New Data Battlegrounds Shaping Performance - Dawn Quigg & Kevin Edwards, Affiliate Window

Editor's Notes

• #18: Just to firstly introduce myself, my name is Dawn Quigg, I’m an Account Director at Affiliate Window and a key part of my role is to help our clients build an affiliate strategy that supports their core online objectives. As Kevin made reference to, more and more we’re seeing clients optimise performance marketing with the complementary insights that are now available to them through our network. We’re helping those that are hungry for real-time, multi-dimensional insights gain access to the information they need to make smarter decisions. The buzzwords you see here are the kinds of projects we’ve been working on this year, many of which you’ll recognise as hot topics in the channel and beyond. This next section of our presentation will hone in on three of these areas to talk about why they have been such popular topics and how we’re helping clients excel in those areas.
• #19: The first rising trend we want to look at in more detail is Globalisation. For those of you unfamiliar with the study conducted by OC&C strategy consultants late last year, they estimated that online sales generated by UK retailers from international markets are expected to soar sevenfold to £28bn by the year 2020, outpacing domestic activity to make up 40% of total online sales. A huge opportunity for the performance channel I’m sure you agree. Already many of our advertisers are investing heavily in the channel to capitalize on the traction their brand is gaining overseas. More and more we’re learning that the pay-for-performance model allows them to access local knowledge and talent to test the waters before making significant investments in a new region.
• #20: So all this demand, but do we have the publishers to support so many advertisers expanding overseas? As a network we’ve been looking closely at where our publishers are signing up from across the globe, all publishers of course subject to our standard network compliance checks. The map you can see here highlights the most popular regions – the darker the shade of blue, the more sign ups. Outside of the UK, the largest regions for signs up are North America and Australia. After that within the top 10 countries you have some of the key European players such as Ireland, Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands, but also Canada is seeing just as many. But we know we’d expect these to be growing areas, so who are the underdogs? Interestingly our results show us it’s India, followed shortly by China. It is believed that in the next two years Asia Pacific will be leading the e-commerce market. India specifically is in a race to becoming one of the world’s biggest economies and E-Commerce is beginning to flourish there, no surprise given the size of the population multiplying number of people using the internet which is estimated to be 500 million in 2015, compare that to 58 million in the UK.
• #21: It’s widely reported that luxury goods, fashion and footwear are the star performers in terms of overseas trade – however we’ve come across some interesting insights of our own. Our research has shown us that the cycling sector has one of the highest volumes of non UK sales on the network. The two largest countries by sales volume and revenue are Australia and Japan. UK brands are offering quality cycling gear at a cheaper cost than what customers can buy locally. Looking at Australia, customers can get ‘FREE DELIVERY’ on a minimum spend, that arrives within 2-4 days, much faster than local competitors, and a Free 365 day returns policy to a local address. In September alone, Australia and Japan combined made up 38% of the cycling sectors total affiliate volume. Interestingly, this sector has one of highest number of social and content publishers, many of which are hobbyists and cycling enthusiasts. In 2014 there have been over 330 sale active editorial sites contributing to the sector in 2014. Not only that but look at the difference in AOV, Japan sees an average spend o £137, Australia at £109, and the UK at just £83.
• #22: Another interesting insight is into the beauty and cosmetics sector where we’ve seen 23% of transactions come from China specifically, the next biggest territory outside of the UK. The AOV is the highest out of any country at £72, compared to just £43 in the UK. Much of the hype in China around British cosmetics we see is driven by the up and coming craze of beauty bloggers, or vloggers – we see evidence in this in that there are 554 sale active beauty blog and content sites contributing to this sector. In China, one of Shanghai’s most popular beau­ty bloggers, Kristi Wang, whose blog Little K’s Diary, gets between 15,000 and 20,000 hits daily, promotes a multitude of British cosmetic brands suited to the Chinese audience.
• #23: Following on the theme of Beauty and Cosmetics, in 2013 one of our clients in this sector invested heavily in the launch of a new payment gateway integrated with additional international payment options in support of international sales growth. As part of their online strategy, they tasked the team at AWin with increasing international sales revenue by 50% through the network and achievisng 100% growth through localised affiliate programmes. The team set about achieving this in 4 individual steps – 1. Scheduled reports were built to identify which country each individual transaction came from – this formed the build of this detail into our standard reporting now available in the interface 2. A script was run across the 78,000 publishers we have on the network to pull out those who had signed up outside of the UK that they could focus on recruiting 3. At this stage with a hitlist of publishers to target for sign up to the programmes, our account management team began producing localised comms for publishers to ensure it was the right 4. language and format. Once onboard those same publishers were given a ‘Get started’ guide in their local language to get them off to the right start. This has taught up that through combining our own network data for publishers with that of the specific brand in question, and going the extra mile to helping publishers out, the results can be staggering.
• #24: Earlier Kevin touched on the fact that publishers are starting to segment their data to allow for better targeting. Whilst many are still at the early stages of leveraging ‘Big Data’ within segmentation strategies, we’re seeing retailers doing the same. The way we capture and analyse data at Affiliate Window means it’s becoming more actionable, so we’re in a better position to help our clients target customers more intelligently. Advertisers are now more than ever in a position to inform things like pricing, product, promotions and communications, creating an online shopping experience unique to each customer. This year one of our clients within the travel & accommodation sector has definitively changed the level at which they look at customer data in the performance channel. Unsurprisingly due to low margins the sector is becoming increasingly competitive.  Rather than just looking at volume as they had done in the past, they have chosen to focus on more profitable growth in order to compete – which is the point at which they really started looking at data we have available.
