Maintaining omnipresence is essential for marketers—but perhaps equally important is protecting brand integrity across channels. Whether you're currently prioritizing brand safety, planning to implement a monitoring program or aren't sure where to start, there is something for everyone in our recorded ClickZ session, Why Brand Integrity is Paramount for Marketers in a Complex Cross-Channel Environment.
With access to a growing number of resources to conduct product and brand research, consumers are becoming increasingly more savvy. In fact, 90% of consumers use coupons when making a purchase, and digital coupon redemptions are projected to surpass $90 billion by 2022. With increased emphasis on discovering the best possible deal before making a purchase, marketers that once leveraged coupon codes to drive traffic, increase sales, target new customers, and build loyalty with existing customers, are experiencing complex risks associated with providing discount codes to their consumers.
As marketers scramble to stay ever-present across the digital marketing mix, they’re allocating additional marketing dollars to digital channels including affiliate marketing and paid search. Of those surveyed, 65% will increase investment in affiliate marketing budgets and 64% will allocate additional budget for paid search in 2021—surges in marketing spend that must be appropriately safeguarded to control the cost of customer acquisition.
Consumer behavior is ever-changing. These shifts in the buyer journey create costly, complex challenges for marketers seeking to achieve critical omnipresence. While increasing the number of meaningful digital touchpoints that consumers experience, equally important is protecting marketers’ cross-channel brand integrity—necessary audits that create a tax on resources and leave room for critical error if done manually.
More than ever, marketers are leaning into the affiliate channel because of its attractive performance-based pricing model that allows a cost-controlled solution to optimize in any economic climate. While the channel boasts benefits such as scale, automation and outcome-based pricing, affiliate (like anything) also carries the potential for significant risk if not monitored—compliance that is impossible to achieve through manual affiliate search audits.
Google ranks first in the United States as the most popular multi-platform web property accounting for nearly 83% of U.S. desktop search traffic—a market share of more than 61% among the leading U.S. search engine providers. With such a stronghold on unique visitors within the landscape, Google prioritizes continuous improvement of the quality of users’ search results, most recently completing an algorithm update that improves sites’ compliance with their quality guidelines and spam detection systems. More specifically, the changes deprioritize commercial links that are not correctly annotated—compliance updates that may negatively impact affiliate links.
In today’s complex ecommerce landscape, there are endless opportunities for bad actors to practice less-than-savory methods of promotion within the affiliate channel. Not surprisingly. this unscrupulous activity can result in detrimental waste of ad spend, time and resources for marketers. In fact, within the partnership channel alone, it’s estimated that 9% of all partnership transactions are affected by fraud and on average, 1.5% of conversions are potentially fraudulent. Bottom line: Affiliate marketers are expected to lose a staggering $1.4B to fraudulent transactions over the course of the year.
Each year, $1.4B is lost to affiliate marketing fraud—ad spend allocated to expand reach and acquire new customers that is instead cannibalized by nefarious affiliates. This risk makes brand safety relevant to all marketers, regardless of whether they’re actively monitoring for suspect activity within their affiliate programs.
It’s been satisfying to see affiliate marketing mature over the past two decades, evolving from a somewhat experimental performance option that more adventuresome marketers undertook to a reliable channel that has perfected the equation for partnerships, analytics and outcomes. In the beginning, early pioneers hoped that their investments and undertakings would pan out, with limited risk, to generate rewards. Those that have stayed the course to present day, evolving along with the space, have seen the value and now can scale with confidence into the future.
When allocating spend to paid search campaigns, marketers expect to expand their reach and acquire new customers to justify a return on spend for the channel. However, a disadvantage of paid search is that the channel’s payment model is based on clicks—a structure that creates a low barrier for entry to digital fraudsters and contributes to $1.4B dollars lost to affiliate marketing fraud annually.
