. It’s important for brands to revisit benchmarking to ensure they are seeing continuous improvements as this allows businesses to track progress against valuable comparison points in the market (for example, the competition, customer spend, or an adjacent industry’s products/services).  Finally, brands should assess capabilities to measure, build the measurements aligned to the business’ outcomes, as well as define the primary measurement KPIs that support the actions needed to run the business. 

3. Analyse

Once a brand’s measurement maturity is understood, it’s important to define KPIs and map them against the measurements that are already currently in place. At this stage, it’s valuable to note all potential data limitations that could hinder achieving your objectives, including details around people, processes, and technology. 

Here, it is important to identify where and how a brand needs to expand measurement to track its performance. As you define KPIs, they should be strategically linked, actionable, and goal orientated, otherwise it cannot be considered a metric for measurement. This can put the business at risk of investing time and resources into measuring data that does not hold value. 

4. Evolve

For long-term measurement success, this requires charting a course for change that evolves over time. Therefore, brands must continuously evaluate their business objectives to ensure everything still aligns and gauge the effectiveness of KPIs, to link actions to outcomes. Once outputs are determined, brands can then begin to prioritise recommendations to improve long-term measurement, with near-term wins.

Finally, it’s time to define the measurement roadmap with key workstreams, dependencies, milestones, and timelines. As well as defining the steps needed to address data, reporting, and underlying technology initiatives to bring the KPI framework to life. 

No two businesses are ever the same, so there’s no such thing as a one-size fits all measurement framework. Instead, the key is to identify short, medium, and long-term plans to develop a bespoke structure that fits around a brand’s individual and unique needs. 

We’re now living in a highly competitive and fast-changing world and keeping up and keeping ahead can be a constant challenge. By building an effective framework, measurement can be used as a very powerful catalyst for change and can improve the effectiveness of customer experiences in new and innovative ways today, and as a business evolves in the future.

The post Using Measurement as a Catalyst for Change appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Now it’s official. Those who missed out in July will have a second shot at savings, with the retailer adding two additional Prime Days on the 11th and 12th October. Amazon has said that the additional days are a chance for consumers to get ahead of their Christmas shopping. And it’s a smart move. One that is very reactive to changes in the market and consumer behaviour.

Early holiday shopping or “holiday creep” is a growing trend. Gartner found that nearly half (48%) of consumers will start to shop in October or November this year, with 16% now shopping year-round for holiday gifts. But it’s fair to argue there is more to shifts in shopping habits than early festive cheer.

Surging energy prices and food costs weigh heavily on the economy. The cost of living crisis is affecting everyone, and as Amazon’s President told Reuters, this “macroeconomic environment” consumers are facing is further rationale behind the second Amazon Prime Day.

From the brand perspective, serving up big discounts for Prime Day isn’t as easy as it sounds for several reasons, including declining profit margins and supply chain issues. A survey of brands for the July event found that 22% planned to discount less than last year. There is no doubt that the extent to which inflation pressures shoppers will be weighing on the minds of brands this October as well.

It’s a lot to contend with, retail brands and marketers will need to think outside the box to balance the bottom line. Especially considering the intense competition for the shrinking disposable income of the average consumer. There is no single prescription for planning how to approach the event. Still, depending on where their challenges fall, there is much to consider around margins and inventory when capitalising on Amazon Prime Day 2.

It’s all about the margins

The problem in 2021 was getting inventory into warehouses, but understandably, it’s all about the margins this year. While all brands should conduct an extensive study on product margins and pricing, those with tighter margins – due to either higher cost of raw materials or inflation – must know their pricing structure like the back of their hand.

Prime Day can feel like an opportunity to go in all guns blazing. However, a conservative approach to bargains offered is a much smarter option for brands with tighter margins. Discounting just one or a couple of products could be a way of minimising the margin squeeze.

Consumer choice is not a bad thing, but in the busiest sales periods, retailers mustn’t overwhelm their customers to the point of checkout paralysis. There’s no need to. Instead, focus on getting the right products in front of the right people. With this in mind, choosing which products to discount should be based on a data-driven approach. Analyse your historical sales – which products are the best sellers? Where do you have an inventory surplus?

