As affiliate and partner marketing channels continue to grow across the market, more brands and advertisers are finding cost-effective and flexible models for building partnerships with a variety of publishers.
In fact, 80% of advertisers believe affiliate partnerships will be more important than ever in 2023. These advertisers are putting their money to work and moving more budget into the channel.
Here, we'll dig deeper into these trends, as Awin data so far in 2023 offers some interesting observations about how advertisers are generating growth. Additionally, we'll share which key areas of your channel strategy are delivering the best results.
1. Step change in opportunities for content creators and influencers
One of the key challenges in 2023 and beyond will be a significant increase in the performance of content creators and influencers for advertisers.
According to Awin data, these publishers are seeing 23% more revenue growth compared to 2022. Advertisers are investing heavily in this area and are paying 37% more commission than last year. As cost efficiency becomes more important and marketing budgets tighten, affiliate channels have become a welcome space for advertisers to flexibly grow their campaign strategies.
Additionally, influencers themselves are increasingly using this channel to distribute additional campaigns and easily collaborate with more brands. Our data shows that more than half of the publishers joining the network in 2023 will be content creators and influencers. Then there are influencer marketing platforms like Stylink, which continue to be valuable partners working in the affiliate channel. Their rapid expansion into new markets encapsulates the scale of the global influencer opportunity.
2. Cashback publishers are key in driving average order value growth
Incentive publishers have long been considered affiliates that incentivize discounts or lower order amounts and generally operate in the lower funnel of the user journey. But we've seen evidence to the contrary.
SingleView is a platform used to better analyze customer journeys and understand the value of different websites in the buying process. His recent SingleView analysis shows that cashback partners are more accretive and valuable than previously thought. We can see that they are increasing their solo conversion rate. If we drill down into this and look at the impact on average order value (AOV), we find that cashback partners offer the highest average basket boosts to advertisers.
Next is the performance of retail advertisers on Awin. Cashback partners achieve an average 13% increase in AOV, which is among the highest when compared to other types of publishers. While the UK remains the largest cashback market, almost all major cashback markets in Europe are contributing to her AOV growth. With services like TopCashback expanding outside the UK, and iGraal and other services also growing in continental Europe, this area of affiliate channels will continue to offer incremental opportunities for growth across the market.
3. Conversion rates remain a challenge for advertisers
We know that one of the key online performance metrics when navigating a challenging consumer environment is conversion rate. With content partners flocking to affiliate technology and advertisers focusing more on content partnerships, it's not at all surprising to see conversion rates drop in 2023.
There are many ways to deal with this recession. Is this one of the most underutilized opportunities in the affiliate channel? A technology partner that provides intelligent, on-brand conversion optimization solutions. Yes, we have a wealth of smart technology that makes it easy to implement and run campaigns across channels. Still, brands are finding it difficult to get buy-in from internal teams and stakeholders. Advertisers who use technology partners benefit. On average, you'll see an 8% increase in conversion rates year-over-year. Global brands leveraging this technology are also now able to seamlessly onboard partners across markets, overcoming various conversion rate challenges in the process.
4. Diversification strategies are mainstream this year
Affiliate and partner marketing channels have come a long way. Initially perceived primarily as an incentive, we now find ourselves increasingly recognizing it as a channel that drives success beyond the last click. We're seeing client services teams and advertisers building strategies that encapsulate this.
Awin's Sportswear Advertiser provides templates for implementing market-leading strategies through affiliate marketing. They achieve this by promoting partner diversity as a fundamental pillar of growth. In his three years of these advertisers, the share of discount publishers' sales decreased by his 6%. Nevertheless, these same publishers are growing his sales by 21% more than the previous year. Content creators, influencers, and editorial partners are experiencing more collaboration and more budget allocation. This resulted in sales increasing by more than 50% compared to the previous year.
This interaction between advertisers and influencers continues to grow the portfolio of content creators that flock to their channels. It’s more important than ever to ensure you have a framework in place to work with them through affiliate channels.
Bhavesh Patel, Senior Global Account Director
