Matthew Wood, Founder of the awards, gives advice: “The vibrancy and atmosphere at this year’s awards were one of the best I’ve seen – the incredible teamwork mostly during the pandemic was rightfully celebrated and rewarded. For next year, we have refined many of the categories and added new ones to the mix. The entry deadline is fast approaching so now is the time to get heads together, speak to your team and clients and put your best foot forward!”

Celebrate at Grosvenor House

We’ll be gathering once again at the glorious Grosvenor House venue for an elating evening of networking, dinner, and awards. You can look forward to being back surrounded by your peers, celebrating all the hard work and efforts that have gone into making this channel so effective and durable.

Study the entry kit for steps-to-enter, judge’s advice, mistakes-to-avoid and more.

Save the Dates!

• Earlybird Entry Deadline – 25/01/2023
• Regular Entry Deadline – 01/02/2023
• Last Chance Entry Deadline – 15/02/2023
• Shortlist Announced – 06/04/2023
• The Awards – 11/05/2023

For full details of the entry criteria, categories and deadlines download the entry kit.

The post Performance Marketing Awards 2023: Entry Kit Ready For The Performance Industry’s Oscars appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Resilience will obviously remain vital amid the latest swell of challenges. The ‘are we or aren’t we?’ questions around economic recession continue, alongside downsized spend estimates that could see teams struggling to drive greater results with even fewer resources. More than just continued hardiness, however, what marketers need are smarter ways of managing change and, ideally, getting ahead of it. 

To be specific, they must work on building better systems for identifying early warning signs of sliding effectiveness, in addition to emerging opportunities, instead of simply scrambling to respond after the fact. And an essential element of doing so is embracing valuable yet often overlooked elements of proactive analytics, especially anomaly detection.

Ghosts in the machine

Even in the current age of technology-powered marketing, anomaly detection might sound more like a sci-fi invention than an everyday tool. Not as complex as it seems, the process is about uncovering patterns in data outside the norm, using artificial intelligence (AI). 

The basics tend to involve setting machine learning algorithms to assess given datasets and 

spotlight outliers that don’t tally with what they expect to find. Trained on huge stores of data about past performance and consumer behaviour, algorithms run comparisons by harnessing knowledge of what counts as typical for particular types of audience segment, campaign, seasonal offers and more. With semi, fully or unsupervised options for analysis, marketers can leave labour-intensive evaluation to machines if they choose, or apply closer levels of control.

Great, so what does that mean?

For marketers, the ultimate outcome of smart analytics is simple. When any unusual patterns are detected, they receive instant warning signals or alerts. As assessment is often focused on monitoring pre-defined metrics, this means they get immediate insight into specific areas of inconsistent performance. For example, analysis may show a product explainer video that has enjoyed high viewing completion for months is now losing audiences mid-way, or highlight sudden spikes in click through rates (CTRs) for recently released display ads.

How does it benefit marketers?

In the days marketers only had a handful of campaigns to juggle, manually monitoring for abnormal data points was feasible, although not always precise. Vast expansion in the scope of modern communications has produced data that’s increasingly difficult to organise, let alone scrutinise for discrepancies. In fact, our research reveals most CMOs (99%) are using at least 10 data sources, compared to six or fewer just three years ago, while six in ten (67%) unsurprisingly admit to feeling overwhelmed by growing volumes of available data.

Where mistakes caused by human error were already a risk, it’s becoming much more likely that marketers drowning in data will miss crucial insights: stopping them from swiftly moving with developing changes and potentially leading to unchecked performance issues.

Outlier detection tools can go some way to help reduce overlooked discrepancies and speed up insight activation. With the ability to rapidly assess large-scale marketing data — including information about cross-channel spend, delivery, and interaction — analytical engines stand a better chance of accurately capturing all possible anomalies, enabling marketers to take swift, informed action. For instance, on top of directing budget away from ineffective efforts to limit wastage, they can identify which activities are over-performing and decide where adjustments should be made to improve both in-flight ROI and future outcomes.

It’s also worth noting that unusual events can indicate the beginning of bigger shifts. Keeping an eye on anomalies once detected will allow marketers to see whether certain patterns grow into fully-fledged trends; meaning they can observe, and respond to, the unfolding effects of external factors such as consumer living costs and market flections, as they happen.

