Affiliate Marketing Manager India

Even though it is not a new concept, Affiliate Marketing is relatively less adaptable medium of online advertising among Indian online advertisers. Now a day, the majority of online advertisers belongs to the travel, finance, education, matrimony and online retail segments. If you monitor the online advertising on all major portals or the advertisements served by the Google Ad sense or other advertising networks, you will find majority of the advertises are related to these segments only.

The most popular medium of online advertising among internet advertisers is Pay per Click. CPC and CPM networks and agencies are making good money from it.

Now look at the psychology of using Affiliate Marketing channel by these online advertisers. DGM India, Shoogloo India, SMXChange are the few most popular affiliate networks in India. Majority of their merchants are either related to Finance, Retail or Travel. Earlier matrimony websites had used affiliate marketing to promote their business but later they moved to CPC advertising.

It looks like that all online advertisers in Indian Internet industry want to use affiliate marketing only for branding and as an alternative to CPC advertising. Affiliate Marketing is a cost effective medium as merchant only have to pay for performance. In this case advertisers are attracted towards affiliate marketing as they even have not to pay for clicks also or very less as compared to Google Ad Sense etc.

If we look at the cookie period of few advertisers in those networks, it is merely 1-2 days. Global reports say that Click through ratios is declining year on year. People normally not prefer to click on an unknown banner and rather than search in Google etc and then go to that site for more information. In this case when an affiliate tries hard to create a website and optimize it for search engines, he will not get the ROI on his efforts which he put to promote those advertisers. Low cookie lifetime means the visitors have to take the action immediately after their encounter with the affiliate site and in Indian environment where the credit card penetration is low; the cookie period should be long.

As we all know, relying on cookie for tracking affiliate clicks and sales is a concern as browsers are becoming more and more private. In this case they should have to implement new methods like direct tracking etc.

It’s also looked like that the entire affiliate marketing game is advertiser friendly and not affiliate friendly. Advertisers increase their term and condition only because they want to get more brand exposure at lower cost. They advertise on Google and other search engine and pay in advance but when the matter of payment to affiliates they delay it for 90-120 days. Affiliate networks accept all the terms and conditions imposed by the advertiser or its agencies as they want business and want to survive. They don't fight for affiliate’s interest.

In long run, it will affect the future of Affiliate Marketing industry in India.