Term Paper on "Customer Acquisition Through Affiliates"

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Affiliate Marketing

Customer Acquisition Through Affiliates: Current State of the Issues

Affiliate marketing has taken the Internet by storm. In theory, it represents an efficient means for getting the word out to a targeted audience in a manner that theoretically takes them right to the purchase point. However, the industry of affiliate marketing suffers from several maladies that harm its ability to deliver as promised. The first is a lack of academic research into affective techniques and customers response. The second is a lack of industry standards and methods. The third factor that harms affiliate marketers is the actions of unscrupulous individuals and companies who have destroyed the trust of the consumer in these programs. This research explores the key issues being faced by the industry, current literature on the subject, and offers practical recommendations that the industry needs to take in order to become a more effective marketing venue.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Web Crawling, Search Engine Optimization and Affiliate Programs

New Research in Affiliate and Click Marketing

Conclusion

Recommendations

References

Introduction

Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique where a business rewards one or more affiliates for bringing them visitors and customers. The affiliate earns a certain incentive for bringing the primary business customers, or visitors. Affiliates are rewarded in many ways including cash in the form o

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f a flat fee, percentage of sales, free gifts, or a reduction of their own fees. Affiliate marketing overlaps many other types of Internet marketing. They use the organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing and display advertising as methods to drive customers to the target site. Affiliate programs receive much less attention than other Internet marketing techniques. However, they are still a cheap and practical force in driving sales for many businesses, both large and small.

Affiliate programs are preferred by merchants because they only pay for advertising that results in a sale, or a customer impression. However, successful affiliate programs require much time and effort to make them work. Several companies have developed that provide outsourcing services for the affiliate programs. The there are similar to an advertising agency, only they specialize in affiliate marketing programs.

Affiliate marketing is an effective way to reach targeted clientele with products and services using others as a venue for driving customers to the primary marketing site. The invention of affiliate marketing is similar to word of mouth. A person goes to a certain site for a specific type of content. While there, they hear about another related product or service that they might be interested in. This seems like a marketer's dream, but there is more behind affiliate programs than what is on the surface.

When one begins to conduct a literature review on the topic of affiliate marketing, it becomes apparent that there is a lot of information available, but that only a small percentage of it is credible information. There are many sites that promote affiliate marketing as a "get rich" scheme, or that offer suggestions to improve affiliate marketing programs. This was found in both the current research and that conducted by Brear and Barnes, 2008). Little of the information is considered credible in terms of academic scholarship or professional level research. It seems as if affiliate marketing has developed on a long and twisted path without direction from academic scholarship. Let us now examine the literature that does exist on affiliate marketing.

Literature Review

A journey into literature on affiliate marketing begins with a search for books on the subject. Unfortunately, from an academic standpoint, many of the books found were how to books that were of little or no value to an understanding of theory or practice in affiliate marketing, General books on marketing were more useful in this respect. Many of the same marketing principles that apply to other marketing media also apply to affiliate marketing. From this standpoint, affiliate marketing can be considered a marketing media and does not exist as a different category in terms of marketing theory. For the purposes of this study, as a result of an exploration on marketing theory, affiliate marketing is treated as a marketing media and does not constitute the development of separate theory. The only theoretical book on affiliate marketing that was found during this research was Strategic Affiliate Marketing by S. Goldschmidt, S. Junghagen and U. Harris.

Janssen, (2007) found that the Internet can be a useful tool to focus marketing efforts. The Internet can be used to identify customer needs and wants, provide an additional channel for consumers to access information and make purchases, and as a medium to achieve customer satisfaction. Hoffman and Novak (2000) were among the first researchers to discover the strategic aspects of an affiliate marketing program. They compared affiliate marketing to pay-per-view, banner, and text advertisements. They found affiliate programs were much more effective because no fee was paid if it did not result in a sale. In this respect, banner, text, and pay-per-view advertising was no different from other forms of mass media already in existence, such as television, radio, or print ads. From this standpoint, affiliate marketing programs are much more efficient from an operational standpoint.

Research was conducted to determine how affiliate marketing affected the ranking of advertising websites in search engines. The results o the study found that the size of the affiliate program had a positive effect on search engine rankings. In addition, newly added affiliate programs tended to improve rankings. The study also found that improvements in search engine rankings were less in programs that operated in highly competitive markets (Janssen, 2007).

Web Crawling, Search Engine Optimization and Affiliate Programs

A majority of academic information on affiliate marketing centered on web crawling, an understanding of search engine mechanics and search engine optimization. A survey of internet users found that most users do no go deeper than five pages. Therefore, many web crawlers do not download more than five pages (Castillo, 2004). In June of 2005, Google released information on the size of its image database. At that point, it was over 1.3 billion. Since that time, they have stopped counting (Price, 2005). These databases have only grown since that time. These figures emphasize the difficulty of the number one problem being faced by marketers: letting the client base know that you are there. It is easy to get lost on the web, never to be found again.

