Tracking affiliate-generated offline sales
- Posted by Kati on December 26th, 2003 filed in mktg brainlog
An interesting sidenote to the previous case study post: the company in the case study drives 60% of their revenue from online sales and 40% from telephone sales. If you’re an online merchant running an affiliate program and you have an option to place orders on the phone, that is prominently displayed on your website, you NEED TO provide a way to assign phone orders to web affiliates, or you’re losing many potentially very profitable affiliate partners. Many online merchants desplay their 1-800 sales hotlines on the front page or even every single page of the online store, and this is a huge red flag for experienced affiliates if they are considering your program.
Imagine a hypothetical example: let’s say the case study example company has an affiliate program, with 65% of the marketing budget being shared equally between the merchant’s PPC (32.5%) and an affiliate marketing program (32.5%). The merchant in the case study attributes online marketing spend to offline orders using a 60%-40% revenue share, e.g. if an Overture campaign brings $10,000 in online sales, they say that another $6666 were generated in telephone sales from the same campaign, and the share of the different marketing campaigns is the same as with web sales. That means that in my hypothetical example, affiliate marketing (32.5% of marketing spend) would account for $2166 of the phone sales. Now imagine the affiliate who generated those leads and wouldn’t be paid the commission he deserves. Even with a 5% commission rate that is over $100 in affiliate commissions.
There are solutions to track web affiliate leads on 800 numbers, use them! (And make sure the call agents record the affiliate details correctly and it’s not in their interest to not record that information.)