Category: Affiliate Marketing Tips

Those same participants got a much less pleasant surprise a few days later, when those gains all vanished from their dashboards, with no explanation or warning. 

After days of complaints and inquiry, publishers received an email saying Amazon had discovered a reporting issue that “inaccurately updated performance metrics” for June, July and August. 

That hiccup proved not to be the last. Earlier this month, some participants received an email saying that OSP had under-reported commissions due to a processing error that occurred in September. 

These hiccups, coming so close to the start of the shopping season, have put OSP participants on edge. They are also, sources said, emblematic of a program that has grown increasingly frustrating for its participants over the past year, thanks to abrupt changes in content requirements, the downgrading or removal of publisher content from search results, as well as a persistent lack of communication that many participants say is becoming untenable. 

While some participating publishers have continued to see revenue from OSP trend upward overall, many have seen it decline precipitously. Sources at two publishers participating in OSP said their revenues had declined so much that they were considering abandoning the program altogether. A third said they worried that they would have to abandon it next year.   

“The future of OSP’s pretty murky for us,” said a source at a fourth publisher. “Amazon provides enough reporting on the affiliate side [with Amazon Associates] where you can hire staff, forecast performance, you can follow best practices. With OSP, it feels like there are levers being pulled that are unseen by the content creators.” 

Reached for comment, Amazon sent a statement in lieu of responding to a set of questions Digiday sent. 

“At Amazon, we are constantly experimenting with our programs to both create the best shopping experience for customers and to help publishers find success on Amazon,” the statement read. “Onsite Publishing is still in an invite-only phase and we will continue to test and learn with how we are sharing this content with customers —testing new placements across Amazon, making it even easier for customers to discover great content and introduce publishers to a new audience. Our goals for the program are aligned with the goals of our publishers, and we’re committed to helping them succeed.” 

A loss of standing

While all affiliate programs are at least somewhat dependent on the retailers offering the commissions, OSP requires the publishers participating to invest a lot of faith in Amazon. OSP allows publishers to distribute product guides through Amazon’s site and app, then earn commissions if a person who reads those guides buys one of the featured products. 

Though publishers can house all their guides on profile pages inside Amazon’s properties, the overwhelming majority of the guides’ views come from Amazon search queries; for most of the past two years, a person who entered a search query such as “best air fryer,” for example, or “best pillows,” would likely find excerpts from a guide written by a participating OSP publisher among the first few search results. 

Like any digital media company, Amazon regularly tinkered with what it put in its search results. Those tests sometimes had catastrophic results for OSP publishers, who said Amazon rarely warned them that tests were coming, though sources contacted for this story said it was perfectly reasonable for them to conduct them. “They wouldn’t be doing their job if they weren’t trying to optimize,” a sixth source said. 

But this spring, many publishers noticed Amazon started to lean into one experiment that they found especially troubling. Instead of showing publishers’ guides in many search results, Amazon was instead showing users products that Amazon itself recommended, or products that were highly rated by Amazon customers. 

Those recommendation widgets, which featured many of the same design elements as publishers’ guides, felt like an ominous step toward an outcome many participants had feared since the program started: That Amazon, after using publishers’ content to learn how content might compel a user to purchase something, would simply cut publishers out of the equation. 

“They’ve basically replaced most of the OSP [content] I could see with ‘Highly Rated’ [results],” said a source at a fifth participating publisher, whose revenues from the program have fallen by close to 90% from their peak.

Opinions differ on just how much share of search results OSP content has lost. But beyond the loss of revenue, the change has set off a wave of suspicion among several participants that Amazon could be using the data created by OSP conversions to inform which items they are recommending to consumers. Amazon has, in several different instances, taken data generated by sellers and other partners and used it to spin up features or products that directly compete with those offered by those sellers and partners. 

“There are not industrial-strength MSAs [master service agreements] governing the use of [OSP] data,” the third source said. 

A change in standards

But Amazon’s support of its own recommendations was especially galling to some publishers in light of a separate change it began making in the spring, when it told publishers they would have to make changes to their guides. 

In its earliest incarnation, most of the content inside OSP came from well-known, heritage media brands, much of it lightly edited versions of content they’d already published on their respective sites. But within a few months, a new crop of publishers had come aboard, many of them much more obscure, some of questionable provenance and making recommendations based on much less rigorous evaluations. 

“They did not go out to try and achieve an environment that rewards great content; they went out to drive sales,” said a sixth source. “On the one hand, they expected the quality to go down [when they let smaller publishers in]. I don’t think they anticipated how quickly people would push the boundaries.”

Earlier this year, OSP participants got a big dose of guidance. In late spring, Amazon began telling participants that it was changing the guidelines and list of attributes that each guide needed to include. 

