Having surveyed over a thousand of affiliates “on their methods, preferences, and strategies”, Affiliate Summit has put together its newest 2010 AffStat Report [source], and made it open to public (free of charge) yesterday, April 20. I’ve been waiting for this one to be announced, and been glad to see it coming out two months earlier that AffStat 2009 did. It is also great to see that unlike the 2009 survey (which had some 450 affiliate marketers participate in it), AffStat 2010 polled 1,150 affiliates, which is a really good sample for a survey of this caliber. You may view and/or download the full report here.

A good part of the new AffStat Report reveals the expectations that affiliates have of affiliate programs and affiliate program managers. Here are the 7 charts and findings I’d light to highlight:

– 1 –

Cookie Life

The top three choices here were: (i) 15-30 days (40.4%), (ii) 60 days (22.6%), and (iii) 1-7 days (13%). The last choice shouldn’t be too surprising, taking into account that the vast majority of affiliate-referred transactions close during the first 2-3 days of the initial click [see also this post]. However, since over 75% of affiliate prefer to have longer cookie life (from 15 to 90 days), you want to take this data into account.

– 2 –

Payment Threshold

I was discussing this with an affiliate program manager of a major brand just a few days ago as they were planning on lowering down the payment threshold for their affiliates. Obviously, the more achievable it is, the better; especially if we are taking affiliate programs run on in-house platforms, where unlike on affiliate networks affiliates do not have an option of aggregating payments across different merchants.

– 3 –

Network-based or In-house?

As one would expect, nearly half of the respondents stated that they prefer network-based affiliate programs, while 38.6% said they do not have any preference, and 14% chose in-house programs over affiliate network ones.

– 4 –

Most Important Factors

Among the top factors in choosing one affiliate program over the other the following 3 were mentioned: (i) payout amount (30.7%), (ii) brand awareness (25.6%), and (iii) EPC (18.1%). Affiliate program management came fourth with its 16.1% of votes.

– 5 –

EPC

Obviously, when it comes to EPC, everything is not as black-n-white as it is with other questions. The distribution is fairly even with (a) 30.8% of affiliates deeming $5.01-$10 EPC to be suitable, (b) 24.2% wanting EPC of $30 and higher, and (c) 15% working comfortably with affiliate programs that have an EPC of less than $5. Obviously, it is not so much the amount of earning per 100 clicks, but the overall earning potential and conversion that ultimately matter most for affiliates.

– 6 –

Reversal Rate

Very few affiliate networks disclose this metric up-front, but it is obviously one of the most important ones as it directly affects affiliate earnings. From the above pie chart, it is clear that over 50% of affiliates will not work with affiliate programs that have a reversal rate of over 5%. Make your conclusions for yourself.

– 7 –

Payment Method

Finally, the above factor has to be highlighted. Unless your affiliate program/network offers direct bank deposit as a payment method, you’re in trouble. Checks and PayPal are good, but the vast majority of affiliates do not want to mess with anything but direct deposit.

Once again, the full 2010 AffStat Report may be viewed and/or downloaded here. Thank you, Affiliate Summit for an excellent product!

As the year 2009 is coming to an end, many are looking back to highlight the most popular trends and developments in their industries, and in a similar fashion I have decided to devote my today’s blog post to highlighting the top (most popular by the number of participants) affiliate polls that I’ve run in the course of the year. They ranged from fun ones (like the first two) to more serious ones (I’m calling them “educational” polls, as merchants have a lot to learn from them).

So here are my top 7 affiliate marketing polls run in 2009:

— GENERIC POLLS —

1. Are you larks, owls, or hummingbirds? [poll]

2. How many alcoholic drinks do you consume on a weekly basis? [poll]

— EDUCATIONAL POLLS —

1. Do you use affiliate program directories to find programs to join? [poll]

2. Do you read program agreements prior to applying? [poll]

3. What’s the maximum acceptable wait for a program application decision? [poll]

4. What’s the maximum acceptable banner file size? [poll]

5. How long (in business days) are you willing to wait for merchant’s reply before giving up? [poll]

If you are an affiliate and haven’t yet participated in any of the above 7 polls, I’d like to invite you to do so. These polls serve as excellent points of reference for me (and I’m sure other affiliate program managers too) to send merchants to. You can participate in any of these by clicking the [poll] link next to each question.

Three days ago Forrester Research, Inc. has published their “US Affiliate Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014″ based on based in interviews of “vendor and user companies, including Commission Junction, Intuit, LinkShare, Pepperjam.com, Performance Marketing Alliance, Stateless Systems, ValueClick, and Vertive” [details]. In it Forrester forecasts the affiliate marketing industry to grow from $1.9 billion in 2009 to $4 billion by 2014.

The global recession is reported to have slowed down the growth of the industry in 2009, but affiliate marketing is expected “to return to double-digit growth in 2010,” and grow significantly further in the following years [source].

Here are some of the key projections:

• Growth drivers: (i) better affiliate site content, and (ii) an increasingly transparent dialogue between affiliates and marketers.
• Social media is not expected to be one of the sources of considerable growth. At least not within the next 5 years.
• Search (paid and organic) is expected to remain the key arena for affiliate marketers to utilize.
• Top 3 affiliate marketing spenders will be (i) financial service providers, (ii) retailers, and (iii) online education.
• Direct payments to affiliates will represent the majority of the affiliate marketing spending (57% by 2014), but affiliate networks will also “remain highly relevant”.
  