Website links not only increase search engine rankings, but they are also a viable way to drive web traffic to the site (Thelwall, 2001). Smith and Chaffey found that the Internet is a useful tool to focus marketing efforts. Understanding the dynamics of search engine rankings plays a key role in the ability to increase search engine rankings and drive customers to the target website. Web users were found to go to the first website that they came to and no more than 10 down the page in most circumstances (Bar-lian, Hasan, and Levene, 2006).

An new issue that will affect affiliate marketing and the ability to draw new visitors to websites will be the introduction of social bookmarking systems. Rather than using an algorithm as with traditional search engine rankings, this system will use the user ratings as a criteria for determining ranking (Krause, Hotho, and Stumme, 2008). This will put pressure on websites to provide quality content, as they will not automatically be included in top rankings just by doing their search engine optimization. The use of social annotations is now considered in the ability to optimize search engines (Bao, Xue and Wu et al., 2007). Understanding how and why people search will become increasingly important to affiliate marketers, as they must understand what drives their audience to be motivated to seek them out.

In a large scale study, it was found the a number of behavioral properties dictated user search behavior and that these patterns were predictive of future behavior (Adar, Weld, and Bershad, 2007). Teevan, Adar, and Jones et al. (2006) found that search patterns repeated themselves in periodic patterns and that users would enter the same search phrase to re-find information that they had viewed before. These studies underscore the importance of keyword usage and search engine optimization in terms the ability to launch a successful affiliate marketing program.

New Research in Affiliate and Click Marketing

It was found that many articles that were written about search engines and the behavior of users seemed to reach a peak in academic articles and white papers for professional seminars around 2000 and again in 2005-2006. For several years, not much academic research appeared on the topic. Now a new group research is beginning to appear. Much of it involved improving search rankings, but user clicks is beginning to spark new interest in this user behavior as a topic of interest.

Hillard, Schroedl, and Manavoglu et al., (2010) found that live user tests and evaluations closely predicted user behavior that could be used to improve the quality of the search page.… READ MORE

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Quoted Instructions for "Customer Acquisition Through Affiliates" Assignment:

“

This course title is Emarketing and my chosen topic is Customer acquisition through Affiliates

Please only use academic published books, journals. No web source is allowed, except the well-established academic organization or government websites(no more than 3),leave out non-academic internet sources, except the company website of which the data are required.

The format of this paper is Report, the word count is 2000 words.

1 Title

2 Table of Contents

3 Abstract (or Executive Summary)

4 Introduction

5 Main text

6 Conclusions

7 Recommendations

8 Bibliography

9 Appendix

It is essential that you write your report so that its order conforms to the above format.

Please refer to http://data.bolton.ac.uk/bissto/studyskills/report/standard.htm for more details

Guidlines from the

What is the question?

60% from a project report which critically appraises a topic from the module

My chosen topic is Customer acquisition through Affiliates

b. This should consist of academic materials to give rigour such as journals and books.

c. Make use of industry and news sources. The types of links added on Twitter give examples of what to read.

d. Observation of your chosen websites and others. As an example Alexa and Google Trends.

3. Plan your work

a. What theoretical frameworks/academic ideas can you use?

i. Firstly refer to academic papers on your possible topic.

ii. Another approach is to take existing theories, for example on Brands, and apply them to your chosen topic. Either approach can work well.

4. Write the project clearly making use of your research.

a. Find time to give yourself clear blocks to write out your ideas. Switch off the Web when you are doing this to avoid distractions.

b. Structure your work clearly.

i. Introduction which sets the scene and explains what the work will look at.

ii. The main body. It is recommended you start with a brief background of the topic

iii. Then an***** your chosen subject using the research you have done.

iv. Conclude briefly.

c. Embed the references in the text, e.g. The Internet has enabled firms to develop new forms of CRM strategy Smith (2007).

This shows that you have done research and your project is informed by such research.

d. Include all references at the end.

e. Present your work clearly. Make use of diagrams, tables, images, screenshots where relevant.

5. Make sure you offer analysis. This can be:

a. Your own well thought out insights.

b. Applying the ideas in an academic paper to another context. As an example an article written about a topic say 5 years ago. Are the lessons still relevant now? What has changed?

c. What can you say that will be interesting? What do you learn from the process? What makes the topic interesting after researching it and writing the project?

d. As an example say you looked at the Advertising methods of a well known company. What do they use each method to do, how do these methods work together etc.

How to Reference "Customer Acquisition Through Affiliates" Term Paper in a Bibliography

“Customer Acquisition Through Affiliates.” A1-TermPaper.com, 2011, https://www.a1-termpaper.com/topics/essay/affiliate-marketing-customer-acquisition/82235. Accessed 5 Oct 2024.

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