Performance marketing: How can advertisers and publishers work together to increase affiliate traffic via mobile platforms?

Jo Thomas, assistant head of performance marketing, LBi
In order to increase affiliate traffic via mobile platforms, advertisers need to make information available to publishers to allow them to understand which products/services to push on their own mobile sites. This will encourage the right type of traffic and customer coming through to the final purchase point on site. Advertisers can also help by having mobile optimised sites which will generally encourage strong mobile affiliates to promote the site on their own ones.

Kevin Edwards, strategy director, Affiliate Window
While handset and tablet traffic is consistently indexing above 20 per cent, mobile marketing is in its infancy. We’re undergoing a rapid period of both internal and external education, working with engaged advertisers to establish proof of concept. In turn this can be case studied and used to inform future planning.

Publisher opportunities through mobile are still largely focused around incentivised online to offline traffic and while these are compelling, do not help advertisers who aren’t on the high street. New mobile propositions will help contextualise the opportunity; there is no doubt there is a huge appetite for making mobile work through the channel.

Helen Southgate, managing director, affilinet
Both the advertiser and affiliate need to have mobile optimised pages to ensure there is a seamless journey for the customer. In just a few years, mobile traffic will exceed that from fixed line connections. As such optimising mobile is no longer about being ahead of the game, it’s about ensuring you’re in the game.

Think about your consumer. How are they interacting with your site? What purchase stage are they at? Use this knowledge to create a seamless and easy experience to optimise traffic and conversion. Lastly, ensure that there is tracking for affiliates in place, simple yet surprisingly often overlooked.

Mary Keane-Dawson, digital media lead consultant and board advisor
By realising that the physical and the mobile experience need to work together to generate a consumer engagement ie. a sale, a visit, a download, an interaction with data capture. Customers have a increasingly superficial relationship with the majority of brands via a touch screen, or at least a rather less reverential one. Consequently being pushed promotions and discounts to your smartphone because of your location is a pretty blunt way of affecting the consumer’s view of a brand experience.

Affiliates need to accept that being more creative in terms of engagement through mobile content, apps etc rather than simply ramming offers into someone’s face is going to become much more effective in making people do stuff, optimising sales revenues and building brand loyalty.

Florian Gramshammer, UK country manager, Commission Junction
The mobile channel brings plenty of new opportunities for advertisers and publishers but it comes with a set of its own obstacles. Of course both, advertisers and publishers, must adapt their websites with responsive design and mobile specific versions and features of their sites in order to provide a consistent user experience.

The consumer engagement lifecycle has the potential to take on completely new forms when today’s mobile-enabled customer interacts with publisher and advertiser websites. Engagement, conversion and customer retention have become a more complex, and more exciting for marketers at the same time.

Working together in an endeavour to engage the mobile consumer needs more than just technology and great looking apps and websites. Some of the most attractive opportunities we see today for advertisers and publishers to work together are found in location-based and social marketing applications.
 
Sharing of data and consistent tracking processes are key, particularly where in-store promotions are on the list of marketing objectives. Commission Junction provides mobile tracking certification to ensure advertisers and publishers can rely on the best tracking technologies; we also enable a number of successful mobile to offline marketing efforts.

Ellie Edwards-Scott, managing director, Quisma UK
The issue that we’re seeing here is that there is a slight disconnect between what publishers and advertisers perceive as premium inventory. Publishers are still in relatively unknown territory when it comes to correctly valuing their own mobile inventory, rather due to the explosion of interest by advertisers in the past six-12 months. Rather than guesswork valuation, mobile needs some research to accurately ascertain advertiser value, to lend this platform the credence it needs to grow properly.

This feature is published as part of The Drum's quarterly Performance supplement, sponsored by:

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