How many different online marketing channels are you employing simultaneously? Let me guess… At least three; maybe five or more. If you’re reading my blog, then you, probably have an affiliate program. Besides it, you’re more than likely also engaged in paid search, SEO, social, possibly display and/or remarketing initiatives; maybe mobile, and video… And then add also email on top of these, and you get quite a borscht!

Last month Zoomerang‘s “2012 Marketing Trends Survey” revealed that in the course of 2012 business executives plan to increase their spend on email (60%), social media (55%), search (37%) and mobile (37%). They are also planning on actively integrating email with social media marketing (68%) as well as with mobile (44%) [see full report in PDF here]. I strongly hope that they’re also planning on investing into a robust platform to help them analyze all of these marketing efforts.

25% of digital marketers admit that their greatest challenge is in arriving at a comprehensive understanding of how all of these different online marketing channels effect their customers. I believe that the reason for this is that it is much easier to gather data than to interpret it — especially, if you’re not properly equipped to effectively do the latter…

One of my favorite multi-channel attribution solutions is being provided by a company called Impact Radius. And I was honored to have been asked to participate in their 2012 Marketing Solutions e-booklet, contributing to a page on “finding clarity in data” (see a snapshot of it below). The full booklet is now available for a free download, and you may request it here. It’s a quick (but important) read on a dozen of topics. I recommend it; and not only because I’ve participated in it. It’ll give you other good food for thought (and action) in 2012.

For numerous times over the past few years (including this recent interview to Smart Insights) I have been asked what I think about multi-click attribution — especially, in the affiliate marketing context. I’m not against it as long as (a) you know what you’re doing, and (b) your affiliate program stays competitive.

Earlier this morning Fred Wilson published an interesting comparison of his blog’s traffic sources where upon splitting “the top ten” referrers “into three categories”, he discovered the following breakdown:

• Direct — 50%
• Social — 40% (with nearly 1/2 from StumbleUpon)
• Search — 10%

These numbers amused me to say the least, and I decided to perform a quick analysis my own blog’s traffic sources over the past 30 days.

As expected, my situation is quite different:

• Search — 72%
• Direct — 13.3%
• Social — 8.1%

I suspect most blogs will see a breakdown more similar to mine than the one that Fred is witnessing now. But that’s only my guess, and I would love to hear from other bloggers on this one.

I’ve also analyzed my top social media sources, and here’s what I see:

Top 7 Social Media Referrers

4.5% — t.co
1.6% — facebook.com
0.8% — twitterfeed
0.5% — linkedin.com
0.3% — stumbleupon.com
0.2% — bizsugar.com
0.2% — hootsuite.com

I guess, I should get more active on StumbleUpon. Fred’s figures are truly compelling.

Finally, I’ve decided to measure what role news aggregation sites are playing in my blog’s traffic (I could’ve included these in the “social” category too, but on a number of reasons decided to single them out), and it appears that they are referring just a bit less than 3% of all my visitors. Here’s a breakdown of what I see in my case:

Top 3 News Aggregators Sources

1.7% — affbuzz.com
0.5% — affdaily.com
0.3% — marketingland.com

What are you seeing on your blog(s)? What social channels do you see perform most effectively? And how effective is social in your case?

Over the past couple of years, many of the world’s top business schools have become pretty active on social media, Twitter included. In fact, some maintain several accounts (for example, I could count 5 different Twitter account for University of Chicago’s Booth School of Management; yet, since my below ranking is based on follower-count, none of these made it).

