Affiliate Marketing is Incremental—and We Proved It

CJ leveraged its powerful audience insights to create a highly accurate view of customer behavior when they engage with affiliate sites, versus when they don’t—to achieve an expression of affiliate’s incrementality.

Digital marketing today includes a wide range of channels that are vying for investment. With a myriad of ways for consumers to connect with brands, the bar has been set higher than ever for channels to prove their value. For brands to intelligently invest, it is important for them to truly understand the value each channel delivers. To find the answer, the CJ Affiliate Data Science team harnessed transaction data, customer profiles, client CRM data, and site visit analytics to pull off the largest affiliate incrementality study ever conducted.

We found that overall, when a shopper interacts with the affiliate channel, they are more likely to purchase, spend more with each purchase, and make more subsequent purchases. Furthermore, we also found that shopper interaction with the affiliate channel positively affected results for both new-to-file and return customers. Our findings prove that affiliate adds incremental value to the marketing mix, to the tune of:

• 46% Higher Shopper to Customer Conversion
• 29% Higher Spend Per Customer
• 88% Higher Revenue Per Shopper

The results that we uncovered through this study demonstrate the unique ability that affiliate has as a digital marketing channel to address a wide variety of customer need states through publishers. These publishers offer trusted third-party perspectives to meet customer needs such as: getting introduced to new brands, researching and comparing products, saving money, earning cashback, and much more. It follows then that a brand’s spend would return more in terms of key KPIs such as orders, AOV, conversion, and revenue.

With more than 21 million retail consumers and 5.5 million transactions analyzed, the results are clear. Check out our whitepaper on a Study of Affiliate Incrementality to see the full impact that affiliate has on key performance metrics.