This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: Take a closer look at full-funnel planning and strategies, learn about an elevated affiliate reward program called Shareback, and more.

• Gen Z’s ecommerce habits require brands to focus on social media, sustainability, and advanced AI technologies.
  
• Full-funnel affiliate planning enhances customer journey engagement, integrating strategy, partner alignment, and personalized data for growth.
  
• Termination threats to affiliates are demotivating and, at worst, counterproductive.
  
• Merge influencer reach with affiliate conversion to maximize full-funnel marketing success.
  
• WeShop launches new program “Shareback” to elevate and reward affiliate relationships.
  
• Take a look at these important affiliate marketing terms, models, and strategies to enhance your program.

The post Affiliate Roundup: Full-Funnel Planning, Gen Z Trends, Shareback, & More appeared first on FMTC.

For a complete list of all merchant programs, please see our public-facing Directory. Current FMTC users can add new stores easily via signup links or the Manage Merchants page. (Clicking the link will allow you to see all unselected merchants that are currently available to add to your account.)

The post New FMTC Merchants Include Antler, Ferrari World, ILIA Beauty, Royal Canin, & Zodiac Watches appeared first on FMTC.

This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: MFA continues to gain traction web-wide, Google further improves product search results, and podcast ad revenue is on the up and up.

• [Case Studies, Profiles & Awards] Affiliate links masquerading as organic search results threaten transparency and trust.
  
• [Case Studies, Profiles, & Awards] Dotdash Meredith partners with OpenAI to boost ad business and protect traffic.
  
• [Affiliate-Adjacent] A study of over 17,000 campaigns found that cost per lead increased by an average of 25% over the past year.
  
• [Affiliate-Adjacent] Podcast ad revenue rebounds to a projected $2 billion after a period of slow growth.
  
• [Affiliate-Adjacent] Google enhances product search results, streamlining price comparison within SERPs.
  
• [Affiliate-Adjacent] Almost half of all internet traffic in 2023 was the result of bots, highlighting a problem with open web programmatic.
  
• [Affiliate-Adjacent] MFA content farms — and questionable profits — are gaining traction at best and running rampant at worst.

The post Affiliate Roundup: MFA, CPL, SERPs, & More appeared first on FMTC.

Written by Brook Schaaf

Online publication Futurism posted a lengthy exposé about low-quality content in, and out, of the affiliate space, a follow-up to their piece about Sports Illustrated posting AI-written content by fake AI-generated writers with fake AI-generated headshots.

The focus was on AdVon Commerce, a company long active in the affiliate commerce space, which reportedly provided content for the since-shuttered Amazon Onsite Associates Program. As detailed in the piece, AdVon has more recently provided content to an impressive roster of local and national media companies. 

Borrowing the much-discussed term from Google’s announcement, Futurism characterizes this as an example of “site reputation abuse,” though it is unclear if there was ever a search penalty or that any given piece of content was necessarily monetized with affiliate links.

Certain observant humans raised a hue and cry, resulting in the loss of the commercial content relationship, the CEO’s job, and the rights to the intellectual property of Sports Illustrated by the publisher, The Arena Group.

This is the “tsunami of crap.” Any media company (and just about every business and person might be a media company today) probably has some incentive to produce as much as it possibly can. This has more or less been true for decades, but what’s different now is the average consumer’s easy access to everything and the inability to sift through it all. Indeed, many have speculated that Google itself is poorly equipped to police this.

What comes next?

First, don’t kid yourself. AI content quality will improve, even if the hallucinations never go away. Amazon just appointed to its board AI heavyweight Dr. Andrew Ng, who has researched the application of multiple models (think AI writer, editor, reviewer, etc.). This will make the sifting harder. 

Second, if trust is lost because readers are overwhelmed, many consumers may stop searching for “best” reviews, the way they seem to have for coupons, which means there could be a drop in, or at least slowed growth of, commerce revenue for the affiliate channel.

Third, more people go straight to Amazon. 

Rumor has it that poor quality content is one reason Amazon shut down the OAP. What a prescient competitive move it will turn out to have been should that content have polluted the rest of the internet, making it too risky to even use.

The post Humans Claim AI Scalp appeared first on FMTC.

For a complete list of all merchant programs, please see our public-facing Directory. Current FMTC users can add new stores easily via signup links or the Manage Merchants page. (Clicking the link will allow you to see all unselected merchants that are currently available to add to your account.)