Bring to life dead inventory

For some brands, lack of inventory is still very much not the problem due to a slowdown in E-commerce sales last year and the ongoing supply chain issues. While historically, sellers have viewed Prime Days as a sale to jump-start new products, for many, this will be a “clear the excess” type of sale. As such, this is a huge opportunity to take advantage of the ability to apply deeper discounts for the readily-engaged consumer. But, before deciding on a promotional strategy, brands must understand their stock levels across their portfolio. This is crucial because promoting such products might not stand out if other best-selling products are discounted.

The percentage discount is obviously pivotal in every Prime Day sale – consumers will not be incentivised to buy if the deal isn’t appealing enough. Amazon instructs a minimum discount of 20% off. This is why with those struggling with profit margins, pouring promotional efforts into one or two products, as mentioned, will be more effective than a full portfolio approach. Whereas in the case of inventory, brands will need to either be selective and only discount products with high inventory levels or have a more aggressive discount on those products.

How to tackle advertising spend to maximise Amazon’s potential

It might sound like a lot of homework. But a study on Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) for advertising campaigns and a set target to work towards on Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) will benefit all brands. For those with excess inventory, it would be wise to delve even deeper, expanding on analysis and having a target ROAS by-product depending on stock levels. This will enable advertisers to understand how aggressive they can be with their strategy, identifying different paths to maximise sales while still making sense compared to the cost of the product and/ or holding inventory.

Mastering margins and inventory, as well as your advertising investment in relation to each respective challenge, is absolutely worth it. Only those who understand how their business is affected by internal and external barriers will be able to remain efficient. But, the benefits for successful brands are vast – this October and further afield.

Prime Days, or indeed any event that offers a good bargain – are the perfect time to attract and engage new customers. But Amazon specifically provides a really good shot at future customer acquisition. For example, three out of four customers use Amazon to discover new products.

But for that to matter, planning must consider how to successfully entice those customers outside of these branded discount days and understand that while conversions happen on Amazon, they are driven by many media channels. An omnichannel approach that includes video and image content will maximise outcomes for Prime Day and beyond.

The post Amazon Prime Day 2: This Time, It’s Personal appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The initiative, which allows publishers to organise their audience composition in a standardised manner, does seem to bring back a level of control over the publisher’s business…

But how exactly do SDAs work, and are they going to emerge as one of the answers to how advertisers and publishers can evolve from the cookie-based system that currently underpins online advertising?

The post WTF Will Seller-Defined Audiences Do For Digital Advertising? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The problem of brand bidding or trademark bidding has been affecting the market for a long time – a couple of years ago an Adthena study showed that up to one third of all queries now experience brand bidding, driven in part, by 50% of advertisers who engage in competitive bidding on pure brand terms. Now brands have learned to fight it more effectively, but according to The Search Monitor 12% of your clicks are lost to competitors who advertise on your branded search keywords.

Brand Auditor, an ad fraud monitoring tool by Admitad, shares insights on the most harmful types of brand bidding, and ways to counteract them, based on its work with more than 2,500 brands.

What types of brand bidding can hurt your brand?

There are several main reasons ‌why someone uses your brand name or other branded keywords in their contextual advertising campaigns or on their websites. In recent years, Brand Auditor has been continually detecting, tracking and blocking harmful attempts in the following categories of brand bidding:

• Unauthorised brand usage. Your competitors know that people searching for your products are likely to buy their product too. This is an easy-to-do and successful way for them to capture the attention of the “hottest” audience – your own.
• Direct brand bidding. Unscrupulous or inattentive partners are interested in easy money. They, as well as your competitors, know that users who use the name of your brand or products in their search query are ready to make a purchase. It’s a simple way for others to get higher conversions at lower prices, at a cost to your brand. 
• Landing page brand bidding, including coupon aggregators and showcase websites. Partners use coupons or promo code pages to lure valuable traffic away from your resources and directly to theirs. 
• Unauthorised brand usage through CPA. CPA partners can also partake in unfair and fraudulent activities by using your brand keywords to siphon off already-interested buyers into their own affiliate programmes. 

