Affiliate Marketing Research Provides Benchmarks for 2009

Successful marketing is built around accurate forecasting and benchmarking. In an industry like the affiliate industry which is not known for transparency, getting numbers to help you set accurate benchmarks is difficult. There are however resources that can help including: the ecommerce focused reports compiled by MarketingSherpa, eConsultancy’s affiliate marketing reports, and AffStat run by Shawn Collins co-founder of Affiliate Summit .

Recently NETexponent’s research division, AffiliateBenchmarks, has made available to the public our second annual survey of affiliates. You can see my post on last year’s survey here, when we had around 500 responses. This year, with help from our affiliate network partners, we got over 3500 affiliates responses, making it the largest affiliate survey to date.

Although I make it a point to not use the ReveNews forum for self-promotional content, I do believe that the interests, practices and expectations of the surveyed affiliates provide insights valuable to all affiliates wishing to learn successful practices, advertisers looking to forge lucrative relationships, networks, consultants and any other readers with an interest in online marketing practices and techniques.

The report is based on date provided by affiliates. It breaks down results based on the annual income of the participants. This allows us to outline the tactics and practices that highly successful affiliates are employing to get ahead in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

For example, those who are buying PPC keywords, utilizing flash and video widgets are seeing a much higher return from their affiliate programs than those who aren’t.  These insights are extremely valuable to all affiliates seeking new ways to improve their businesses.

Of the respondents 49% indicated they were new to the industry in the last two years.  This points to significant growth in the affiliate channel. However, it is apparent from the results that many of these newer affiliates are not yet taking advantage of the technologies and strategies that are helping more established affiliate succeed.

Among the other under-utilized opportunities beyond PPC search and the use of flash ads/widgets: new affiliates missed opportunities to gather up to date information from industry blogs in order to spot trends and failed to collect data on site visitors in order to promote the more relevant, higher-converting merchant programs.

For a limited time we’re offering all ReveNews readers a 30% discount off the price of the report! To get your copy of the AffiliateBenchmarks report click here and enter code RN30.

About Peter Figueredo

Having worked in the online marketing arena since 1997, Peter Figueredo has seen the ups and downs of this industry. He is currently the CEO of Affiliate Management and Search Marketing Agency NETexponent. which he co-founded in 2001. Prior to that his online direct marketing experience came from working at interactive agencies such as Mass Transit Interactive, as the EVP Director of Performance Marketing, and i-traffic, currently a division of Agency.com where Peter held the title of Director and helped establish and grow their Affiliate Marketing Services division. At a time when affiliate marketing was relatively unknown Peter was building and managing affiliate programs for leading Fortune 500 companies.

Peter’s company recently launched an Affiliate Marketing Research division called Affiliate Benchmarks to provide Affiliate Marketers with more insights and data.

You can find Peter on Twitter: @figueredo.

Website: http://www.NETexponent.com