This is a very interesting debate as I’ve had one of my insurance merchants doing some analysis on exactly what the affiliate vs comparison cross over is over the past few months.

The merchant hasn’t implemented any deduping this is purely an information gathering exercise so the tracking for the direct comparison deals and the tracking for the affiliate channel are running side by side.

So far we’re 3 months in and, using a combination of the 2 tracking solutions, the cross over of sales where a customer has visited both a comparison site and gone through an affiliate link is around 3% with the last referrer being the affiliate in about 60% of the cases.

This is well within tolerable limits for the merchant apparently so looks like deduping won’t be considered which is good for affiliates and has also displayed to the merchant the influence affiliates are able to exert in the buying process…after all, the customer did convert off the affiliate link in 60% of cases and cashback has only played a very small part.

Granted this is on a single program for a single insurance product so its probably not an accurate indication of events across whole sectors but I’d be interested to see some research into this.

Cheers

Andy

Contrary to a perception that numerous cookies are being overwritten, we’ve found the vast majority of sales we’re recording across a handful of sample merchants have a single affiliate referrer (in one case it’s 96% single referrer).

The biggest loser (if you can say ‘biggest’ given the negligible incidence of overwriting) is price comparison and generally ‘true content’ sites still do better from a last referrer than first referrer model.

I should add this is across retail merchants and not finance. I believe the picture differs slightly between sectors.

Where I think more research needs to be done is at a granular level that references sector or product specific data. This is a project we’re currently working on at Awin.

Thanks,
Kevin

I’ve noticed Aviva have opted out of price comparison websites.
However they still are allowing cashback sites to promote them.
Seems strange to me.
Any ideas as to why they would do this?