Brand bidding ads often end up among the first links that Google shows to a user. Statistically, the first ad on a Google search results page has an 8% click-through rate. The first non-ad link has an even higher CTR – over 30%. 

If a user has specifically searched for your brand, it’s unlikely that they will pay attention to whether a result is an ad link or an organic link – they’ll click it anyway. 

Therefore, up to 30% of organic traffic searching for your brand or product risks either getting to your site through brand bidding (for which you’ll undeservedly pay a reward), or being channelled to a competitor’s store. 

Why is it crucial to monitor brand bidding?

The only way to effectively respond to and prevent brand bidding is to receive timely, real-time notifications that it’s happening. Therefore, monitoring services such as Brand Auditor have become an essential part of a business’s online marketing strategy. 

For Admitad, the issue of monitoring brand bidding and preserving high-quality traffic is an acute one. Brand Auditor, a tool that was developed for this exact purpose, has been carefully monitoring, filtering and blocking forbidden brand mentions in contextual campaigns and on websites – by both partners and competitors – for many years now. 

Due to an ever-growing demand for such services, by both Admitad customers and companies outside of our ecosystem, it was decided to launch a brand new, cutting-edge version of Brand Auditor.

Our new version of Brand Auditor will be released as a stand-alone product – available to Admitad advertisers as well as any brand around the world who wants to protect themselves from brand bidding.

This is a key point in our new offering. While other monitoring services are restricted by location, Brand Auditor is available universally – in every country, all around the world. 

Brand Auditor has shown that the approach of limiting brand bidding services to monitor only in countries that traditionally produced the bulk of contextual traffic – countries such as the US, UK, Germany, etc – is outdated.

Other regions like India and Brazil are rapidly increasing the volume of their contextual advertising, and their problems with brand bidding are no less acute. That is why our service now monitors globally, so as not to miss a single use of a branded keyword without the brand’s full knowledge.

How can you counteract brand bidding?

The threats ad fraud poses to your brand, business and income are very real. Over the years, Brand Auditor has sought out and blocked brand bidding violations for more than 2,500 advertisers globally. 

Intelligent brand bidding monitoring has enabled advertisers to filter out hundreds of thousands of orders, protecting their marketing budgets by stopping them from paying undeserved rewards. 

Also, by constantly monitoring competitors for any illegal or malicious activity, many brands working with Brand Auditor have been able to successfully launch their own branded contextual counter-campaigns, protecting their legitimate organic traffic from any encroachments.

Upon being alerted to suspected brand bidding, Brand Auditor offers several options for dealing with it, depending on its category type and circumstances:

• If there is a violation by a partner – the partner network will be alerted. If they find out the partner used your banned keywords intentionally, they will be removed from your affiliate programme. 
• If your branded words are used by a competitor – you can set up a counter ad campaign targeting them yourself, knocking them out of the competition. Usually, it costs you less to use your own keywords, so resistance will be short-lived. 
• If you have a registered trademark for your brand name and a competitor uses that word in the text or image of an ad – Brand Auditor will locate, track and document the content of the ad, enabling you to launch a formal complaint and take legal action against your competitor.

The monitoring, detecting and combating of brand bidding is a highly-nuanced field. For every brand or business, an individual approach is important. 

If you’d like expert advice on these issues, contact the Brand Auditor specialists at support@admitad.com or through request form on Brand Auditor product page. Their experts will be happy to provide you with all the information and expertise you need.

The post The Very Real Dangers of Brand Bidding and How Brands Can Fight It appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Here’s Neve Fear-Smith with how brands can make conscientious decisions when forging partnerships in these turbulent times…

The post How to, and How Not to Approach Brand Partnerships in the Recession appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Let’s start checking off that daunting to-do list so you can enjoy a successful, stress-free holiday shopping season – and don’t forget to check the list twice, although we’re sure you’ve been less naughty and more nice! 