The post New FMTC Merchants Include BIMBA Y LOLA, Brooks, L’OR Coffee, Nordstrom Rack, & TENA appeared first on FMTC.

This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: Elevate Summit makes a major move out of the computer screen. BarkleyOKRP expands their performance marketing offerings with a new acquisition. Amazon’s investment in timely delivery pays dividends.

Special announcement: ELEVATE Summit announces first-ever in-person conference, September 16-17 in London.

• After merging in March, BarkleyOKRP acquires Adlucent to expand their performance marketing.
  
• Google cracks down on fake coupon content to protect consumers.
  
• Diversify content, build community, and secure sustainable revenue for niche sites.
  
• The 2024 Affiliate & Partnership Industry Review by IAB delves into industry insights, including advertiser spending trends and publisher revenue growth.
  
• Amazon bets on fast delivery — with monumental results.
  
• Marketers are shifting spend from big tech to affiliate marketing due to control issues.
  
• Affiliate marketing: Opportunity or online scam? Check out this crash course.

The post Affiliate Roundup: Elevate Summit, Niche Sites, & More appeared first on FMTC.

Written by Brook Schaaf

This is the second of what may turn into a four- or five-parter (with the DOJ suit) on Google and the affiliate space. Last week we covered Google’s announcement around site reputation abuse (bolt-on coupon and commerce content for sites like CNN and LA Times) and the since-passed May 5th implementation. Apparently dramatic changes were noticeable on the 6th, but let’s give this topic more time to settle before diving in again.

Today’s related(?) topic cropped up on my radar some months ago but I must admit I failed to give it proper heed because, frankly, I thought the posts were just clickbait, typified by headlines such as “How I am going bankrupt.” Such, however, was not the case and this issue has clearly come to a head. SEO Lily Ray posted a list of domains with estimated traffic drops between a whopping 68% and 95%, noting most are affiliate sites. Separately, an agency principal told me their commerce content affiliates were down by about 25%.

The poster child for this devastating reduction is HouseFresh, which provided a lengthy account and criticism of various players, not just Google. In particular, an SEO technique called “keyword swarming” has been fingered.

By this account it may seem like the little content guy is being pushed down, though on the Martech Record Slack workspace, Stephen Regenold, founder of GearJunkie, pointed out that HouseFresh is hardly an aw-shucks-I-just-blogged-what-I-loved site. It boasts a 17-person masthead and is owned by NeoMam, a sophisticated content and SEO shop.

This prompts the question: Who deserves the highest position and its accompanying traffic, which has commercial intent and is valuable? To be fair to HouseFresh, they explicitly stated that “Google doesn’t owe us anything.” Still, it’s hard to argue the site doesn’t have great content or for many to feel that this isn’t fair play or what’s best for the consumer.

Without fresh revenue, there may no longer be fresh content from dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of commerce content sites, some of which are quite good. This will, in all likelihood, further harm SERPs. For operators and employees, who have to move on to other projects, it may be that no good comes of this. For the affiliate channel, it at least gives testimony that this may be the optimal monetization strategy for certain kinds of content — provided, of course, that you can get traffic. 

The post Commerce Clout, Cash, and Catastrophe appeared first on FMTC.

For a complete list of all merchant programs, please see our public-facing Directory. Current FMTC users can add new stores easily via signup links or the Manage Merchants page. (Clicking the link will allow you to see all unselected merchants that are currently available to add to your account.)

The post New FMTC Merchants Include CNC Tattoo, GE Appliances, Incase, L’Amour Pearls, & TikTok Shop appeared first on FMTC.

This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: Cookies fight to see another day, Threads expands its creator offerings, and The NY Post provides a good use case for first-party data.

• Retail marketing firm Neptune Retail buys Quotient Technology for $430 million in cash.
  
• Revcontent Insider challenges claims on native ads, emphasizing their vitality.
  
• Google delays cookie deprecation, leaving marketers to pursue alternative solutions.
  
• Meta’s Threads, which is seeing stable growth, invites creators to earn bonuses.
  
• Estimating affiliate marketing growth is complex and often unpredictable; merchants are urged to focus on controllable aspects and view it as a long-term investment.
  
• The New York Post leverages first-party data for targeted ad sales and growth.

The post Affiliate Roundup: Neptune Retail’s M&A, Cookie Delays, & More appeared first on FMTC.