My first job title, Marketing Coordinator at a young Zappos.com, oversaw a ridiculous number of proposals and initiatives, from affiliate marketing to early pay-per-click to sky typing to print magazines. We had a little luck with earned media (thank you, Tony Winders), but we never bought paid television or print media that I recall. (The big exception was a digital billboard on the 101 that Tony Hsieh apparently guilted the owner into offering by taking offence at not being called a nationally known brand.)
The glossy magazines had a particularly absurd proposition, in my view. You took the magazine’s probably inflated circulation, then you assumed that everyone read every single page, then you assumed the subscriber passed it along to four other people who also read every single page, then you charged a ridiculously high CPM. And attribution? Good luck.
Maybe there was a dedicated phone number. Occasionally, there was a dedicated landing page. Most of the time, though, there was no reliable way to connect a sale back to the ad.
While affiliate is beset by last-click attribution, one might say the walled gardens are set by any-click attribution. Or, hell, any glance that gets within ten feet of the screen and might have turned into a click. Affiliate has to prove a click happened. The platforms increasingly ask advertisers to trust statistical models that say a sale was influenced. This is what Wall Street calls “grading your own homework,” and it justifies oversized budgets. Affiliate, in contrast, depends on a deterministic chain, which is easily broken in the zero-click era.
But what if we could play their game? Here’s my proposal: using the next generation of tracking technologies, now available with, for example, Partnerize and impact.com, affiliate reporting comes to regularly include two numbers: deterministic tracking (clicks, coupons, etc.) and a contribution or influence number (AI inference, other uncredited touch points).
Presumably, the latter will usually be bigger than the former, likely multiples bigger, based on various case studies that have been published in the last year or more. If it happens to be inverted, as could be conceived, it doesn’t matter.
This will show advertisers that they are, in a manner of speaking, getting more than they are paying for. The immediate expected response will, unfortunately, not be the loosening of budgets. Call tracking revealed conversions that advertisers were already receiving but weren't crediting to marketing channels. When I had an agency many years ago, we proposed RingRevenue (now Invoca) to some of our clients who would take large orders over the phone.
The proposal was more or less shrugged or even laughed off - why pay for what you’re getting for free? The affiliates didn’t have leverage or even awareness of what could be considered to be leaked commissions.
But if this contribution number were regularly shared with affiliates, it would put them in a better negotiating position. Perhaps more importantly, the same standard could be applied to other advertising channels, which regularly take full credit for inferred sales. This would put affiliate marketing on more equal footing with channels that routinely claim credit for sales they can only infer.