Review Seasonal Historical Data and Update Creatives

Analyse your Q4 KPIs from the past few years, such as impressions, reach, revenue, click-through rate, average order value, conversions, and return on ad spend. Which publishers, channels, and promotions worked well for reaching holiday shoppers, and which didn’t? This data is extremely beneficial when revamping prior years’ seasonal campaigns, planning incremental campaigns for new business and product lines, and determining in which channels to invest your holiday advertising budgets. 

Perhaps in prior years, you focused only on one end of the funnel or the other, and now it’s time to diversify. Based on the data, you may decide to focus solely on upper-funnel content publishers or invest in a full-funnel omnichannel approach to scale order volume. Either way, it would be wise to partner with an affiliate management agency with industry experience and deep connections to publishers across a multitude of digital channels.

When optimising your holiday paid media creative, make sure you provide a variety of assets to publishers to make it as easy as possible to promote your products, including: 

• High-quality lifestyle and product photos
• Various approved CTAs
• Banner ads in commonly needed sizes
• Text links
• Promo codes
• Seasonal landing pages

Learn the inside scoop into how proactive planning and data-driven insights allowed QuietKat to achieve a 430% increase in revenue during peak holiday seasonality with Perform^[cb] Agency.

Recruit, Test, and Optimise with Top Publishers

Don’t wait to reach out to top partners, like influencers, bloggers, and industry publications – secure the best content placements now. Publishers are eager to map out their content calendars and test placements months in advance, so brands can greatly benefit from communicating promotional plans promptly – not to mention avoiding outrageous last-minute fees.

To entice publishers during the recruitment process, brands could test running competitive commission rates, as well as unique discount codes for banner ad placements in category pages, holiday promotion pages, email, SMS marketing, push ads, and more. Working with an agency or network partner with proven experience and existing relationships within your vertical can help immensely ahead of Q4, from both a cost-savings and publisher recruitment perspective.

Do you have additional budget and are looking for areas of publisher optimisation? Try testing promotions around top Q4 shopping holidays, beyond just Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Check out Perform^[cb]’s list of the top-performing 2022 shopping holidays.

Build a Full-Funnel Approach

Many brands get lost in shiny upper-funnel partnerships when it comes to holiday campaigns, such as influencers and listicles. While 40% of revenue in the affiliate channel is driven through content, seasoned marketers know that the real ROI lies within a full-funnel approach. Let’s touch on a few examples you should incorporate throughout the funnel in your Q4 campaigns:

During the season of increased traffic and competition, and with holiday sales projected to grow 16% this year, you must incorporate unique advertising tactics throughout each stage of the funnel. Publishers are always on the hunt for additional ways to maximise profitability, especially during the Q4 shopping season. From gift guide inclusions to newsletter placements, and all the promos in between, marketers shouldn’t shy away from testing and optimising their advertising efforts throughout the funnel to entice holiday shoppers.

Get Ahead or Get Left Behind

Don’t get left behind this holiday season. By analysing historical performance, planning around top-performing Q4 shopping dates, optimising new and existing partnerships, and proactively securing the best media placements for your brand, the gift of holiday ROI will not be far behind! Set yourself up for success during the busiest time of the year with Perform^[cb]’s Guide to Q4 Seasonal Planning & Profitability.

Whether you currently work with an agency or are looking to layer some affiliate management muscle onto your in-house team, we know that Q4 is also the time of year when marketers start thinking about RFPs. Our agency team would love the opportunity to chat about your programme and goals. Request a no-strings meeting with us to find out more about our cutting-edge delivery model that has our clients raving!

The post Get Ahead or Get Left Behind: Expert Tips for Securing Seasonal Placement Success appeared first on PerformanceIN.

With key insight from Acceleration Partners, Awin, and Vyde, here’s a Fresh Look at the Funnel.

The post Deep Dive: A Fresh Look at the Funnel appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Earlier this summer, Remi Lémonnier, Co-Founder and President of Scibids coined a new term, ‘Virtuous Advertising’, to describe the future that marketers should be moving towards. But what is it? And why does Artificial Intelligence (AI) play a big role in making Virtuous Advertising the new norm? 

