Wanamaker made these remarks more than a century ago, but his words still resonate with modern marketers. Even in the information age, it’s not easy to keep track of the actual marketing channels that persuade customers to buy .
Today, shoppers browse a company’s social media profile, look for other customer reviews, and check out competitor websites before making their final decision. It’s a long and complicated journey that can take several weeks.
It’s difficult for marketers to determine exactly where the majority of their marketing budget should be spent to achieve the best possible result. And when affiliates are involved, it becomes even more difficult.
Multi-channel attribution is already complex
Although it does happen, most customers don’t phone number list simply purchase a product in a single session. If a customer searches for shoes on a search engine, clicks on the top-ranking website “Footwear.com” and immediately orders, no marketing attribution model is required. The search engine is responsible for the conversion.
But let’s imagine a different scenario. Here, a customer clicks on Footwear.com but doesn’t buy the shoes. A few days later, the same person looks at the review of the shoe on a social media page that includes a promo code from Footwear.com. A week later, the customer visits the site again and makes the purchase using the code.
Most buyer’s journeys are similar to the one described above. This is why online businesses invest in conversion optimization auditing and multi-channel attribution. Some attribution models attribute the sale to the most recent referral or click.
But that doesn’t give an accurate picture.
Customers are influenced by a variety of factors and interact with multiple channels before they finally how to convert more leads into sales with crm order the product.
Focusing only on the last touchpoint is reductive and could lead the website to invest in channels that do not offer the best ROI.
What happens when affiliate marketing is involved?
Affiliates play a role in different stages of the sales funnel . At the top are the content bloggers with their reviews and at the bottom are coupon websites. There are different channels in the middle of the funnel as well. Figuring out their value and contribution to conversion is not so easy.
Additionally, due to the increasing number of parties involved, it is extremely likely that each party will use different software and tools to analyze agent email list channel performance. This will lead to discrepancies in the data as affiliate marketers will report different results using different mechanisms. In this scenario, it becomes difficult to identify the channels that provide the best ROI.
Without accurate data, you wouldn’t be able to review affiliate commissions and fully understand the value some of these external channels provide to your business.
Implementation of Attribution Models in Affiliate Marketing
Attribution is extremely important with affiliates because companies have to give them a share of the revenue. Many companies would prefer not to pay an affiliate a commission based on $80 in revenue when the attributed revenue is actually $50.
So how do you go about achieving this? The answer lies in the different commission models that a number of affiliate platforms offer. Here are some of the common attribution models.