Today I’d like to bring you a list of top twenty business school accounts to follow on Twitter. As you already know, the ranking is tied solely to the number of followers each of these has as the time of this post:

1. Wharton at University of Pennsylvania (USA)
2. Harvard Business School & see also Harvard Business Review (USA)
3. MIT Sloan School of Management & MIT Sloan Management Review (USA)
4. Stanford Graduate School of Business (USA)
5. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (USA)
6. London Business School (UK)
7. Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley (USA)
8. Columbia Business School (USA)
9. IE Business School (Spain)
10. HEC Paris (École des Hautes Études Commerciales) (France)
11. ESADE (Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas) (Spain)
12. IESE Business School of University of Navarra (worldwide)
13. Saïd Business School at Oxford (UK)
14. McCombs School at The University of Texas at Austin (USA)
15. IMD Business School (Switzerland)
16. Rotman School at University of Toronto (Canada)
17. INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires) (worldwide)
18. Thunderbird School of Global Management (worldwide)
19. Yale School of Management (USA)
20. Darden School of Business at University of Virginia (USA)

Again, the above is not to be read as anything else but the ranking of the school’s Twitter activity, and specifically the size of its followership.

It’s Friday again, and the #FollowFriday undertone of this post seems to be more than appropriate.

I don’t know about you, but the amount of information (from quality to mere noise) distributed via social media overwhelms me at times… So, as mentioned not too long ago, one of the methods that I use is that of sorting and filtering.

Now, over the course of the past four years, some of the people that I follow have gained enormous respect in my eyes — mainly, due to the high-quality, thought-provoking information (and thoughts) that they constantly share. Today I’d like to share their names with you (the order is merely alphabetical; descriptions taken from their Twitter profiles):

Lisa Barone
Twitter | Outspoken Media Blog & also Small Business Trends
Co-founder, Branding Officer & PITA at Outspoken Media.

Linda Bustos
Twitter | Elastic Path Blog
Director of Ecommerce Research with Elastic Path Software.

Dave Chaffey
Twitter | Smart Insights Blog
Bestselling author, consultant and speaker. I enjoy sharing the latest strategies, tools and tips to get the most from Digital Marketing.

Bryan Eisenberg
Twitter | BryanEisenberg.com Blog
Marketing Optimization expert, keynote speaker and New York Times best selling author, columnist.

Mitch Joel
Twitter | Six Pixels of Separation Blog
President of Twist Image. Blogger & Podcaster of Six Pixels of Separation. Marketer. Speaker. Author. Journalist. Marketing Reformer. Media Hacker.

Seth Godin
Twitter Stream | Seth’s Blog
Founder of Squidoo.com, author, blogger.

Avinash Kaushik
Twitter | Occam’s Razor Blog
Author, Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day | Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google | Co-Founder, Market Motive

If I have missed a marketer (or researcher) whose thinking and tweeting (or blogging) moves you, please do add them through the “Comments” are below.

Quick timeline:

• Dec 1, 2011 — new brand’s website launched
• Dec 5, 2011 — official announcement and press release go live
• Jan 12, 2012 — second press release is published
• Dec 6, 2011 – Jan 18, 2012 — over a dozen of articles appear

Analyzing the keywords that drive traffic to the website I see an interesting picture:

I do realize that among those (not provided) keywords many, in fact, may be searching for this key phrase too. Yet, even without those, the situation looks more than impressive… “But how, in the world, does a brand new business name gain such tremendous brand recognition over such a short period of time?” I wondered.

And yesterday I’ve found the answer. It is probably not so much “brand recognition” that we should be talking here, but something different (and equally impressive) — a new brand claiming a Google Instant match for affiliate management key phrase. Look at this:

Having realized that Google Instant may be showing these to me, because my recent browsing behavior may suggest that affiliate management days is of more interest to me than, say, affiliate management agency, I ran this by five other people across the country. And it appears that just as myself in Virginia, folks in the states of California, New York, and Massachusetts also see the same picture. So “days” have indeed beaten “agency” in Google Instant. Very interesting (and certainly pleasing to see).

On a separate note, speaking of the Days: the Early Bird Rate for the San Francisco conference expires at midnight PST today (Friday, January 20). So, if you’re seriously contemplating going, register soon to save $620 off your pass.

