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.

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.

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.

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.

So many things have happened in the past 10 days it’s hard to choose what to write about! On top of everything else, I was at an entrepreneurs’ conference last week in Singapore. (Aside: If you are an owner/founder with an established business, reach out to me and I can connect you with this community, which includes a few affiliate marketers.)

Of all the developments, the one that seems most timely, if not significant, is Google’s recent inclusion of an anti-spam policy against “site reputation abuse,” including this specific example: “A news site hosting coupons provided by a third-party with little to no oversight or involvement from the hosting site, and where the main purpose is to manipulate search rankings.” 

Famed SEO Lily Ray asked on X/Twitter (doesn’t “ex-Twitter” make more sense than Twitter/X?) if enforcement of this would be manual or algorithmic, to which Google SearchLiaison responded, “Both,” indicating a serious level of intent. 

Forbes’ addition of a no-indexing tag to its coupon directory was cited over a week ago as an example of heading off a penalty, though multiple SEOs observed loss of SERP ranks and traffic for coupon and reviews pages. Ray contended there was a “double whammy” with the combination of no-indexing and algorithmic changes.

Since then, the coupon portion, managed by Upfeat Media, has apparently been shuttered entirely. (Forbes Vetted, which my sources indicate is operated separately, is still up.) The dramatic policy change and outcome merit some commentary. 

Upfeat Media, like its better known competitor, Global Savings Group, whose https://coupons.cnn.com/ is still up, is a subdomain leasing affiliate. For the record, they are, at most, indirect competitors to FMTC, because our core customer is an enterprise affiliate with its own relationships and platform. While we do have our sub-affiliate network called FreshReach, its strategy is speed to market and long-tail monetization, not being a concierge turnkey solution offering merchant negotiations, content curation, display technology, and backend operations. Moreover, the merchant sets are typically much smaller — in the low hundreds as opposed to FMTC’s low tens of thousands.

Thus, as a relatively neutral observer, I can sincerely say this takedown misses the real villains: sites that post totally fake data. While the frustration over search engine manipulation is understandable, subdomain leasing affiliates, which may also operate their own properties, generally publish valid, updated content. This means consumers have a good experience. When clickbait codes don’t work, that means there is a bad experience. My guess is that many people stop shopping through coupon sites entirely, which means merchants miss out, especially long-tail merchants.

My hope is that Google’s next ruling will be to penalize sites with demonstrably bad data, which should improve the overall user experience and, I think, the success of the affiliate channel.

The post Did Google Take Out the Wrong Guys? appeared first on FMTC.

This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: A major retailer files for bankruptcy, a slew of new e-commerce tools for you to try, and journalism meets marketing.

• Apparel brand Express files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and plans to shutter at least 95 stores.
  
• From Amazon to Walmart, Alibaba to Shopify, check out a roundup of new e-commerce tools.
  
• Learn more about incrementality, which measures additional sales from affiliate efforts and improves affiliate program evaluation and optimization.
  
• As brand budgets slim down, the pressure for ROI increases. Here are eight ways creators can build resilience in the face of smaller budgets.
  
• Martech Record’s Smooth Operator podcast welcomes a former Hearst editor and current e-commerce VP to discuss the intersection of marketing and journalism.
  
• Check out these nine key affiliate management strategies to keep your program afloat.

The post Affiliate Roundup: Express, Incrementality, & More appeared first on FMTC.

YouTube’s new shopping features for creators, including “Shopping Collections” and “Affiliate Hub,” have had a burst of coverage this past week, including in TechCrunch, Hello Partner, Practical Ecommerce, Search Engine Journal, Modern Retail, and AdExchanger. So much coverage indicates to me some kind of public relations push, which, in turn, signals serious intent by YouTube. 

I wrote a blurb just over a month ago about YouTube, TikTok, and X’s disparate treatment toward affiliate, with YouTube being the most favorable, but it bears more detailed commentary in light of a subsequent Business Insider (paywall) article that Jesse Lakes of Geniuslink shared.

From the article: “While it’s still early days for YouTube’s native affiliate program, Business Insider’s conversations with several talent managers and creators suggest the tool may be having a hard time attracting creators who have a bevy of other affiliate options to choose from.” 

“Native affiliate program” is, for me, a novel term to describe a situation like this, which itself is kind of novel — i.e., a platform acting as a sub-affiliate network for its creators. Whether or not this catches on both as a term and a practice may depend on YouTube’s success. The article cites creators already having direct relationships with other monetization solutions, such as Amazon, LTK, and MagicLinks, or niche advertisers, such as finance-related companies.

A couple cited commission rates were competitive, so integration into creator workflows might come down to YouTube’s tools, which it could be in a good position to cultivate. The company also offered bonuses last year to entice participation, according to BI. 

Two other challenges were the threshold of 15,000 subscribers and fear of demonetization (i.e., a creator would keep direct-relationship revenue even if it lost revshare dollars), though the latter seems to impact political channels, which probably post fewer affiliate links anyway (at least at this time). 

Thus, YouTube’s embrace of affiliate, while most welcome, may have come too late in the game. Other platforms should take note. 

The post Did YouTube Wait Too Long for YouAffiliate? appeared first on FMTC.

This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: Amazon offers even more ways to target shoppers, UK consumers show their preferences for a good deal, and Buy Now Pay Later continues to grow.

• Studies show coupons are not “a bygone era” — and are even on the rise.
  
• UK shoppers report prioritizing a good deal, loyalty rewards, and employee welfare when choosing brands.
  
• Amazon expands its targeted-coupon categories, offering more opportunities for brands to connect with consumers.
  
• Big Tech’s ad transparency falls short, hindering research and accountability.
  
• Advertisers, frustrated by Meta’s bugs and lack of compensation, consider spending elsewhere.
  
• BNPL is growing its customer base — and finding stiffer competition.
  
• There are several factors to consider when integrating affiliate efforts into email marketing.

The post Affiliate Roundup: Targeted Coupons, British Shopping, & More appeared first on FMTC.