If you are in the affiliate marketing, you want to read this article toward Facebook, the biggest social network is setting the standard in the newest area of performance marketing, it recent hookups with some of the world’s biggest brands offer a glimpse of the future, which is not a pretty sight for affiliates, according to the mThink.
As you may know, performance marketing has seen remarkable growth in the last couple of years, driven by VC monies that have streamed into the online advertising sector, cheaper platform software and a recession that has resulted in ad budgets leaning heavily towards the assurance of ROI that performance marketing provides.
While most publishers are scrambling to find their place in social media, Facebook is quickly perfecting performance marketing techniques that have the potential of reshaping online advertising on a scale unseen since the rise of search engine optimization.
Just four years old, but already pushing 800 pounds, the gorilla of social networking is romping through the performance marketing jungle like it owns the place. It doesn’t – at least, not yet – but its recent momentum is reminiscent of the rise of Google five years ago when Yahoo still seemed to have an iron grip on the search market. With MySpace in a coma and other social media still finding their footing, nothing appears to stand in Facebook’s way.
Where does affiliate marketing fit into social networks? Good question, according to Judy Shapiro, the senior VP for Marketing at Paltalk, a network that offers free video chats to its 4 million members. “The question we’ve been asking ourselves is how do we incorporate the power of social media into the affiliate marketing model, because it doesn’t exist today. It just doesn’t.”
Of course, affiliates are free to place ads on Facebook. But there have been widespread complaints within the affiliate community of inflated click counts. A company spokesman says Facebook is looking into what he admitted was “suspicious” activity.
“The people-you-know part of the social marketing phenomenon is going to be challenging [for affiliate marketers]. I can’t even think of a good way to do it, personally. It becomes problematic,” she says. But if you target the audience by commonalities, as Facebook does, then “the affiliate marketing machine has to compete with plain, old-fashioned behavioral targeting. The affiliate CPA [cost per action] model is often the black sheep of the marketing family, largely because networks can’t monetize it as well. Networks like CPM deals better because they’re money in the bank. The problem with a lot of CPA programs is the risk has shifted from the advertisers to the content producer.” …. Continuing read entire article here
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