What does adoption involve?

As with any form of analytics, there are crucial ingredients for effective use beyond the evaluation tech itself. Before adopting solutions with real-time detection abilities, users first need to ensure there is a solid foundation of unified, precise, and usable data to work from. 

Almost every marketer will be familiar with the data processing mantra of “garbage in, equals garbage out”, especially in terms of AI solutions. Whatever their assessment sophistication, intelligent analytics are only as reliable as the data feeding them. If data is flawed and fragmented, it’s highly probable that choices guided by the insights they produce will fail to hit the intended mark, or worse, result in negative impacts for brands. 

While the work needed to fine-tune data fundamentals will clearly depend on individual needs and circumstances, marketers can make a start by checking whether systems meet a basic list of criteria. Data stores need to be comprehensive collections of all relevant sources, accurate, and up to date. Analysis will also be a lot smoother, and reliable, when inflowing information is automatically integrated, cleansed, synced, and merged, ready for evaluation. 

Not only can anomaly detection assist with identifying any patterns but it can also provide critical intelligence to maximise performance, which can be replicated in future campaigns. Anomaly detection also tends to work better when companies already have a higher level of data maturity, including use of machine learning (ML) that helps them pinpoint where to focus detection analysis. For example, data mature companies know what KPIs are relevant for their business, how to track them and what KPIs are relevant for which dimension. The AI and ML algorithms can then help classify and analyse these two parameters, indicating how significant an outlier would be for this combination. For instance, a small outlier for an important KPI in the most important market should ring the alarm bells more than a huge outlier on a vanity metric.

Despite acute awareness that their remit has become more complicated, many marketers are hastily reacting to each new curve ball, instead of rolling with and turning fresh developments to their advantage. By providing immediate indicators of deviations from the norm, anomaly detection can enable marketers to see change coming and make proactive decisions about where, how, and when their approach should be adapted for better results. All of which means anomaly detection is a key agility asset for the modern analytical toolkit.

The post WTF is Anomaly Detection? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

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.

How does it work?

Online images are usually uploaded directly to a site in a traditional format such as JPEG, PNG, or GIF. With image streaming, images are uploaded to a secure, password-protected central server, which generates a specific embed code that is then pasted into a webpage editor, such as WordPress or Weebly. These embedded images are then displayed on a webpage, similar to the way a normal uploaded image would. The difference is, this method incorporates a number of additional security features, powerful metadata, and interactive controls, which together provide image owners, publishers, and advertisers with a unique opportunity to enhance both security and end-user experience.

Security: Studies have shown that more than 2.5 billion images are stolen daily, fueled by the way images are published today on various social platforms and websites. While sharing culture provides unprecedented global reach and connection, it also comes with a variety of hidden costs, robbing image creators of fair compensation and increasing the risk of altered imagery spreading misinformation and disinformation online. Images are copied, downloaded, and redistributed without consent or awareness of the original source. Image streaming can improve this system: right-click, screenshot, and drag-and-drop actions are all disabled, instead displaying copyright notices that direct the user to a trackable embed code. Not only does this protection prevent unauthorised copies being made, but with each image being streamed from a single file on a secure server, creators and publishers have the ability to see and control where their content appears across the web.

Context: When uploading an image to the central server, image owners can attach uneditable metadata – captions, details of image content, and attribution – that stays with it wherever it’s displayed. An additional layer of control is provided via a list of the URLs and domains that host the image, giving the owner an opportunity to deactivate the image from view on a particular site at any time. Once an image has been published, it is also possible to gather analytics data, which gives publishers and image owners unprecedented insights into how the content is viewed, shared, and enjoyed. Performance can be measured through the number of views, clicks, and shares an image receives and it is even possible to see where shares and theft attempts take place.

Interactive controls: The end-user benefits too. While publishers and website owners often upload images in the lowest resolution possible to keep buffering times down, streamed images keep sites light even when extremely high resolutions are used as they are not permanently uploaded to the page. They also adapt to individual user display resolutions and make it possible for audiences to view pictures in full-screen mode or zoom into the finest details. This makes image viewing more interactive and boosts engagement.

Furthermore, the publisher can choose which features to embed: if a sharing option is included, this ensures the image is circulated consensually.

Why does it matter?

