Not Much of an Impression

Written by Brook Schaaf

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In what can only be described as a terrible lapse of judgment, PI LIVE had me as a speaker in London two weeks ago. The topic was growing the affiliate channel 10x larger than it is now, which led to many side conversations. 

In rough numbers, affiliate spend in the U.S. for 2024 is projected to be $11 billion, or 3% out of a total of $397 billion, much lower than the 10%-20% it typically drives, for retail programs. Lead programs, in my experience, are often higher. So by this, at least, affiliate should already be multiples larger. (I’ll save other points for the future.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly for an affiliate show, the proposition was met with general interest and agreement, with a fair amount of discussion around just what has been holding us back. As usual, no decisive conclusions were drawn. 

After I got home, a contributing factor occurred to me for the first time. Now that we’ve deprecated FMTC’s legacy v1/2 software (hallelujah), we’re planning an outbound advertising campaign that includes — believe it or not — display advertising. In brief, our setup allocates various ads (paid search, retargeting, matched, lookalike, review, social boosts) across Meta, LinkedIn, Google Search, Google Display, Bing, Adroll, and review sites (G2, Capterra, SourceForge). 

What’s missing from this audience-targeting and impression-based campaign? Affiliate, of course. To be fair, this is not entirely unreasonable; impressions have never been a thing in our space. Sure, they probably are for select relationships, but ever since I’ve been here impression-tracking pixels have usually been stripped out by affiliates. I don’t think they’re ever requested by our subscribers. They just aren’t important in an outcomes-compensated relationship. 

Our consultant does recommend affiliate advertising as part of his generic mix … later in the process. But by that point, time and money may be a little short. From this different vantage point, I understood for the first time how affiliate can be an afterthought, if not overlooked entirely. 

Note, though, that Google Search makes the cut even though it belongs on the performance marketing side of the equation. Perhaps it’s simply too obvious that you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t start with it right away. (Immediate delivery of traffic probably doesn’t hurt, either.) 

It made me wonder what things would look like if affiliate were set up before these campaigns, which might make more sense because it takes longer to get traction but has baked-in profitability. Given my own belated realization, perhaps we can work to convince CMOs and planning executives that they, too, have been laboring under the wrong impression.