For comparison, in June 2008 JupiterResearch (which was acquired by Forrester on July 31 of that same year) forecasted online marketers to spend $2.1 billion on affiliate marketing fees in 2008, with US online affiliate marketing spending reaching $3.3 billion in 2012 (cf: US Online Affiliate Marketing Forecast, 2007-2012).

A few days ago Shawn Collins wrote a good post on recruiting targeted affiliates, in the comments to which I suggested several more me methods of affiliate recruitment. Among these methods I have mentioned affiliate program directories as one of the ways to get a word about an affiliate program out. I personally have never measured the success of recruiting affiliates through program directories. However, every time I do a comparative affiliate marketing analysis for a new client, I see affiliate program directories ranking extremely well in nearly every niche. Here’s an example:

Take “credit card affiliate program”  and variations of this key phrase, and you’ll see that  there is a total of over 5,000 people searching for these every month on Google:

When I search for this key phrase just now, here is what I see on the first page of matches (affiliate program directories are highlighted):

…and the same can be seen with nearly every [niche]+[affiliate program] key phase typed in (anywhere between 3 and 5 of the top 10 results belong to affiliate program directories).

Additionally, I see affiliate program directories having fairly good (and improving) Alexa rankings.

Back to Shawn Collins’ post. Commenting on my suggestions, a fellow-OPM, Debbie Carney challenged the idea that affiliate program directories carry much value in affiliate recruitment. She wrote that “even if affiliate directories show up in searches, I don’t think an affiliate has ever joined a program I run because of being listed in one.” Since I have never measured this myself, I have decided to put together a poll to find out what affiliates really think/do.

Here are the results of that poll as they look at the time of this post:

The above data made me conclude that affiliates are, after all, using them, but definitely not the majority of affiliates are.

Then last night when I got a hold of the new AffStat Report, another important piece of the puzzle was found. Here’s one of the pie charts from AffStat:

So, 18% of affiliates still do find out about affiliate programs to join from “affiliate directories”.

So, are affiliate program directories dying? Probably not.

If you haven’t yet voted on my above-quoted poll, I’d certainly love to have you cast your vote as well. Many thanks in advance.

It is good to see this year being so fruitful for affiliate marketing reports. In February Econsultancy released their UK Affiliate Census 2009. In March the US Affiliate Census 2009 was published.  Another great report — this time from the Affiliate Summit — is being released tomorrow, June 15, 2009. Thanks to Shawn Collins, I’ve had a privilege of studying this brand new 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report (sample: 450+ affiliates) today, and in this post I’d like to give you a quick sneak peak at it.  Starting form tomorrow, you will be able to download the full report for free at AffStat.com.

Today I’d like to turn your attention to just four charts that I have personally found to be of interest.

– 1 –

The top 3 decisive factors in choosing a merchant whose affiliate program to join are:

1. Payout amount (24%)
2. Affiliate management (23%)
3. Brand awareness (23%)

Needless to say, that I especially appreciate the presence of that “affiliate management” option in the top 3.

– 2 –

The highest reversal rates affiliates are willing to accept are:

1. Up to 3% (22%)
2. 5.01 to 10% (21%)
3. More than 10% (19%)

Very interesting data. It is a bit surprising how tolerant affiliates, in reality, are.

– 3 –

Frequency with which affiliates would like to hear from their affiliate manager:

1. Monthly (44%)
2. Weekly (39%)
3. Quarterly (11%)

…and 6% of the respondents said they do not want hear from affiliate program managers ever! Wow.

Between those that have voted for “monthly” and those that chose the “weekly” option (a total of 83% of respondents!) one may as well conclude that semi-monthly newsletters may not be a bad idea.

– 4 –

The top 3 communication channels that affiliates prefer affiliate program managers to use are:

1. E-mail (42%, of which 38% chose mass e-mail, and 4% personal messages)
2. Blog (17%)
3. Network internal e-mail (17%)

The above data both underscores the importance of running affiliate program-specific blogs, as well as reveals some interesting data on the subject of network-internal e-mail.

Much more information will be accessible starting from tomorrow at AffStat.com.

Let’s start with quick definitions first:

Lark (aka “morning person”) — individual boosting with energy from early in the morning, and not as productive late in the evening.

Owl — needs caffeine in the morning, cannot wake up without an alarm, most productive in the evenings and at late night hours.

Hummingbird — a person ready for action both early and late

A study has shown that about 10% of people “qualify as larks”, 20% follow the “more owl-ish” patterns, while the rest of the population are really hummingbirds [source].

Over the past three weeks I have been polling affiliate marketers, trying to determine whether we are mostly larks, owls or hummingbirds. The results of the poll roughly correspond to the above-quoted stats. Here’s what the pie chart has ended up look like:

So, it looks like most of affiliate marketers are also hummingbirds.

Just to remind you all, eConsultancy is looking for affiliates to participate in their Affiliate Census report for 2009, and the cut off date is tomorrow (27 January 2009)

Being a UK company, last year they focused solely on the UK affiliates. This year they are also covering the US market, and this is definitely good to see. You may read more about the Affiliate Census 2009 at the AffiliateProgramAdvice blog. Here are the links to the surveys:

• Survey for US Affiliates
• Survey for UK Affiliates

Keep in mind that the deadline is tomorrow. Don’t procrastinate! Participate today.