Virtuous Advertising acknowledges that marketing organisations are under increasing pressure due to the heightened economic, environmental and regulatory pressures surrounding digital marketing. At the heart of the concept of Virtuous Advertising is respecting resources, i.e. being efficient so that we only use resources that we absolutely need. 

In a digital marketing context, this means removing as much ‘wastage’ from ad campaigns as possible, and the best way to do this is by not serving digital ads to people who are unlikely to convert. AI is conducive to Virtuous Advertising, as it is constantly adapting to avoid irrelevant targets, and reallocating budgets in real time to achieve waste-free campaigns. 

Opening the door to AI

According to the latest research, which consulted contemporary brand marketers, many have doubts over whether their marketing stacks are delivering adequate scale and performance. Alongside this major challenge, today’s decision makers are dealing with an array of external issues, including increased privacy regulation, a shortage of human expertise, the environmental impacts of digital marketing, a fragmented technology landscape, and a volatile macro-economic climate. 

How is it possible to reflect these multiple considerations in your marketing tech stack, while still generating business growth and strong ROI for advertisers? Well-engineered AI, designed to tackle the mounting challenges facing digital marketing, provides a way forward. 

One consideration here is the type of AI used: an off-the-shelf algorithm for ad decisioning provides standard lift for all its users. By contrast, advanced, sophisticated AI provides customisable algorithms that can optimise to differentiated outcomes whilst leveraging and growing proprietary data sets. When advertisers use their proprietary data for advanced optimisation, they are building a competitive advantage that is unique to their campaigns. 

How is AI being used today?

Currently, in the UK, it’s estimated that around 40% of programmatic ad spend uses algorithmic decisioning or artificial intelligence. Agencies are generally using algorithmic/AI systems more than brands and, interestingly, agencies and brands are often deploying AI for different reasons. Revenue gains are the driving factor in agency use of AI, while brands are more motivated by the prospect of privacy-compliant targeting.

Overall, operational efficiencies, convenience, and revenue gains are the most commonly cited factors driving the use of algorithmic decisioning and/or AI in digital marketing, while scale and campaign optimisation are less prominent factors. ‘Complexity’ is often given as the leading barrier to further use of AI-enabled tools. 

When considering the use of AI inside your own organisation, it’s crucial to consider the extent to which automation allows your traders to be effective. AI designed to compute optimal media prices with all available data will outpace and outperform human guesswork. This increases the quality of insights that professionals can leverage, providing clear paths to scaling efficiencies across more media opportunities. When people are equipped with the right tools for a job, they can do their job more effectively, rather than feeling outsmarted by the tech they are using. 

AI in context 

In today’s privacy-focused climate, marketers can no longer rely on cross-site tracking and personal identifiers for ad decisioning. Promisingly, though, where results from contextual signals are available, UK marketing professionals are reporting that these are performing just as well as traditional identifiers. 

Despite these encouraging results, a minority of brand marketers are currently using all the contextual signals present in the bid request (log level data), which is one of the most scalable and privacy-preserving signals on the web today. Through the smart use of AI, this freely available log level data can be made actionable to enable privacy-friendly media buying practices. 

While there are many commercial metrics advertisers need to focus on, marketers must prioritise insights available from data sets such as sales data and warehouse stock level data. A good piece of advice is to focus on these data sets, and then partner with a company that can ingest that data and produce performance metrics that can be codified into the AI to optimise media buying.

Advertisers that lack advanced data science and engineering capabilities should plan to leverage AI to bring business metrics into the buying process. For more advanced buyers, AI can be used to tailor media buying strategies for specific business outcomes.

When a whole industry cites scarcity of expertise as their main challenge, every manager should give their team the tools they need to ensure that their work is meaningful, insightful and responsible. AI is not intended to automate most of what industry experts do. Instead, it is a vital and incredibly powerful tool that can help us build a responsible, ‘virtuous’ future for the digital marketing industry. 

