It’s official, the first results from our affiliate poll are in and the vast majority of affiliates prefer CPC campaigns.
The underlying results are telling on the state of the industry.
The affiliates polled were asked whether they’d prefer a CPM, CPC or CPL campaign.
Affiliates were able to answer once and select multiple options.
29% of affiliates preferred CPM – interestingly enough the respondents ran mostly high traffic sites.
28% of respondents showed a clear bias towards CPL – and the most of these affiliates were ‘expert level’ affiliates with relevant sites.
63% of the audience polled would run a CPC campaign.
If you’re asking – what does this mean for affiliate marketing in SA? Here’s my thoughts:
1. Professional affiliates back themselves to earn more on a lead campaign – they don’t believe they need tons of traffic to make money, they just need to convert enough visitors into leads.
2. General interest sites, the vast majority of the South African affiliate base, want to be paid for performance – though they may not have high thousand visitors each month – they’re pretty convinced that their audience would be interested in the offers – resulting in earnings for them.
3. High traffic sites value of their traffic and don’t want to risk running CPC or CPL programs when they’re happy that they can earn sufficient revenue from being paid for the display of ads.
What this means to advertisers.
Considering the number of respondents that were willing to run multi-payout campaigns its prudent to consider setting up hybrid campaigns, paying for both the click and conversion or display and conversion. Certainly there’s a clear lead on click based campaigns – but significant affiliates still prefer lead campaigns.
If you’re looking for ROI at the cost of visibility, then a CPL program’s for you. If you’d like a campaign that blends ROI and generates awareness as well, I’d recommend you look into CPM / CPC to ensure wider advertising distribution.
Yours in Affiliate Marketing Brilliance!
Jonathan
