Affiliate marketing vs. PPC marketing ROI
Being an affiliate marketer, I am obviously biased towards affiliate marketing, which is constantly questioned for its effectiveness and the ROI it can provide. In fact, the thinking amongst many marketers is that since afffiliate publishers tend to use the very same marketing channels that they could use themselves, they could get a much better return executing those techniques instead of going through the “hassle” of recruiting and managing affiliates.
How much value an affiliate can provide to a marketer really varies from affiliate to affiliate, but there is no denying that a well planned and executed affiliate program can generate great ROI (we have been part of several huge successes). Don’t take my word for it— check out this analysis from MarketingExperiments, the company that recently acquired MarketingSherpa. Even though the study might itself be a couple of months’ old, the findings should certainly be useful to marketers who are sceptical about affiliate marketing and want to rely solely on their paid search engine marketing.
As with anything else, there are no shortcuts. Identifying and managing good affiliates– the core of running a successful affiliate program– does require investment of resources. If one is not prepared to do that, there is not much point in trying out this channel for namesake and then discarding it as ineffective (we see that happen quite often).