To several sources, the guidance was welcome, but the timeframe was not: Many were told they would have 30 days to get their guides, which in some cases amounted to hundreds of pieces of content, into compliance. 

“This is hundreds of articles. This is stuff that’s [been] previously approved,” the second executive fumed. 

Many made the changes, not just to avoid a significant drop in revenue. but because some of the changes would might lead to better performance. For some, that didn’t bear fruit.

“We never saw material improvement from those changes,” the third source said. “There was a bitter taste from that.”

In a telling moment, in Google’s recent engineering research event, tech lead manager Josh Karlin said that the search engine’s FLoC solution would involve assigning topics to websites and people, rather than assigning numerical cohort IDs to them. It was, in effect, a validation of the fact that the future of targeting lies in context.

Following this trend, media agencies have broadly accepted the changes and are adopting contextual targeting strategies left, right and center. They’re ready to buy contextually and to understand the benefits in terms of brand salience — contextual advertising increases brand awareness, sentiment and preference.  

With the buyers in place, one question remains: Are publishers adopting a contextual strategy to follow the advertisers lead? 

While first-party data is invaluable, publishers can win with contextual video strategies

Large publishers with a wealth of first-party data are better prepared for post-cookies advertising than those without. They have freely given knowledge about their users and can build upon that to reach them with targeted messages. Although, if they are subscribers, these publishers need to think beyond advertising for their brand-led solutions — subscribers will expect an ad-free experience. Nevertheless, contextually placed quality video content can still enhance the on-page experience for users, providing a new source of information that goes deeper, or offers new angles. But it’s not the place for monetization.

Subscriber-reliant publishers will still want ways to monetize their non-subscribed users. Adjusting their video unit to run pre-roll ads, with those formats sold based on user groups determined by the page or video content, is a simple way to do this.

Hybrid publishers that offer a free logged-in experience can use their first-party data to benefit users with tailored on-page and newsletter content. But there is still a need to generate revenue from these audiences, and some form of contextual targeting option for advertisers is likely to be required. 

Those publishers who do not have first-party data will rely on offering a contextual strategy to their media buyers. They will likely be running a mixture of native, display and video units already, but it’s the video units that will be yielding the highest CPMs and attracting the most user attention, so it’s important to get the video vendor right.

At this stage in the game, it’s clear that most publishers know they need to implement a contextual strategy. They know they need to invest resources in implementing contextual targeting platforms to their site, but they might — quite rightly — be asking themselves if they are taking the right steps. For example, not all contextual solutions are created equal. 

Rather than asking if contextual advertising is right, publishers are reviewing their providers and evaluating the market. They’re A/B testing solutions, trialing new options and replacing redundant or underperforming tech — and they’re taking the following steps in pursuit of contextual success.

Analyze video content accurately for contextual audiences

While there are numerous, well-known and competitive contextual advertising partners that build their contextual audience groups based on editorial text, advertisers are now in the age of video. Consumers expect a mix of media, and well-placed video content always adds an extra dimension to written content.

Video advertising also offers the CPMs that make a significant difference in campaigns. Advertisers are now able to target their advertising based on the video content, rather than page content — a subtle but important distinction.

As such, it’s vital that contextual partners are able to analyze video content accurately and translate that content into an audience for advertisers. 

IAB category and keyword targeting against video content will win publishers premium CPMs. Contextual partners should be able to build out and offer contextual audience segments to buyers in the open marketplace, or through private marketplaces (PMPs). Ideally partners should provide full-service solutions to help create such segments.

Cross-channel presence is crucial

Mobile web, in-app and desktop are all candidates for contextual advertising. Working with different vendors on different devices can be a painful process, so it’s best to choose one partner that can provide all of these services under one roof. This saves time, money and valuable resources.

Furthermore, as CTV’s star is rising, contextual partners are emerging that offer an ability to include CTV inventory in a targeted group.

Publishers need to offer context at scale with their video inventory

Contextual targeting is only effective if large groups of users can be built based on specific topics, such as IAB categories. For example, if a publisher offers multiple categories to its audience and has limited content in one vertical, they may struggle to reach the scale required to attract advertiser dollars. 

If pursuing a video strategy, one should consider creating page content that plays to the strength of video. Creating articles on a wider range of topics can bring in more campaigns. More niche articles can perhaps capitalize on trending topics, now that video content is produced so quickly.

Video content offers value to audiences that prefer sight, sound and motion on their screens. Advertisers, too, appreciate contextual video placements enough to pay a mighty premium for them. Likewise, context has now been proven in study after study, the FLoC and third-party cookie changes are merely accelerating the transition to this form of targeting.

For publishers, it makes sense to offer contextual video at scale, across pages and devices. Contextual video advertising alone is no longer enough, it needs to be done well from both the content and advertising perspective. This new phase of contextual advertising will find publishers testing solutions to their limits.