Affiliate Network Advertisers – Marketing Through Referrals

With the fascinating and rapid increase of the internet around the world e-commerce has also grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, e-commerce today has outgrown the traditional marketing and purchase of goods and services such that in the field of consumer industries there is hardly any company that doesn’t have a foothold in the area of internet marketing. Over the time with significant research into methods of making e-commerce a mainstay in their business companies or sellers have started newer and newer methods of driving traffic to their websites. However, it was later realized by astute marketing companies that it wasn’t sufficient enough for traffic being generated by the help of search engine optimization, but that the resulting traffic should make use of the offers that a website of a particular product offers. For this, around the year 1994 after the World Wide Web was born, the concept of revenue sharing by paying commission to referral businesses was made use of by the affiliate advertisers taking the advantage of the World Wide Web.

In other words, the website publishers or advertisers set a paid fee for each referral that came to their website through the concept of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing to some extent even goes a step further than other internet based marketing methods. Affiliate marketing not only uses organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing, display advertising, but also publishes reviews of products or services offered by clients or parties. Thus, it is seen that the main objective of affiliate marketing is to drive traffic for one website to another. And the concept of revenue sharing makes this effort almost automatic with participatory method of marketing. It is seen, after a careful analysis and deep study of internet marketing by different companies which use this form of affiliate network that 80% affiliates today use revenue sharing method or cost per sale (CPS). The other 19% uses the method of cost per action (CAA) while the remaining 1% uses the method of cost per click (CPC). This quite obviously shows that more affiliate network advertisers are trying the safer methods of cost per sale which doesn’t bring in any form of fraud or malpractices as in the case of cost per action and cost per click.

It is also to be noted that the affiliate network advertisers are growing in great numbers and it is on record that among the most notable giants in this form of marketing are Amazon and Google. Google with its strong base in internet marketing with Google Ad Sense would pose a great danger to the smaller entities which are actually also in the fray. However, over time the internet as always hopes to come out with answers as to how to enable the smaller affiliate network advertisers to sustain the onslaught and survive to tell their tales of success.