It’s been some time since my Top 20 Affiliate Marketing Bloggers to Watch in 2011 post. And besides the fact that one of these twenty has claimed her Affiliate Summit’s best blogger award (Tricia Meyer, who is now inspired to reach new blogging heights, and, of course, belongs on my below list), a few other things have happened too.

In fact, the landscape of affiliate blogosphere has been changing almost as dynamically as the industry itself. In the course of late 2011 I’ve spotted quite a few bloggers gaining steam. The spectrum ranges from the fairly new ones to affiliate marketing blogging to those who have been quiet for some time, and are now back in the game. All of these guys (and gals!) deserve a list of their own — one for 2012.

So here we go (again, in alphabetical order, and with everyone’s Twitter handle listed):

10 Affiliate Marketing Bloggers to Watch in 2012

1. Sarah Bundy: SarahBundy.com Blog | Twitter

2. Dave Cupples: FatCowBusiness.com | Twitter

3. Existem’s Team: Affiliates4U News | Twitter

4. Sam Harrelson: SamHarrelson.com Blog | Twitter

5. Impact Radius’ Team: ImpactRadius Blog | Twitter

6. Scott Jangro: Jangro.com Site | Twitter

7. HasOffers’ Team: HasOffers Blog | Twitter

8. Owen Hewitson: Econsultancy Blog posts | Twitter

9. Tricia Meyer: Tricia.me Blog | Twitter

10. Shannon Weidemann: Marketing Elf Blog | Twitter

If I’ve missed your favorite affiliate marketing blogger (especially, if you believe them to be a rising star!) please do mention them in the Comments below.

For ages there has been an inherent disconnect between the promotional method an incentive affiliate uses, and the end goal of every pay-per-lead program — or that of generating “potential sales contacts“. After all, when the chief end-user motivator is cashback, points, virtual currency, or anything of this kind, it is very hard to reap quality leads (read: contacts that are truly interested in your product/service).

Now it looks like we finally have a good solution to the problem. Don’t know if you’ve seen RingRevenue‘s latest press release, which was easy to miss as it came out concurrently with the last day of Affiliate Summit West 2012, but take a look at this before you read the rest: Tapjoy and RingRevenue Partner to Deliver Innovative Call-Based Advertising Program.

Of course, it’s a huge advance for mobile, but it seemed to me there was potential beyond mobile in this. So, I reached out to RingRevenue, and asked Drew Thorne-Thomsen (DT), the company’s VP of Customer Development, three questions:

1. Your new partnership with Tapjoy seems like a tremendous advance for mobile. The path from using a mobile app to placing a call is clearly significantly shorter/easier than that between using a website and placing that call. Are there any other specifics that you’d like to emphasize in connection with this new development of yours?

DT: It’s true, the path from mobile app to placing a call is shorter than that path on the web. One of the things that makes mobile and call-based advertising so perfect together is that the mobile phone at its most core function is a phone. But the really exciting thing here is for advertisers who value phone calls, because it changes the game for them. If you look at industries such as insurance, financial services, and education, the “form-based lead generation” industry was basically created to help them get more prospective customers on the phone. The consumer fills out a form and someone calls them back. But this process has never served the advertiser or the consumer well. Advertisers deal with declining re-contact rates and the consumer deals with having their personal contact data sold off to who knows where (being contacted when they are busy). When all either party wanted to do was talk on the phone. When you add in mobile phones and only 3 inches of screen real-estate… consumers don’t want to fill out forms on their phones. With call-based advertising, we cut all of that out and make the experience seamless for all parties involved. We shorten the time it takes for a consumer to be connected and provide highly-qualified leads direct to the advertiser’s call center. And by using unique phone numbers that tie each caller to the action they are taking, we make it really easy for the loyalty member to get their rewards. Once their qualifying action is taken via the phone, for example an insurance quote, we immediately notify the loyalty program — like Tapjoy’s — so they can issue the rewards.

2. For those not familiar with how exactly pay-per-call programs powered by RingRevenue work, could you specifically elaborate on the different levels of filtering available to merchants (to refine the qualification process)? Naturally, filtering makes a world of difference.