• #25: The brand in question, popular with bookings for accommodation within the UK, have begun to build profiles of what their customers actually look like. Using network data, the team at Affiliate Window have looked more closely at transactional information to help segment these customers. Firstly the team looked at location data to pinpoint which cities within the UK house the biggest proportion of the brands customers, you can see from the size of the dots, London, Manchester and then Sheffield are the biggest ones. Looking at the AOV, you can see vast differences between locations – take London at an average of £155 and then Newcastle at £61. Going one step further the team then looked at the AOV broken down by whether they were buying domestic or international accommodation – and you can see clearly as you’d expect, that international is always more than domestic, but just how much more Londoners are spending on their accommodation abroad compared with the rest of the UK – this kind of information shows this brand where there most valuable customer is located.
• #26: So whilst we’ve recognised that London is clearly a hotspot not only in terms of the number of people in that area buying accommodation, but also the considerable amount they are spending on it – this brand wanted to uncover which publishers on their programme were helping drive that volume and value for them. When we looked at the numbers, we saw that a total 77% of bookings from Londoners were purchased through just 2 publishers, those are represented as Publishers A & B in blue and grey on the pie chart. In going a step further, the team then started to analyse the actual city of destination for the accommodation that Londoners were booking through these publishers. We uncovered that Publisher A was driving more stays in London itself, but was also selling more bookings for Nottingham and Edinburgh – Publisher B on the other hand was popular with bookings for Leeds and Newcastle. As we begin to chip away at the data, we’re beginning to get a flavour of the kind of customer they could reach through individual publishers. The team are really only beginning to scratch the surface with the way in which they analyse this brands data. There is so much more to uncover. Ultimately once we finish unravelling our own network data, the idea will be to then tie this in with publisher data and what the brand can also share themselves.
• #27: Take this lady for example, with all parties collaborating on data, our client now knows that from her online shopping habits that she’s a young professional living in London who travels to Manchester on business, but who also likes to get out of the UK when she gets the chance on international city breaks. Whilst we don’t actually capture any of her vital statistics and private information as a network, we’re able to help facilitate in sharing her wider interests through the transactional information we collect. Now that our client has built up her online profile, she’ll soon receive a special offer on a double room in a boutique hotel in New York City that she can enjoy with her boyfriend. Unbeknown to her, she’s been the lucky candidate for much smarter, more sophisticated targeting.
• #28: Kevin introduced us earlier to the fact that when looking at publisher value and contribution, it’s vital to look at this in the wider cross channel context. But first of all I want to focus specifically on the affiliate channel. In September we saw that 83% of sales had only one affiliate interaction – so the big question really is how do we reward the remaining 17% of publishers who are losing out due to the last click model? We’ve always talked about the need for transparency, but this year we’ve taken our own advice and have started sharing more widely the data we capture in order to help us answer this question.
• #29: Over the past 5 years we’ve taken progressive steps in utilising network data to help clients shape attribution models that are right for them and their publishers. Our approach and capabilities have developed over time, but our mission remains the same – to bring transparency. Early insights came from the ‘daisy chain’ insight we offer. This looks at the path to purchase a customer takes from click to sale through the performance channel. We look at which publishers were winners and which were losers due to the last click model, who overwrites who and how often. A stage later we introduced post-view tracking capabilities to enable us to investigate the influence of certain publishers that customers were interacting with further up the sales funnel. In April this year, we added a new metric to both the advertiser and publisher performance reports called ‘Assists’. Assists show multi-affiliate transactions where a publisher wasn’t the last click. We also look at the sum of all last click sales and assists to define the ‘total influence’ that publisher has had. The most recent update came just last month when we took the ‘Assist’ reporting a stage further, now able to provide insight on how publishers assist sales beyond the affiliate channel.
• #30: To give you a view of what is now visible within our reports I’ve taken a look at the assist data for the month of September for a successful social content site promoting a leading fashion brand on the network. Our reports show us that… 211 times they converted solo and no other publisher was involved 217 times they converted but this time there were other publishers involved in the journey 84 times they drove the first click, but were not the last referrer 62 times they drove a click but again were not the last referrer This is where it gets interesting – a total of 5834 times they drove a click but were overwritten by another channel And lastly 6346 is the number of times they assisted plus converted showing us their total influence Overall you can see how well this publisher converts within the affiliate channel but how severely they miss out when looking at the wider online picture picture. 
• #31: Looking at it from an advertiser perspective, we want to show you how a retailer within the mobile operators sector has made use of our assist data to reward publishers differently. As you know this market is highly competitive and with the launch of the iPhone 6 last month, competition was at its peak. The team at AWin decided to look at the affiliate journey to try and understand not just which publisher were closing the deal, but also those influencing at the start of the journey. On average for this sector, 93% of the time there will only have been 1 affiliate touchpoint. Almost 7% of the time there are 2 or more. When looking at the assist reporting, they found that there were a handful of content sites with very high assist to sale rates. One in particular, had assisted 58% of the time and only converted 42%. The team then conducted daisy chain analysis to work out who the publishers were losing out to – you can see from the results here it was a high amount of UGC, price comparison and cashback – unsurprising given customers are looking for the best deal.   The team recommended funding a tenancy for 1 month to see if the rate at which they convert would increase. Within that month long period the publisher’s conversion shot up to 75% compared with the previous 42%, an increase of 17% - showing there is real value in engaging and rewarding those publishers who are regularly assisting earlier on in the funnel. Another exciting development to be aware of is in the coming months we’ll be launching functionality within Darwin to reward publishers for assists in real-time, no matter what stage they were at in the journey.
• #32: So now you’ve had a snapshot into some of the insights we’ve seen and projects we’ve been working on, the big question is, what’s next on the roadmap? For that I’ll pass you back over to Kevin who’s going to share some insight into what’s in store as we enter 2015.