These features benefit the whole industry and introduce fairness, transparency, and equality into the supply chain. Here’s how:

Advertisers: Image streaming is a sure-fire way to guarantee high-quality contextual coverage and high-visibility placement. By using streaming technology, advertisers can activate in-image advertising, whereby an ad is shared within the space that an image is already displayed – often the focal point of a piece – sliding into the frame while a consumer is looking at it.

A combination of AI and metadata ensures the ads are targeted in contextually relevant environments, based on the exact origin and context of the image. For example, a picture of a football team could switch to an advertised football jersey for that team and back again in an article on the latest Premier League developments. Considering the uncertainty of third-party cookies and their future alternative, plus the ever-looming concern of ads being placed alongside unsuitable content, in-image advertising provides a crucial solution to delivering relevant content that is also brand safe, while respecting user privacy.

Publishers: Publishers, from bloggers and news outlets to image libraries, can reap the benefits of streaming images, including increased advertising revenue and the ability to offer a more engaging and effective user experience. In addition to this, since image owners are able to monetise their images through advertising, many will consider providing them to publishers for free, addressing a significant cost of more traditional licensing models.

Image/content owners: When it comes to the contemporary media landscape, it’s often image owners who come out the worst. Their work is redistributed without consent, copyright notice, or adequate compensation. Not only does image streaming allow image creators – from photographers to graphic artists – to keep track of their work with guaranteed accreditation, but it also ensures high visual quality whichever device it’s on, while empowering them to embrace a new stream of revenue through in-image advertising.

Going forwards

Image streaming is a revolutionary technology that not only supports a more transparent and equal media ecosystem, but also offers new models of monetisation. Instead of spending considerable time and resources trying to trace stolen images, streaming images can prevent their theft, which is currently all too easy to accomplish. All streamed images are protected and tracked, which helps brands, publishers, and image owners know how, where, and when audiences interact with their content. It also offers a much-needed opportunity for truly contextually relevant, brand-safe placements for advertisers. In short, image streaming creates opportunities at every stage of the media and image supply chain – a win-win situation for image owners, advertisers, and publishers.

The post WTF is Image Streaming? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The session will be hosted by the programme’s co-founder, Tina Judic, alongside a panel of judges, featuring Stevie Johnson, managing director at Disrupt, and Simon Hofmeister, Industry Head eCom at TikTok. They will be judging the four finalists of this year’s Digital Disruptors, all of whom are around 15 years old, who will be pitching their ideas for a brand new network or app. The winner will be crowned the McShane Young Digital Disruptor of the year.

So, why should you care about Digital Disruptors, and why should the final feature on your agenda? This week, I spoke to Tina Judic to found out more about this inspiring initiative, and how it’s shaping the future of our industry.

What is Digital Disruptors?

Digital Disruptors is a programme that’s on a mission to encourage young people to investigate digital marketing, the options it can provide as a career choice, and to think dynamically about the opportunities it can bring to our everyday lives.

It’s all about young people harnessing their amazing array of creativity and innovation and letting them loose with it, while working with some of the smartest individuals and businesses.

It was set up in the memory of Nicky McShane, one of the UK’s most exuberant and progessive digital marketers. She was always keen on supporting the underdog, so it felt like a really beautiful thing we could bring together.

We asked: How can we champion digital, whilst supporting younger people coming up, and see what their potential is in the space? And thanks to our partnership with The Hebe Foundation – a charity that helps young people discover and use their talents – Digital Disruptors was born.

Who should get involved, and why?

Everybody! Everybody should get involved. To any young person who wants to get involved, we’re here for you. We’re very keen for you to apply to join the programme. There’s a real potential to grow. The bigger we can make it, the better.

We would love more businesses to get involved. Whether it be a donation of funds, prizes, or time – all is appreciated.

Once young people are working on their responses, it’s great to have mentors. What we’ve seen with mentors over the years is they get quite competitive! (Laughs) And they’re working really closely with the young people to deliver the best they can possibly deliver.

What are some of your proudest achievements with Digital Disruptors?

First and foremost, it’s the enthusiasm of the young people who participate in the programme. They choose to do this in their summer holidays; they’re coming together after school to work on their response to brief. They want to be the best they can be.

When I get email after email: “What do you think of this, Tina?”, “Can I do this?”, “Can we run through our presentation with you?” Just showing that they care is utterly fantastic.