DT: Filtering is certainly the key to making phone calls work with affinity and loyalty programs. The goal is to ensure when a caller hits the advertiser’s call center, they are equally motivated to buy or sign up as someone who comes in via search for example. Starting with the advertiser’s ability to define the profile attributes of their target audience to setting qualifying criteria in a specific campaign, the advertiser is in control of defining their ideal caller. We create transparency between the advertiser and the loyalty publisher to make sure they are aligned with what makes a quality call.

With our platform we provide quality filtering via our technology that includes criteria that automatically filters out callers based on targeting, but also through our highly customizable interactive voice response (IVR) system we can apply virtually any level of filtering a client can imagine. In the case of Allstate for example, they only want to talk to a consumer who is serious about an auto insurance quote, and meets some very basic criteria such as owning a car, possessing a drivers license and living in a state where the offer is valid.

3. Similarly to Tapjoy in mobile, many online affiliates employ similar principles of rewarding the end consumer for the action the affiliate desires to see. However, be it with social games or various incentive affiliates, I’ve always had a problem with making them work for pay-per-lead programs. It seems that this solution is also a big step towards helping an affiliate manager make incentive affiliates work for PPL programs. Have you thought of it in this light too?

DT: You are exactly correct. This problem with PPL programs and affinity programs has been quality. Couponing and loyalty represents a large percentage of traffic across the performance marketing networks. The opportunity for advertisers to get broad distribution is huge. But there is always the question of quality. This is why calls work so well with affinity and loyalty programs. The quality filtering we are able to apply ensures that when the caller gets to the call center agent, they are sufficiently motivated and likely to complete the action. In the case of the Allstate campaign, once the caller makes it through the qualification process, they are staying on the line with agents for an average of 15 minutes or more. So if you look at call duration as a function of call quality, the calls being connected are very, very good and are resulting in quotes for auto insurance.

For other types of advertisers, take a floral delivery company for example, they already know that phone calls are their top converting channel. Now we can help them get additional reach and distribution through their affinity marketing partners without sacrificing quality. For the loyalty publishers, the benefits are pretty significant as well in terms of revenue they are missing out on right now.  All of the performance marketing networks using our platform have high-value offers that loyalty publishers can easily start promoting and earning revenue from today. Plus, our account team is happy to help them get set up and make sure their promotions are optimized for this type of campaign.

So there you have it… Looking forward to trying it first-hand.

I’m sure that in the past you have come across blog posts about affiliate marketing being “dead”, “dying”, too crowded, too risky, too dependent on this or that, and so on, and so forth… However, over the past few days I have witnessed a few signs that point in a completely opposite direction — namely, that affiliate marketing isn’t even just “alive and well”, but it is thriving, and working really well for those who take it seriously.

3 Signs of Affiliate Marketing Thriving

1. Largest Affiliate Summit to Date

Two days ago Affiliate Summit, the industry’s central conference, has completed in Las Vegas, NV. This has been the largest one to date, gathering nearly 5,100 attendees (yes, an almost tenfold growth in 7 years!) under one roof. More about the conference’s spectacular growth in the newest issue of FeedFront magazine here.

2. Wide Interest in Affiliate Management

Right after presenting at the above-quoted Affiliate Summit, I uploaded my 64-slide PPT deck to SlideShare. Yesterday I learned that it made its homepage. And at the time of this post, it is already nearing 1,000 views (in under 3 days). There certainly is great interest in serious affiliate program management.

3. Affiliate’s Hard Work Pays Off Big

Not sure if you’ve caught my yesterday night’s tweet, but as you can see above we’ve had an affiliate in Compete.com’s program make $1,000 from one sale; and this isn’t the first time it’s happening. Hard work certainly pays off.

I hope these encourage you as much as they’ve inspired me.

As always, if you have anything to share with regard to this post’s subject, the Comments are all yours.

