June’s Affiliate Marketing Council meeting saw a bumper turnout of more than 50 affiliate, merchant, agency and network employees for what proved to be one of the liveliest meetings to date.
Top of the agenda was behavioural retargeting and de-duplication against natural search. These are two subjects that have recently come to the fore of affiliate marketing and will require further discussion by all the networks who are members of the Council, to decide on whether we pursue a collective approach.
Behavioural retargeting (BR) is an interesting topic as it deals with the type of promotion not usually seen within the affiliate arena. For those who don’t know, BR serves banner ads for advertisers whose sites consumers have previously visited but failed to purchase from. In other words, there was an obvious interest in the products or services offered by an advertiser yet the consumer didn’t transact, and therefore in an effort to close the sale relevant banner ads are served on portals and publisher sites after the advertiser site has been visited. Many BR companies currently operate on a CPC model and deal directly with advertisers but some are now looking to turn their attention to affiliate networks as they recognise they offer easy access to thousands of advertisers.
While this could expand the reach of affiliate marketing, looking deeper into the issue raises a number of questions that we’ll need to address. Some of these points were discussed at last week’s meeting and this short piece can’t do justice to the depth of debate that is needed. But at Digital Window we’re inclined to believe the key point is on what we would term ‘cookie weighting’.
BR companies are serving up (potentially) millions of impressions and have required networks to agree that they will run post impression (or post view) cookies on the programmes they promote to make the activity commercially viable. So assuming PI/PV cookies are in place what cookie hierarchy should exist?
There is a general consensus that PI/PV cookies are a ‘softer’ action; a click carrying far more intention to engage with the product or advertiser. At Digital Window we strongly believe click is king, overwriting PI/PV cookies whilst not being overwritten by the impressions that may be served afterwards.
This issue was discussed in more detail on the A4UForum a few weeks back and some of the networks including Affiliate Window gave some insight into their current thinking on the subject. Presently there’s collective debate amongst the networks as to whether there should be more of a standardised approach towards working not only with BR companies but PI/PV cookies.
For now this activity doesn’t impact affiliates as little, if any, BR companies are operating via networks. But as an industry we will need to better understand the impact this potential next stage of affiliate evolution could have on all of us or what the impact will be on affiliate campaigns if BR companies choose to operate directly.
The next meeting is in London on 26th August. If you’d like to sign up for the agenda points and minutes please drop me an email. You can also follow the Council on Twitter @IAB_AMC.
Kevin Edwards
Strategy Director
