Comments:
As always Jeff, good eye for the message behind the message. Research like this does leave a “biased” taste in anyone’s mouth, and unfortunately was likely commissioned with the answer already a known outcome.
A study like this just shouldn’t be necessary, either. In theory, their 300 clients already KNOW the value their receiving.
It’s disappointing that Mr. Molander made no attempt to learn more about Performics’ affiliate marketing research before posting. Monday’s press release included an option to request the full research findings (available for download at http://www.performics.com). The document posted supplies answers, in detail, to all of Mr. Molander’s questions including the names of the 63 merchant programs reviewed. Additionally, I and 11 Performics’ staffers were on hand at Affiliate Summit with copies of the findings which we made available at our booth.
I’d like to provide clarity on a specific inaccuracy within Mr. Molander’s post. The sample size was not limited by the 19 publishers reviewed. The methodology section explains that the study tracked all affiliate referral activity across the 63 programs as identified by network domain URLs.
The 19 publisher sites were an additional analysis of the study to provide Performics’ clients with demographic and performance data for those specific publisher sites. Performics opted to supplement the merchant data with the publisher perspective for the benefit of clients who are always interested in learning more about publishers.
As for why we commissioned the research, we see it as part of Performics’ responsibility as an industry leader. A need exists for unbiased, credible, third-party data demonstrating the value of the channel across merchant programs. And in particular this study was structured to provide existing Performics clients insight to not only their affiliate program, but those of their competitors through an unbiased research perspective.
It surprised me that Mr. Molander would create a post to intentionally provoke, rather than doing a little more homework on the subject. Any good writer researches their story.
Sincerely,
Chris Henger
VP, Affiliate Marketing
Performics
Hi, Chris…
Thanks for taking the time to share additional information. As you know, the Web’s middle name is ‘interactive’ and blogs are inherently designed to provoke discussion. If I’m anything I’m a provoker and have been for a long time now. In fact, I dare say that’s why people read/pay me attention.
While I encourage everyone to take a look at the report itself, it would be great to know how many affiliates, in total, were part of the sample—here on ThoughtShapers.
I didn’t realize that the 19 affiliates were considered supplimental as this was not spelled out in the press release. I do not believe this diminishes my comments or tarnishes my opinion.
I still feel this number is rather small (takes away from the weight of the resulting analysis). As one retailer told me in a private e-mail “if one of the 19 is one ‘eBates type’ affiliate the resulting analysis is worthless.” I don’t know that I’d go that far, myself, but this is what they said.
It would also be great to understand more, in summary format here on ThoughtShapers or perhaps in another press release, what the wider analysis yielded (considering the 1-22 press release discussed supplimental analysis).
If you’ll humor me… much of what ThoughtShapers does is filter and summarize for busy executives. I blog at my own risk and do my best in terms of accuracy but I am not bound to journalistic standards; rather, my own integrity.
I ask that you consider: As a blogger, my job is to create useful information through dialog with people like you. If I make an error or look past something it’s useful, to the community at large, to have people step in and correct. It happens all the time. Hence, I make no apology for overlooking or not doing better research as I’m not a journalist. I’m a filter… an opinion who’s education on a subject is up for interpretation. I do aplogize for assuming that one of your crack PR staff or your own Google Alert would clue you in on this post. It only takes a moment to alert you via email or a quick call.
So… Directly addressing questions here in this forum will help our readers but participation is your option. Discussing the total scope of affiliates/publishers, IMO, would help readers assign proper “weight” to the supplemental findings. Thanks again.
Dave:
Great to see you here. Your comments were echoed by Kowabunga’s (Think Partnership) Jeff Doak on the Weekly Insight show today. Thanks for sharing your comment and kind words.
Jeff,
Seems we are not communicating very well. The study was driven off the 63 merchant affiliate programs (all very large programs), so the number of affiliates could have been thousands. The way we identified affiliate traffic was two fold, we looked for the presence of an Affiliate network URL (primary method) or if no network URL existed we looked to match the referrrer against a list of over 900 affiliate domains we provided. I’m very confident we had a large sample size of affiliates, across different affiliate business models that produced affiliate generated visits/transactions. These were large merchant affiliate programs. Here is the specific URL to the report, it is also on the front page of the Performics website.
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