It is interesting to look back to (and analyze) the predictions that were made in late 2010 regarding 2011. Some of them were right on the money, some didn’t take root (yet)… But it’s time to create a similar post for the Year 2012, which is already here. So, just as it was for 2011 I now bring you predictions for 2012 from affiliate (and digital) marketing experts from four different countries on both sides of the Atlantic. Here they are (in no particular order):

Affiliate Marketing Predictions for 2012

1) With the rising prominence of Product Listing Ads taking up paid search space on the Google SERPs, affiliates will have to rethink their paid search strategy with Google on the long tail product specific searches.

2) From a real estate perspective on the Google SERPs, Google Shopping results will continue to drop on the page.  This should open up more real estate towards the top of the SERPs for organic listings for retailers and affiliates.

– Ned Farra of Zappos (follow them on Twitter)

3) Abusive affiliates will increasingly shift from direct relationships with merchants to indirect relationships through super affiliates with sub-affiliate programs

4) The FTC will take aggressive action against several brands for inappropriate representations made by their affiliates in social media

– David Naffziger of BrandVerity (follow them on Twitter)

5) US merchants will push back on paying multiple, static commissions for the same sale (this being triggered by EU trend in 2011). Continued absorption of ‘affiliate channel’ into mainstream “performance budget” means: (i) path to conversion reporting including PPC, retargeting, display, SEO plays a major role in correctly rewarding/identifying successful affiliates/partners; (ii) split commissions on affiliates will become more common place as merchants see what is delivering incremental sales; (iii) affiliate networks offer contractual wording to accommodate ‘attribution and de-duplication technology’ (source); (iv) merchants remove duplicate/unfair payment in real-time, allowing for re-distribution of spend to smaller affiliate networks; (v) budgets/bounty for successful and fair affiliates will grow, as merchants raise bids for affiliates driving genuine incremental leads/sales based on audited data.

– Chris Brinkworth of TagMan (follow him on Twitter)

6) Low-converting landing pages will be squeezed out in many categories. Unless you have a relentless focus on conversion rate optimization and always provide your affiliates with the highest possible EPC, you are at a huge disadvantage. Without best-practices redesigns and ongoing testing of your key landing pages you will fall behind and never recover.

7) Mobile specialist affiliates will emerge in force. Now that smartphones and tablets have become well-established, there are new and innovative ways to reach on-the-go people. New ways of driving traffic, mobile landing pages, and apps will become more common as affiliates become more sophisticated.

– Tim Ash of SiteTuners (follow him on Twitter)

8 ) Mobile, social and video will take charge… and not necessarily individually. Look for them to be merging even tighter than before. As an example, an affiliate can take a video of a product with a mobile phone and share on a social network today, but look for them to take it even farther and do more with the messaging in 2012.

9) Affiliates will use social media more to advertise. This offers merchants another platform to reach potential customers, but will require close monitoring in order to detect fraud/spamming/TOC violations, etc.

10) Merchants will need to provide more creatives that are optimized for mobile and tablets. No flash banners for these users! They might even want to consider video creatives.

11) According to comScore Video Metrix, 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October 2011 for an average of 21.1 hours per viewer. A year earlier, comScore reported that 175 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October 2010 for an average of 15.1 hours per viewer. An increase of 9 million viewers and 6 more hours per viewer on average over the past 12 months means there is even bigger opportunities for merchants and affiliates to include video in their marketing mix and I don’t expect that to slow down in 2012. I found the info in YouTube Creator Playbook especially helpful when thinking about creating marketing videos. It includes tips, best practices, and strategies to build larger audiences on YouTube and tells you how much effort it will take and what you can expect to get out of each change.

– Sharon Mostyn of SharonMostyn.com (follow her on Twitter)

12) I think variations/iterations of the QCP model that eBay has used for the past 2 years will be implemented further across the industry. I think this will be a result of the natural evolution of multi channel attribution in the affiliate world.

