Author: robberrisford

When does an edge case stop being an edge case? When you have thousands of them.

For the affiliate world, that’s what mobile is today: a channel of a thousand edge cases, especially in the app context. From the tech perspective, getting from a publisher’s app to a brand’s app involves factoring in countless variables, including operating system intricacies, device intricacies, whether the user has the brand app installed, and what to do when they don’t. Inevitably, things break, and that’s bad for everyone. 

In contrast, desktop affiliate is absurdly more simple: The user clicks on a publisher link in one browser tab and is directed to the brand’s website in another browser tab.

The problem is that desktop isn’t the future – mobile is. Because of this, the affiliate industry needs to take the issues that are holding mobile back seriously and layout real solutions to solve them. 

Here are a few of the big challenges, why they matter, and one big reason why the industry should fix them. 

Brands are missing out on a powerful app acquisition channel

For brands, app installs are hard to come by, and quality app installs are even harder. In 2018, AppsFlyer forecasted that spending on app installs would increase to $64 billion this year, up from $27 billion just three years ago. Brands everywhere recognize the value of app users and are competing with each other to acquire them. The install-to-purchase rate has nearly doubled since 2017, according to data from Adjust and Liftoff. 

The affiliate channel is in a good position to offer brands another way to acquire quality, high-intent users. Last year, for example, based on Button platform data, we saw that 36.4% of people who installed an app also made a purchase (8.5% of people made a purchase directly after installing.)

The reason that installs from the affiliate channel perform so much better than any other channel is because there’s an install added to the purchase path, rather than pushing an install on its own. 

The bottom line is, if we can turn the affiliate channel into an app install channel, it opens up access to millions of high-intent installers. 

Broken links: You can’t get paid for what you can’t track

For brands and publishers, broken links are bad business. 

Unfortunately, broken links are common on mobile, particularly, when users move from mobile web to mobile apps, and vice-versa. 

Why does that matter? Because when links break, so does attribution, which is bad for both brands and publishers. Brand marketers don’t know which publishers are their strongest performing partners (and can’t trace the entire user journey), and publishers don’t get properly compensated for the sales they drive. 

There are big knock-on effects for users as well. If a user clicks a cashback offer and doesn’t get credit for their purchase, then that’s bad user experience. Moreover, it means that publishers have to deal with complaints from users upset that they haven’t gotten their cashback.

Bad mobile user experiences are punishing brands’ most loyal users

Speaking of bad user experiences, here’s another one. 

When given the chance, mobile users would much rather transact in a brand’s app than on a brand’s website. We know this from the data. During last year’s holiday season, for example, users across Button’s platform were twice as likely to convert in apps than on the mobile web and represented over 75% of total orders.

Yet, despite that, when users click on a brand’s affiliate link in a publisher app, they’re more likely to be sent to the brand’s mobile website, not their app. This is true even if the user already has the brand’s app installed on their phone. Why is that bad? Because it results in a lower conversion rate and a lower lifetime value. 

More fundamentally, this is just bad user experience, and it should be the opposite of what brands want for their most loyal users 

Why this matters

I promised I would give you a reason why these are problems we need to fix. Well, here it is – Money.

Through poor user experience and untracked sales, the affiliate channel is leaving millions of pounds on the table every single day. The longer you go without fixing it, the more money you lose. This is a challenge every brand, publisher, and network should be invested in fixing.

The post Mobile Affiliate: Three Ways it’s (Still) Broken appeared first on PerformanceIN.

APAC is estimated to have been responsible for 64% of all e-commerce transactions in 2019 and mobile commerce is booming, with seven Asian countries placing in the top ten for mobile commerce penetration.

But despite these ideal conditions, perception is that publishers have been slower here than elsewhere in the world to take advantage of commerce content and harness e-commerce as a revenue stream for their businesses. Until now. 

As publishers from Australia to Taiwan and Malaysia scale commerce, Skimlinks has played a key role in many of their journeys, so we’ve put together the key levers they can pull to grow commerce revenue:

Time is of the essence 

Publishers in the UK and US are keenly focused on two commercial factors: commission rate and earnings-per-click. They want to know how many shares of a sale they’ll receive and how much they’ll make for every click they send to a merchant. 

In APAC there are different key priorities: Time to delivery and shipping charges. 