On top of that, I’ll never forget the first year we took them to PI LIVE. As an aside, big shout out to PI LIVE, which has supported us from the very first year. It’s so phenomenal that Matt and the team do this.

But, the mainstage – it’s quite a daunting thing. I think it’s quite a daunting place to go for any polished practitioner, let alone a 15 year old. It’s fascinating because you see some of them kind of go, “Oh my god!” (Recoils in terror) And then others are going, “Bring it on! This is where I was meant to be.” It’s just so wonderful to see.

Beyond that, I think we’re now starting to get into a few success story potentials. So, one of our first Disruptors, an amazing human being, is now at university. She came along to the Digital Disruptors programme this year as a youth support worker. She just volunteered her time.

I said, “Oh hello, Simbie! What are you doing here?”

“Yeah, well, I’m at university and I chose to do marketing because of Digital Disruptors. And by the way, I really want to have a conversation with you about work experience and getting a job when I’m done.”

I thought, ‘Brilliant’. She’s got ambition, drive, the knowhow; everything about her was so good. I told her to let me know when she’s done and we’ll have a talk.

It’s inspiring because there’s a whole 360 journey, from not really thinking about digital, to studying it at university, to speaking with me about working in the field.

Another chap, Francis, came to Digital Disruptors a couple of years ago. He’s now in college, just 16, and he’s set up a little side hustle as a design agency. We’re now speaking to him about getting some work experience with us and paying him to do some design work for the business. So again, we’re starting to see some of these young people now coming through and that makes it all the more rewarding.

The proudest achievement is being in a position where you’re inspiring young people and seeing their potential. At the moment, we’re living in a society that can often stunt creativity. Digital Disruptors enables young people to imagine, dream, create. It lets them put their unique stamp on things, on what matters to them. So, to give them that moment is amazing.

Even if they just take away something for their CV, or the confidence to express themselves, or the confidence to go on stage – and they can think back, “Wow, I did that at 15 years old!” – then that’s got to be a resounding success in its own right.

What can we expect from this year’s Digital Disruptors finals?

This year, we challenged them to create a new social media app/network. The brief was: ‘something that means something to you’. Everything is open, we don’t want to dictate anything. What we do want to know is how strong your idea is, who your audience is; what’s the validation of your idea, what research you have done, how are you going to promote it; give us an example of what might feature on it.

Four teams are going through to the final, so I’ll give a sense of what they’ll be presenting. We’ve got one team presenting a professional network, which is designed to minimise the gender gap. There’s a network that’s all about educating and developing young people’s skills. There’s a fashion platform, focused on helping people overcome their fears of purchasing online, providing a judgement free space for users. And the final one is a co-moderated network, all about helping young people be who they are in a very safe, entertaining environment.

They’ve only got six minutes each to bring these ideas to life, but when you hear them speaking about it – you hear the ideas, see the videos they put together – it’s just so inspiring because you’re seeing what is bothering them on a day to day basis, the things that they think are important. We should engage much more with the younger generation.

What are your plans for the future of Digital Disruptors?

Ultimately, we want to do more with it. We need sponsorships and support. There’s costs putting it together, bringing in the youth workers to support it, sorting travel for young people; we’re always looking for any financial support we possibly can.

We’re always super grateful for clients offering prizes. It would be great if companies could open up their offices and give us time; we want to expand further and take them on a tour of what they could achieve. I’m really delighted that this year the winning team will get to do a tour of TikTok – which I think they might like! The future is encouraging more to get involved with the initiative. The further we can take it, the better.

The post Digital Disruptors Should Be On Your Radar 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 past five years have been a strange and unsettling period for marketing. There’s been hyperinflation in some of the biggest marketing channels; martech stacks piled so high they’re close to toppling; the death of third-party data; the pandemic. Now the recession has pushed marketing to a pivotal point. The status quo isn’t working. To survive in the times ahead, businesses must now rethink their approach and adapt.

That starts with turning to your most valuable (and often overlooked) asset: your customers.

Turn customers into brand advocates

In the current economic climate, your customers represent the greatest source of untapped growth potential. 

Consumers trust referrals from friends or relatives more than any advertising. They’re much more likely to listen to – and act on – the glowing recommendation of a friend, than that of an influencer or targeted search ad. 