13) I think affiliate marketing as a sole business model will no longer be tenable. I think Google will insert itself more and more into the buying cycle of consumers and the traditional affiliate model will finally die. Affiliates who previously put in the effort in lieu of revenue to build a brand will reap the rewards and those who didn’t listen to Rae Hoffman-Dolan will wish they had. I’m glad I did.

14) I think a lot of affiliates and/or beginning affiliates will give up as Panda will make the barrier to entry too difficult and time consuming to understand. Panda will continue to decimate low quality affiliates and keep higher quality publishers on their toes.

15) I think that most large affiliates/publishers will, with the data and skill set they have built up over the past few years, become merchants themselves.

16) I think that the lack of anonymity for affiliates as a result of the necessity to participate in social to compete will clean the “darker” side of the industry up. Somewhat.

– David Davis of Redfly Marketing (follow them on Twitter)

17) Continued growth in the industry: We’ll continue to see growth in the affiliate channel as technology and expertisebecomes even more sophisticated. Of note, industry analysts at Forrester predicted that the affiliate channel will reach $4B by 2014. Also, in their December 2011 report on the channel, they found that consumers perceive deals offered on affiliate sites as superior to those on the merchant’s website. It’s clear that the steady growth of the industry and consumers’ increasing reliance on affiliate sites will enable the channel to continue to thrive.

18) The evolution of mobile: We’ve been talking about mobile for a while now and the potential it represents for the affiliate channel. In 2012, we’ll see more opportunities in mobile. This will be driven by three factors. The increased number of smart phone users, which is expected to rise by nearly 50 percent from 2011-2015 according to eMarketer. The second factor is that mobile shoppers are expected to reach 72.8 million in 2012, according to eMarketer. Third, the mobile browser shopping experience will become a better user experience. As these two worlds come together they will create more opportunities for advertisers to reach their audience on the users’ preferred device.

19) It’s all about data! Whether it’s on a desktop, smart phone or tablet, the opportunities for advertisers and publishers will be contingent upon their ability to quickly and accurately mine customer data and present the right offer at the right time on the right device. This will require networks to provide sophisticated technology including easy to use, customizable data feeds while ensuring offers are current and relevant.

– Scott Allan of LinkShare (follow them on Twitter)

20) The US economy will continue to grow slowly but with an occasional knockback from growing economic problems in China, rapid oil price fluctuations and European wobbles. That means affiliates, merchants and advertisers will continue to see slow growth too unless they can create new revenue streams through innovation.

21) Several CPA networks will go to the wall as the FTC drives easy profits out of the sector and cash flow pressures mount. This kind of consolidation is a good thing as the CPA network space needs fewer, bigger players to drive increased trust and growth with major brands and agencies. CPA can boom, but it has to do more to educate big-brand CMOs.

22) If Obama loses in November the FTC will lose interest in enforcement.

– Chris Trayhorn of mThink.com (follow them on Twitter)

23) Facile interaction with video content will skyrocket. Companies like Coull and Fullscreen will expand YouTubers’ ability to easily monetize their videos.

24) Performance-based call campaigns will continue to capture more affiliate dollars. Industry leader RingRevenue will expand its current footprint in 9 of the 10 largest affiliate networks, while simultaneously driving calls in the offline world for advertisers whose offerings do not lend themselves to affiliate marketing.

– John Greathouse of Rincon Venture Partners (follow him on Twitter)

25) Google Panda and the dominance of coupon and cashback sites struck a blow to many small and mid-size affiliates in 2011, and they will continue to struggle for survival as a result of assaults on three fronts: coupon/cashback sites, Google, and the recession. Online will continue to become more reflective of the offline world, with the bigger affiliates getting bigger and the small withering away. In every mature e-commerce market a handful of affiliates will be responsible for a huge share of sales.

26) The god that is Google will continue to enact algorithmic refinements which will impact negatively on most affiliate models, with a few exceptions. The Google Remote Rater document that was leaked a while ago stated that coupon and price comparison sites are acceptable. Therefore, the leading affiliates I mention in my first point will be such sites in the CPS space.

