PerformanceIN LIVE is the annual two-day event which celebrates measurable marketing across all channels, and focuses on how best to measure, learn and optimise digital performance. This year, our Head of Affiliates, Matt Brown, joined the Tradedoubler panel to discuss the changing performance marketing funnel, and was also joined by David Ayre from Smarter Click, Mike Fisher from Philips, and Marc Vallverdu from Global Savings Group.
Key takeaways
The panel initially touched on affiliate marketing’s place within the performance funnel, and noted the value of recognising the funnel from the perspective of the customer rather than the marketer. This view enables affiliate marketers to understand the other touchpoints and communications customers may already be interacting with from a given brand, which will inform them on when and how best to target.
This leads on nicely to the importance of having quality data to inform planning and strategy, whether that be through an integrated platform or technology, it was clearly underlined that data should inform the logic behind affiliate campaigns. That being said, there’s often disparity across different data points, so it’s important marketers invest in a tool, technology, or processes to obtain clean and accurate data.
The next area the panel highlighted as being critical to affiliate performance and strategy was tracking. They clarified the importance of attribution data being fed into measurement or analytics tools in order to correctly associate engagement to affiliate activity (and any other activity that has led to engagement for that matter).
Overall, a big topic of conversation was around the pre-purchase and post-purchase stages of the funnel and how well activity needed to be measured during these phases in order to paint a clear picture of the customer lifecycle for affiliate marketers.
As such, it was concluded that customer journeys today are distinguished by their multi-path, multi-touch, and multichannel nature. Where we are today, marketers have more data to hand than ever before, and the panel noted that it’s important that marketers own the complete customer journey and understand how and why customers interact with their brand at each part of the journey, rather than focusing on specific touchpoints within it. The former allows big picture thinking and a clearer customer strategy to formulate, whereas the latter encourages teams to work in silos and leads to inefficiencies (or worse, inaccuracies) when it comes to targeting and attribution.