Shipping is key because as everywhere else people are becoming more impatient and want items quickly. In Australia for example, where shipping can sometimes take weeks, publishers will look to prioritise brands that can deliver items faster. Publishers are likely to see fewer conversions if the merchants they link to can’t deliver orders quickly. 

Charges are also key. Free shipping has appeals everywhere, but in APAC it is especially appealing for publishers because it remains a relatively rare promotion, in a huge market where deliveries often cost more and take longer. Where publishers can’t find free shipping offers, they will look to pick the merchants that offer cheaper rates to ship items and use that to inform the merchants they feature in commerce content. 

Use tailor-made expert editorial content 

Despite e-commerce’s advance across APAC, commerce content lags behind, but many publishers find syndicated editorial content an expedient way to scale. 

It helps them produce content without increasing direct headcount and enables them to rely on a regular stream of expert commerce content to publish. 

It takes time to make the business case to hire commerce editors. While publishers work to scale commerce, to prove its value and argue for investment in the channel, syndicated content helps them maintain momentum. 

The volume of articles produced plays a key role in publishers scaling commerce content. The more advice on products readers see, the more accustomed they become to using publisher recommendations to inform the purchases that they make. Skimlinks’ own editorial network has scaled to produce over 200 articles per quarter since the start of 2020. 

Our research shows a commerce editor needs to write 5 articles a day for commerce to scale. So if syndicated content can supply some or all of those articles for a publisher it will help them scale faster. It can also offer valuable insights publishers can benefit from early in their commerce journey. 

Commerce editors need to optimise the length of an article, number of links, number of merchants, when they publish content and many other factors. Bespoke commerce content, tailored editorial needs and informed by commerce expertise can make all the difference. 

Highlight international brands in your commerce content 

When we think about our top publishers in the UK and the US, they prefer to highlight domestic merchants. 

That is to say that in the UK publishers will typically write about British retailers like John Lewis, Argos and Marks & Spencer, while in the US publishers will favour brands like Walmart, Target and Wayfair. 

But in APAC there’s a much broader emphasis on international brands. 

This varies between the individual sub-markets. International fashion brands like Nike, for example, perform strongly in Australia, which is doubly interesting as many of the top performers failed when they attempted brick-and-mortar launches in Australia. 

Things look slightly different in South East Asian markets like Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Here international luxury brands like Net-A-Porter are the popular topic matter. 

In South-East Asia there’s a huge appetite for luxury merchants across all categories. These naturally shape the kind of commerce content created and provide a different emphasis, then might be expected on large regional players like Alibaba.

Attention to detail is all important  

Publishers in APAC really take the maxim one size does not fit all to heart. This is informed by their heavy emphasis on timeless or evergreen content. 

Their preference is to spend more time on a single piece of content, that has a longer lifetime value, rather than more disposable pieces linked to seasonal e-commerce events. 

A key focus area is product guides – for trainers or jeans for example – which they can update periodically to keep relevant. Attention to detail is arguably more vital here than elsewhere and that’s linked to cultural differences. For example publishers in Taiwan pay close attention to the individual colours of the item chosen, as different shades hold various deeper interpretations. 

Audiences are also more demanding, so for articles around items a celebrity is wearing, or outfits from a TV show, readers want the exact pieces from the exact retailer and will know if a publisher has gotten it wrong. 

Summary 

Ecommerce sales in Asia-Pacific and Australia grew to an estimated $2.3 trillion in 2019. 

We expect that growth to continue into 2020, driven in part by the continued growth of e-commerce, and by publishers who’ve focused on commerce, reaching maturity with their strategies in the next 12 months. 

For APAC publishers that want to grow commerce the path to scale is clear: 

• Prioritise merchants with shortest delivery windows and free shipping offers 
• Take advantage of editorial content from others 
• Highlight international brands in Australia, and luxury brands in South East Asia
• Attention to detail is all important 

As publishers face uncertain times, commerce remains a revenue stream that can provide a valuable service to readers and offer alternative revenue to intrusive advertising. In APAC, as elsewhere in the world, there’s huge room for publishers to scale it as a meaningful part of their business. 

The post The Key Levers Publishers in APAC Can Pull to Grow Commerce Revenue appeared first on PerformanceIN.