Tuesday 13 December 2011

AFFILIATE MARKETING-An Eagle’s View

“In e-commerce industry affiliate marketing can be simply defined as a web based marketing technique by which a group (affiliates) or an individual (affiliate) gets remunerated by the product/business owners (merchants) for promoting their products or consumables.”



Internet users come across various AD links placed on commercial websites which are designed to capture their attention and elicit a click eventually leading to a possible sale/end user acquiring the product. From an end user perspective this process seems very simple, however such a seemingly innocuous activity is a result of complex background processes involving a number of independent players and complex mechanisms of crediting a sale and calculating the remunerations for all participants in the value chain.
Affiliate marketing is used by product owners in various domains like Food & Drinks, Fashion & Beauty, Automotives, Computer & Technology, Career and employment, Retail etc to target internet users by leveraging marketing strategies of affiliates specialized in these real world domains. Affiliate/s endeavor is to direct consumers/end users to the product owner’s (merchant) website to augment product popularity and thereby promoting product sales. This is done by placing ad links of Products/Merchant Company on their websites which eventually route the consumers/end users to these product sites.
Rewards in the form of commission are awarded to affiliate/s based on the business leads/sales or popularity (clicks) it brings to the products/Merchant company. One of salient features of Affiliate marketing is that it is based on a pay for performance model and involves no upfront cost to the merchant. As Affiliate marketing becomes more ubiquitous, technological innovations in support of affiliate – merchant networks are gathering pace.

No comments:

Post a Comment