Why Combining Affiliate and PR Can Stretch Your Marketing Budget Further

Lynsey Jones-Kmetz, Managing Director at Apogee Agency, recently saw a statement that puzzled her: ‘TikTok doesn’t convert.’

Speaking to Hello Partner, she muses, “I read this as a TikTok user who has spent more money in the last six months watching TikToks than I have looking at any other social media site ever. But what I realised is that I'm not clicking, I'm actually going to the store. And of course, there's no real way to track that.”

Thus, Lynsey brings to the fore one of the biggest pain points in affiliate marketing today: the unreliability of attribution. It’s no secret that attribution has been the affiliate channel’s Achilles’ heel since it started. Even though progress has been made to better follow the whole customer journey, there’s still an abundance of cases where publishers’ aren’t receiving the commission they deserve, and brands aren’t effectively tracking the true touch points of sales.

One way of fixing this, Lynsey suggests, is to integrate PR operations with affiliate tracking, to build longer-lasting, more rewarding relationships between publishers and brands that can measure ROI and leverage niche audiences. “There are a lot of brands that still keep (PR and affiliate) separate,” she observes, “And what I’d like to say is that we all work better together.”