If you’ve built a great brand that offers quality products and service, there’s a good chance customers are already talking about you.  Effectively engaging with these brand fans will create a powerful community of advocates who market your business better than you ever could. 

As well as increasing the quantity of your customers, this word-of-mouth marketing will also enhance their quality. Compared to the average customer, referred customers have double the lifetime value and are 5x more likely to refer onwards – creating a powerful cycle of sustainable growth.

Putting customers at the heart of your growth strategy isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s imperative to the long-term success of your business. Referral can fundamentally transform the economics of your business. It offers lower acquisition costs alongside high lifetime value customers, driving organic growth directly from your core. 

That’s the holy grail of marketing – and the reason that thought leaders, including the creator of NPS Fred Reichheld, are now talking about how driving referrals and thinking advocacy-first is the secret to future-proofing growth. 

A sustainable competitive advantage

As well as a high-performing acquisition channel in its own right, referral generates uniquely rich first-party data that gives you a sustainable competitive advantage. 

Referral data tells you who your best customers are today. That’s not your biggest spenders. It’s your brand advocates – those customers actively introducing high-quality new customers to your business. 

With this data, you can optimise performance across your marketing channels. Social media is a compelling example of this. Despite being one of the modern marketer’s most invested in channels, the death of third-party cookies has seen this channel deliver fluctuating returns that can be near-impossible to predict. 

With first-party referral data, however, brands can target referrer lookalike audiences that are highly likely to convert and have high lifetime value – scaling their businesses whilst reducing their CPAs. Menswear trouser SPOKE is one example of a brand using this to great effect. By using referral data to build audiences on paid social, it’s driving 30% higher ROAS and 12% lower CPA.

You can even start to segment customers based on how likely they are to refer, and target them accordingly. By encouraging customers with a high propensity to refer to share the brand with friends, Moss Bros increased share rates in this segment by 6x. And by offering low propensity customers a discount on next order instead, it increased repeat purchase rates by 23%.

Become a winning business

In the tough times ahead, marketing teams cannot simply plough on with the same strategies and hope to survive. Maximising value from all your assets and channels is now mission critical. Referrals help you make this ambition a reality.

In the words of Fred Reichheld, referrals aren’t the icing on the cake; they’re an essential ingredient for sustainable growth. Harness referral and advocacy for your business, and you’ll optimise marketing performance, beat your competitors and win in the recession. All while earning trust that keeps customers coming back and bringing their friends, long after this challenging period is behind us.

The post How to Future-Proof Growth Through Customer Advocacy – in a Recession and Beyond appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The last several years have posed extremely challenging circumstances for everyone. Consumers and businesses have faced a series of unforeseen curveballs ranging from a global pandemic, lockdown regulations, supply chain issues, a regional war and accompanying sanctions, not to mention a cost-of-living crisis at a time of extreme inflation. 

With so many uncontrollable macro factors at play, the success of a business right now is largely down to its ability to adapt to these turbulent times. Change doesn’t have to be scary though. For the most agile companies, from giant corporations to rising entrepreneurs, these shifting sands have been an opportunity to grow at the expense of their slower moving competitors. 

And with the affiliate channel witnessing an explosion in partner types over the course of the last couple of years, covering every conceivable online media touchpoint, advertisers can use the channel in a highly adaptive manner. Today’s affiliate industry represents a galaxy of marketing options that can hit any range of KPIs, from brand awareness to new customer acquisition.

Combined with its heritage as a low-risk ad model where spend is tied to tangible outcomes like sales and revenue, and where the ROI returns are consistently high, it’s easy to see why advertisers have turned to affiliate partnerships in these difficult circumstances.

But to make the most of this new choice of options, a proactive and experimental approach is required. Advertisers that actively diversify their publisher base in the current climate are the most likely to see incremental growth. Those that are complacent, and who rely on just a small, unvaried programme of partners for growth are unlikely to see it in the long term, and risk becoming over-reliant on them.

Don’t just take our word for it though. We grouped a selection of current Awin advertisers into two distinct categories that aligned with these two approaches to illustrate the distinct difference in outcomes.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

Awin works with thousands of brands, of many sizes, across every sector. Taking a sample group of large brands with defined strategies, we analysed two approaches to managing an affiliate programme. 