27) For CPA-paying advertisers, email and lead generation affiliates will be responsible for an even larger share of leads in 2012 than they were last year. Some of these affiliates operate ethically, others less so, but they will generate enormous volumes of leads. Their databases will grow and, with the continuing demise of CPM advertising, more and more list owners will enter the affiliate marketing fold to broadcast campaigns on a CPA model.

– Nadeem Azam of Azam Marketing, Inc. (follow them on Twitter)

28) For the first time ever Affiliate Summit will cross the cumulative annual mark of 10,000 attendees.

29) A new affiliate management e-Book will be published (insider info: likely to be available in electronic format(s) only).

– Geno Prussakov of Affiliate Management Days (follow me on Twitter)

30) Affiliates will continue to evolve their multi-channel offering helping to drive the performance channel ever more mainstream. In 2011 we saw the UK’s biggest cashback site, Quidco launch a mobile app and offer in-store cashback and voucher code redemption, all supported by a significant marketing push that included TV and other above the line media. Alongside a handful of other well known publishers have established themselves as retail portals in their own right, attracting far more traffic than the vast majority of advertisers they feature. The implications are far reaching with a shift in the traditional publisher/advertiser relationship as well as a multitude of promotional activity, not all performance focused. This development will continue and will help drive the industry further towards professionalism.

31) Evolving this first point we have also seen some initial steps towards embracing the opportunities that mobile offers. At Affiliate Window and buy.at we have spent the past year analyzing our mobile traffic and have seen rapid adoption with our mobile sales and traffic increasing fivefold in the past twelve months. There is a chicken and egg dilemma with mobile however, in that many major advertisers have launched m-commerce sites without affiliate tracking in place. Therefore, where is the incentive for publishers to develop their own mobile proposition? Having said that we have seen incentivized traffic take the lead in 2011 primarily through in-store redemption. I would expect 2012 to see a handful of more engaged advertisers look to focus their energies in using affiliates to drive online traffic in store as well as actively pursue mobile strategies alongside their existing affiliate activity.

32) Regulation will continue to feature largely in the wider digital landscape with the revised ePrivacy Directive being actively enforced from May 2012. The IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council (AMC) has already made a good start at engaging with affiliate marketers in the UK and has devised a five point plan that we will push out in the next few months. As a network we will be focusing our energies on encouraging affiliates to offer greater transparency to consumers on how on-site content is monetised. The AMC will also evolve as it looks to continue its agenda of self-regulation.

– Kevin Edwards of Digital Window (on Twitter: Affiliate Window & buy.at)

33) Niche affiliate networks will become more appealing to affiliates than general ones. This will be caused both by the affiliates’ focus on specific niches and the big/popular merchants joining these networks. Most of the smaller affiliate networks will become more and more focused on certain types of products / services, or they will only target affiliates from specific territories.

34) The ability to segment and target customers from specific territories through affiliates will be an important factor in the big merchants’ choice for the affiliate network(s) to run their programs on.

35) In the software vertical, games and security niches will continue to grow with the strongest rise of the mobile apps vertical. As “new entries” — SaaS and cloud-based end-user services will gain even more ground.

36) Small and medium affiliates will continue to focus on niches. They will prefer to rather have multiple websites for multiple niches rather than one website for all the niches.

37) Local authoritative affiliate websites with original content in form of reviews for products and services will have a bigger slice of the affiliate sales pie. So, to wrap it all up, the two main words in 2012 for affiliate marketing will be “niche” and “local”.

– Cristian Miculi of Avangate (follow him on Twitter)

38) Over the last 12-18 months there has been a noticeable shift for brands to engage an agency to provide the account management for their affiliate campaign. Previously the norm would be that the chosen affiliate network(s) would act as both the technology provider and the service agency. More and more, brands are beginning to take the opinion that the technology provision needs to be separated from the account management and this has lead to a growth in both specialist affiliate agencies, digital media agencies as well as traditional full service media agencies bulking up their digital provision.

