FEATURE
If the regulators can see a correlation between good reviews and large placement fees, that could be a problem. Just saying.
However, on the whole, affiliates play a very straight game. They create a website, add content, do their SEO, get traffic and hopefully pass converting traffic on to operators.
Very few affiliates do social media marketing and data capture, such as build mailing lists, so on the whole they will not fall under the GDPR legislation.
In my view, as long as affiliates don’ t overtly mislead customers, they will not fall foul of the GC guidelines on social responsibility.
In short, I think Sky Bet’ s argument about risks with affiliates is overblown and an excuse for cutting substantial costs. Now that we’ ve covered some of the background of the Sky Bet affiliate programme closure, let’ s look at why closing their affiliate program is such a major misjudgement.
Organisations such as Sky Bet are of a size that stops them spending substantial money on anything that doesn’ t have clear accountability. Therefore, they will never take organic search truly seriously because they will never know how much money it makes them.
However, as an affiliate who gets business through organic search, you’ ve accepted the ambiguity of‘ not provided’. This simple fact means you’ re prepared to commit far more relative investment in SEO.
No operator can go there If you think of search engines as questionand-answer machines, the questions people ask are‘ search queries’ with different search queries having different intent. So, it’ s reasonable to say that anyone who wants to research a brand to make a comparison will want websites that can in some way compare one operator against another.
Returning to this whole idea about misleading marketing, it would be
In an ideal world, where organic search had the same accountability as paid media, what I’ m about to talk about would be part of mainstream consciousness.
However, as we know, if you can’ t track‘ it’, then‘ it’ is just hypothesis.
Back in 2011, Google released a report on something they called a zero moment of truth( ZMOT). In this report they said 88 % of consumers research before they buy, consulting an average of 10.4 sources of information.
Half of the 5,000 respondents searched online with a search engine to get information before buying. For comparison, 18 % became a friend / brand follower via social media before buying. Additionally, 54 % of the respondents comparison-shopped for products online. Upshot: even back in 2011, which feels like an age ago, most people used search engines as their main‘ jump point’ to get information to make a decision about a purchase.
“ Very few affi liates do social media marketing and data capture, such as build mailing lists, so on the whole they will not fall under the GDPR legislation”
Death of the SEO business case For years, I’ ve constantly said that organic search is more powerful and influencing than people realise.
Since Google moved of its users across to secure search— therefore hiding search query data— there is no easy way for a brand to categorically state that organic search makes them‘ X’ amount of money.
In business, if you don’ t have clear accountability, it’ s very difficult to get budgets.
A good parallel to organic search is public relations, where a business accepts that public relations is important, but is unlikely to spend substantial amounts of marketing money on it compared to paid media.
SEO was once a‘ marketing channel’ with clear ROI numbers. A brand would treat it just like paid media. Now, SEO is more like PR. It’ s a thing every brand should do, but not spend too much money on because no one knows whether it’ s actually profitable. implausible for an operator to build a credible comparison website where they rate themselves number one against everyone else.
Of course, you’ re going to cite Oddschecker and Sky Bet being owned by News Corp, but if you look at Oddschecker carefully you will see that Sky Bet has no more prominence than any other operator.
My point: there are huge territories on the organic search landscape where operators can never go.
To recap:
● ●operators are getting nervous about affiliates
● ●operators can’ t put a good business case together for organic search
● ●operators can’ t have prominence in‘ comparison searches’
Power of search Let’ s look at why Sky Bet or any other operator would be very unwise to kill its affiliate programme.
More data In 2014, according to Retailing Today, 60 % of consumers start their research on a search engine( what a surprise!). And according to Econsultancy, 61 % of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase.
Retailing Today tells us that consumers visited at least three online stores before making their purchase and that 66 % of shoppers looked at warranty information, 52 % pricing, 51 % model information … and so on.
MineWhat. com produced a report saying 81 % of shoppers conducted online research before buying.
Upshot: this data tells us the obvious: people use search engines to make buying decisions.
Search, trust and influence This is an area which interests me a lot … I’ ve always found public relations fascinating and I feel that organic search is going the way of PR. In other words it’ s something every brand should do, not just to get traffic but to use as a way of influencing purchases.
Every year the PR company Edelman publishes its Trust Barometer report. It’ s a huge piece of work that they’ ve produced since 2001.
36 iGB Affiliate Issue 65 OCT / NOV 2017