Group 1 – Armchair Advertisers: The first group of brands has a very passive marketing approach, focused on a couple of core partner types, and running a traditional programme strategy without room or budget for testing or trying more varied partnerships.

Group 2 – Adventure Advertisers: The second group of brands strive for a diverse programme mix, with set budgets available for adapting to market changes, and regularly welcome new partner types on board to support this strategy. 

Diversity of partners fuels increases in traffic 

When comparing both groups year-on-year Armchair Advertisers saw a 6% decrease in traffic mostly impacted by traffic drops from core publisher types, including discount (-8%), loyalty (-9%) and cashback (-29%). 

Adventure Advertisers however, benefited from audience diversity through their varied partner mix and saw traffic increase 29% for the same period. This growth was driven by a variety of the less conventional partners welcomed to the affiliate channel in more recent years, including SEM affiliates seeing 162% traffic growth on the previous year and CSS partners up 76%. 

A diverse affiliate partner mix drives sales performance too

Traffic increases don’t necessarily equate to valuable business growth though. However, looking at sales performance year-on-year presents a similar picture. Armchair Advertiser programmes saw a credible 16% increase in sales, but Adventure Advertisers still exceeded this seeing an impressive 33% sales increase. Again, a mix of newer affiliate types were responsible for this significant sales growth. SEM partners were up +217%, influencers +73% and CSS partners +58% YoY.

Diversity of partners mitigates AOV impact from one partner type 

Increase in average order spend is another common KPI for an effective affiliate programme. Armchair Advertisers witnessed a 2% growth in AOV over the last 12 months, whereas Adventure Advertisers saw a 9% increase in AOV through the different partner types that they could leverage. 

Delving deeper into this disparity, we tracked a significant 12% drop in AOV from just one partner type which impacted growth for Armchair Advertisers who were reliant on this type of affiliate for driving almost half of their sales performance. Despite working with the same partner type themselves, Adventure Advertisers were insulated from this sudden decline thanks to the range of other partner types they worked with. 

Conversion Rate still strong at 4.76% 

Sharp-eyed readers will note the one metric Armchair Advertisers won out by in comparison to Adventure Advertisers was on conversion rates. This is not totally unexpected though. Traffic volumes, as we’ve already established, were significantly higher for the latter group. The diverse nature of their programmes means their programmes influence customer journeys across a much wider segment of the marketing funnel, further from the traditional conversion spaces which last-click attribution metrics focus on.

While this means their average conversion rates were lower (though a close-to-5% conversion rate is still strong), it also means that their partners are likely reaching customers at much earlier phases in their shopping journey. These are by no means wasted interactions. Instead, they can help drive vital brand awareness goals for Adventure Advertisers, keeping their brand in mind when that shopper does eventually decide to buy.   

“If life were predictable it would cease to be life and be without flavour.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

So, we’ve outlined the benefits of building a more diverse affiliate programme across a variety of important business goals. But who are these emerging partnership types helping our Adventure Advertisers?  

Influencers 

Influencer marketing is becoming an integral part of brand affiliate marketing strategy. We are increasingly seeing separate budget pots, KPIs, and success measures for them. In fact, over the past two years we have seen content creators and influencers go from driving 5% to 8% of all network traffic. The number of influencers actively driving sales has also increased 8% over this time period, with 112,095 sales-driving influencers live on the Awin platform in 2022. 

Feel Unique partnered with Sellers Alley via Awin to diversify its existing influencer activity outside of established social platforms to hit a new audience on TikTok. Using a test budget and focusing on UGC-inspired ads, this activation saw search volumes grow 27%, new user engagement up 84%, and delivered 15k sessions on TikTok. Feel Unique impressions reached far beyond the TikTok community with brand followers growing across multiple social platforms too, and increased searches on site for products featured in the TikTok campaign. 

CSS (Comparison Shopping Service partners)

In 2017, Google Shopping welcomed third-party CSS providers into their shopping ad auction. Whilst CSS isn’t necessarily brand new to the overall marketing mix, we are increasingly seeing brands wanting to partner with one or more CSS partner via their affiliate programme, allowing for quick campaign testing, running on risk-free CPA-based commercials, and aligned tracking and measurement alongside other partner types.

