Affiliate Marketing Statistics

Affiliate Marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

The concept of revenue sharing, paying commission for referred business, predates that of affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream ecommerce happened almost four years after the World Wide Web was born in November 1994, when CDNow launched its Buy Web program. With its Buy Web program, CDNow was the first non-adult site to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing — using one site to drive traffic to another — is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers’ marketing statistics.

• The three most important statistics to track for increasing your store’s sales and profits are: traffic count, average sale, and closing ratio. A drop in any can result in decreased sales, just as a boost in any will increase sales. Once you know these numbers, you can react and plan accordingly.
• If traffic count is down, increase time and effort spent on marketing.
• If your average sale has dropped, determine whether it’s due to the wrong merchandise, the sales staff not selling up or adding on as much, or local economic conditions.
• If the drop in average sale is because the merchandise isn’t right, ask your customers what they’d like.
• If it’s because the sales staff isn’t selling up or adding on, work on both in sales-training sessions.
• If economic conditions mean your customers are spending less, boost marketing to build traffic and offset lower per-ticket sales.
• If your closing ratio (how many people are sold versus how many come into the store) has dropped, this is also a signal to improve your sales training, especially closing.

Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the web, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business.