Busting Performance Marketing Myths Through Customer Insight

Busting Performance Myths

Compared to 10 years ago how consumers shop and interact with brands is significantly different, people are now comfortable buying online all day every day and from any location anywhere in the world.

There have been more changes and technological advancements in the past year compared to the previous five year, technology companies that aim to help you understand all of the marketing data that is available to you have double in the last year, rising from 947 to 1,876.

75% of companies say that customer engagement is a priority to them however less that 1/3 of companies admit to knowing how to do this effectively.

Tradedoubler say that there is a need to find a unified approach to tracking, reporting and attribution, however as a result of a lot of fragmented customer journeys coupled with multiple tracking technology this remains a challenge. They have recently launched a platform called ADAPT which they hope will help to achieve this goal.

We believe that there is a greater need for a holistic tracking platform that not only looks at tracking, reporting and attribution but also looks and engagement, life-time value, repeat purchase rate and forecasting while bring together on and offline customer journeys.

By understanding all of this data we can create a new form of highly targeted and personalized advertising by making predictions through artificial intelligence, to an extent, this is already here, Digital Advertising 4.0.

While the ADAPT tools is still in its infancy, Tradedoubler have used it to try to and dispel some of the common myths that exist in affiliate marketing.

The Myths

Cashback steals the last click – the research by Tradedoubler and other networks in previous years shows that this is a myth. While they’ve only studied attribution through affiliates at present, I’ve been promised across all channels will be coming, the stats show that 83% of customers start and finish on a Cashback site. What’s more if the customer stars on affiliates that they are likely to be 3.3 times quicker at placing their order.

These stats are looking at world wide network data, if they isolate the UK specifically it shows that 92.5% of people who start on a Cashback site finish on a Cashback site. The remaining 7.5% of people that started but did not complete generally ended up purchasing via a vouchercode site. A similar overwrite is seen on vouchercodes last click, demonstrating that both generally assist each other in the conversion process.

Cashback sites have a lower average order value – again this is a myth, Cashback affiliates generally driver a higher average order value than other affiliates and all other channels, we’ve proven that this is the case through our analysis of Trekwear’s data, to find out the results click here.

Performance marketing loses at sales at the weekend – in part this is true, if you look at the data by device type you will see that desktop sales go down and they are generally at their lowest on a Saturday however mobile and tablet sales go up. Generally looking at the retail sector, Saturday under performs with Sunday picking up momentum with this day of the week being the highest for tablet sales.

A single online strategy fits all – We know this not to be the case the behaviour of each country is different. In our experience product, colour, size and preferred payment methods varies from country to country. Consumer behaviour also varied from country to country; for example the number of the average number of days from first click to last click varies significantly.