The post Unlocking ‘Virtuous Advertising’ with AI appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The different publisher types can interact with consumers at different times. This means that brands need to be strategic and reach target and halo consumers through utilisation of all of them.

Advertisers have very different properties within themselves, whether they’re selling a product or a service, are new or established, small or large, or selling expensive versus cheap/commodity based items – all of these factors change where they’re targeting and getting consumers from.

In order to grow your programme in the most holistic, profitable way, you need to…

Map the consumer journey

When marking out your consumer roadmap, you need to make sure you know who you want to reach at different points of the journey. These days, consumers are spending a lot more time researching before making a purchase. This means it is key to be able to have a holistic programme makeup.

Advertisers tend to determine promotional types that they will work with based on programme KPIs and what their boss wants, whether it be high AOV, revenue etc.

The most important thing for brands to keep in mind is the fact that leaving out certain publisher types simply because you think they may not assist you in achieving your KPIs leaves holes in your consumer journey that should definitely be filled.

Using various publisher types can grab secondary consumer journeys

Brands often make the mistake of approaching an agency or network with a hitlist and don’t want to work with certain affiliates. For example, they may have ‘heard’ coupons are ‘bad’. Now is a good time to set this straight; just because there has been a tidal wave of coupon affiliates, they get a bad reputation. But you simply can’t throw these out – this huge influx of these publishers does not mean that there isn’t value to be had here.

Coupons are required across almost all affiliate types and can enhance promotion. Consumers want these things! They ultimately want to save money, so will find other ways of doing this and if you don’t offer coupons, discount codes or cashback, they will go and find a product somewhere else.

“Consumers are more loyal to their wallet than your brand…”

Considering the sales funnel, and thinking about the different sections of the consumer journey, every advertiser can expect to get their primary flow of consumers from one of these.

In a recent panel discussion at the Performance Marketing Association Virtual Conference, moderator Choots Humphrey posed this question to panellists Anne Mies of Simpl-eCommerce and Sarah Beeskow Blay of Silverbean… “Would you guys say it’s uncommon for a consumer to not touch different promotional types between the start of the purchase journey to the end? Or does it happen more than people think?”

Anne said this definitely happens more than people think and also completely depends on the product. For example, with a product you would purchase often and repeatedly, such as cleaning products, this is going to be different to a more expensive, high consideration product, which, when looking to purchase, a buyer will touch different points, meaning multiple affiliates will be involved in different parts of the sales funnel.

Sarah said: “As a consumer you always have your antennas up and you are constantly learning about different products. So, regardless of the product you’re selling, it’s key to think that consumers are going to be present at different bases, all of which you need to cover.”

Commission

It’s also important not to have a one size fits all commission structure. The panellists mentioned that it is a good idea to base your commission on the investment of the publisher. For example, a lot more effort goes into writing a blog post or review than it does to list a coupon code online. Different amounts of resources need to be rewarded accordingly.

“The natural way for an advertiser to incentivise is to differentiate between how they reward publishers.”

When asked for her final thought on what brands simply MUST consider, Anne said: “What I love about this channel is it’s really easy to test and learn. If you don’t like what you’re getting you turn it off, if you like it you do it more.

“It’s an incredibly low risk channel if you pay attention to what’s going on, and it’s a really fun and creative way to reach consumers”

One thing Sarah wanted to bring up that’s important for brands to remember is that, post-pandemic, one of the major shifts is consumer expectation on experience.

“Another key part of the consumer journey is the various tech publishers that are often ignored. When working with networks and agencies, make sure to ask them which tech can change user experience and improve trust, and they will be able to recommend new partners to close conversions.”

It’s important to not only set your affiliate programme up based on which publisher types you’ll work with based on KPIs. You never know how your consumers will join you; make sure there are no holes in your journey, and set up your programme for success.

Thanks again to the panel members and the PMA for this fruitful discussion. Make sure to check out the replay section of the site if you missed out on any of the sessions at the virtual conference!

The post Brands, This is Why You Need to Utilise All Publisher Types: Insight from the PMA Virtual Conference 2022 appeared first on PerformanceIN.