Awin has highlighted CSS growth over the last few years, and these partner types have proved no exception in 2022. In 2020, Awin tracked performance through 20 different CSS partners, however in 2022 we now have 304 different partners active in this space driving sales for brands. Investment in CSS partners from brands has increased 57% and CSS partners are now responsible for driving 4% of total network sales. 

Technology Partners 

Technology partners are an exciting way to diversify your programme, but it’s also worth noting the amount of diversity within the umbrella term ‘technology partners’. There are 109 technology partners live on Awin, and a different partner available to meet every objective. If, like many retailers at the moment, the current cost-of-living crisis is impacting the number of items consumers are purchasing per shop, an on-site bundling partner such as Increasingly or Particular Audience might be the partner of choice to support you in boosting this goal. Or, if your business changes tack on what stock to shift and when, a partner such as RevLifter focused on personalised offers, or intent.ly’s on-site overlay technology might be the best choice to interact with consumers during their shopping journey and incentivise specific purchase decisions. Technology partners allow you to accelerate your own in-house innovation, removing traditional martech barriers around allocating development resource and costs. Year-to-date, our technology partners have driven over £160m in sales revenue for our brands globally. 

Brand Partnerships 

Another impressive recent partner success story at Awin has been that of brand-to-brand partnerships. Advertisers are increasingly partnering with complementary, non-competing brands to reach a potential new audience with similar values. Brands can co-promote each other and enter a reciprocal partnership, or follow a more traditional affiliate partnership model with one promoting the other. 

So far this year, Awin UK has tracked over 450 active brand partnerships driving £1.7 million in revenue. 

Awin have also launched partnerships with two providers who specialise in creating bespoke reward portals that brands can feature on their own sites. These offer a seamless, quick and effective white-label solution to fast-track your own customer reward space on your e-commerce site, further enhancing your offering. 

One of the pioneers in the brand partnerships space was the dining card membership brand Tastecard. They saw their whole business model come to a halt at the height of the pandemic lockdown, but swiftly pivoted their business model and worked with Awin to create brand partnerships that would continue to offer their members incredible benefits while restaurants were closed. By promoting other brand offers to the Tastecard audience they were able to maintain customer loyalty and drive a completely new revenue stream for the business which has since become an established part of their offering.  

Diversification as Awin’s North Star

Insights like those we’ve outlined above have helped to inform our own strategic direction at Awin. Understanding that diversification and a proactive approach to establishing new partnerships is vital to continued growth is why we’ve developed a new North Star metric that guides our own priorities and goals as a business.

Awin’s North Star metric is simple; to increase the number of active partnerships tracked through the platform each month. This benefits brands and partners alike, offering continued opportunities for growth and empowering brands and affiliates the choice to enter different partnerships, ensuring their performance goals are achieved and limiting the risks involved from relying on fewer partnerships.

If you are interested in diversifying your partner mix, testing new partnerships, or want to hear more of our case studies, please do attend our session on the mainstage at PI Live at 2.50pm on Tuesday with Awin’s Chief Customer Officer David Lloyd, or reach out directly to Joelle.mullin@awin.com.

And to explore the diverse array of partners you can work with via Awin, check out our Power 100 in this year’s Awin Report 2022 – our selection of the 100 most innovative and influential affiliate partners on our global platform.

The post How Can Brands Adapt to Change and Embrace Publisher Diversity? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The post Movers and Shakers: September 2022 appeared first on PerformanceIN.

For ticket holders, it’s now time to access the Event Hub, and plan your experience. You can use the Hub to review the delegate list, arrange meetings, check out networking opportunities, and create your own personalised agenda. This will guarantee you an optimised experience, better ROI, and a memorable time. Check your inbox to find the link to sign up.

And of course, there’s more to PI LIVE than just business. 

After a busy day of building your network and gaining key industry insight, we expect you’ll want to loosen up in the evening and let your hair down. We’ve got you covered. 

The PI LIVE Afterparty will be hosted at the striking, newly renovated cabaret club Proud in Embankment and is being sponsored by OTB-Algo. Join us to sip on cocktails and celebrate the bright future for performance, affiliate, and partnership marketing. Details on how to get tickets for the afterparty will be announced soon.

If you still don’t have a ticket, please purchase yours here, we’d love to see you there. But act fast, as there is limited availability.

The post The PI LIVE Event Hub is Live! appeared first on PerformanceIN.