39) Further to the above, the market has seen several of the larger full service agency groups launching their own tracking solutions or utilising white-labels with the networks, thereby removing the need for a network at all. Personally, I think this is a trickier route to go down successfully and I think there will continue to be developments within this as with pure play technology providers entering the market to service this need.

40) The other main trend, which ties into the above, is the viewing of affiliate marketing within a wider marketing context. The affiliate sector has always sat slightly separately from “mainstream” online marketing (something that the affiliate community has encouraged in my view) but now brands are beginning to scrutinize the channel more. This is driven partly by the economic situation, partly by a natural maturation of the market and partly by the increasing involvement of media agencies in the arena. This has lead to an increase in the attempted understanding of the part that affiliates play within the overall customer journey and how this knowledge should influence trading discussions and buying behaviour in the affiliate space. Brands themselves are also becoming more sophisticated by incorporating metrics such as lifetime value of a customer in order to truly understand the real value of the affiliate channel.

– Chris Bishop of 7thingsmedia (follow him on Twitter)

If you have something to add to the above, the “Comments” are all yours; and I would highly appreciate your input.

Make sure to also take a look at Matthew Wood‘s post where he reviews 2011 and gives his predictions for 2012, Peter Hamilton‘s expectations of 2012, as well as Chris Johnson‘s summary of IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council’s recent findings pertaining to 2012. Also, my today’s Affiliate Marketing Strategy in 2012 interview to Smart Insights may be something worth checking out.

I have done this in 2009, 2010, and in 2011.

And now again, for the fourth time in a row I am happy to bring you worldwide affiliate marketing events (conferences, symposiums, conventions and expos) that are worth considering in 2012, which will be here in less than 3 days.

As always, I am using the * asterisk to mark the conferences that I have personally attended in the past, and/or highly recommend.

2012 Affiliate Marketing Conferences & Events

• 01/08-01/10 – Affiliate Summit West (Las Vegas, NV, USA)*
• 01/17-/01/19 – LinkShare Symposium West (San Francisco, CA, USA)
• 01/26-01/29 – London Affiliate Conference (London, UK)
• 02/14-02/15 – PubCon Paradise 2012 (Honolulu, HI, USA)*
• 02/28-02/29 – LeadsCon Las Vegas (Las Vegas, NV, USA)
• 02/28-02/29 – Online Advertising & Affiliate Expo (London, UK)
• 03/08-03/09 – Affiliate Management Days (San Francisco, CA, USA)*
• 03/13 – PerformanceIN Travel & Leisure (London, UK)
• TBA – LinkShare Symposium UK (London, UK)
• 05/15-05/15 – Affiliate Summit Central 2012 (Austin, TX, USA)
• 05/16-05/18 – ShareASale ThinkTank 2012 (Austin, TX, USA)
• TBA – LinkShare Symposium Japan (Tokyo, Japan)
• 06/19-06/20 – a4u Expo Europe (Barcelona, Spain)*
• TBA – Affili@SYD (Sydney, Australia)
• 06/25-06/27 – LinkShare Symposium East (New York, NY)
• 08/12-08/14 – Affiliate Summit East (New York, NY, USA)*
• 09/04 – PerformanceIN Fashion & Beauty (London, UK)
• 10/11-10/14 – Barcelona Affiliate Conference (Barcelona, Spain)
• TBA – Commission Junction University (Santa Barbara, CA)
• TBA – a4u expo London (London, UK)*
• 10/15-10/19 – PubCon Las Vegas 2012 (Las Vegas, NV, USA)*
• TBA – Affiliate Management Days (New York, NY, USA)*
• TBA – LinkShare Symposium Canada (Toronto, Canada)

As usual, if I have missed an event that belongs here, please post about it in the “Comments” area under this post, and I will add it to the list too.