Tips & Guides — 27 Dec 2018
With 2018 coming to the end, it’s high time to evaluate how the industry changed and predict how these changes would affect the upcoming year for affiliate marketers. Thus, we asked top industry leaders about their predictions for 2019 year, and what affiliate marketers should keep an eye on. Enjoy the reading, and share your opinion in the comments down below.
Without doubts, 2018 was a difficult year, especially in terms of the regulations over protecting consumer’s privacy. We all survived GDPR (well, sort of), Apple’s ITP 2.0, but we still don’t know how it will affect affiliate marketing in the long run.
Clément Névoret, co-founder, elementr:
“The next year will be tough. We believe it will be a year of “make it or break it” for many, especially bigger players. As the market continues its way towards more policy and regulation, the pressure on quality and transparency will continue to grow. Under this pressure, some big networks might suffer from being unable to fully comply with those new rules, leading them to cut part of their inventory and revenues. This could have a snowball effect on their cash-flow, their capability to hit profitability, to pay their publishers and employees. So we expect ultimately pretty heavy restructurings to happen in 2019, and we anticipate the mobile ad network landscape to look very different from the current one.
Positive aspect of this evolution, we believe networks with more agile structures and the most experienced professionals will have additional opportunities in this context and will be able to takeover market share from bigger players.”
According to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, the time we spend on our connected devices keeps rising. Daily digital media usage among adults now comes in at 5.9 hours, and the majority of that time is spent on mobile devices. In fact, mobile is the only medium that users increased time with compared to the previous year.
Alexander Bachmann, founder, Admitad:
“As rightly forecasted in 2017, the year of 2018 became the time of practically entire transition to mobile devices and this trend will definitely continue to shape the e-commerce industry in 2019. Almost all the activities of consumers now can be fulfilled via a “smartphone”. All the e-shops have been and are still trying their best to optimize the mobile shopping experience for customers.
More to that, the influence of the so-called social commerce grows rapidly: social networks have become the newest e-commerce marketplaces and now more than 80% of the e-purchases are accomplished in social media (most of which – via partner networks).
Following the trend of “mobilization”, this year Admitad elaborated its cross-device and cross-browser tracking tools as well as launched the updated version of Mobile SDK – the revolutionary solution in mobile tracking to provide advertisers with new traffic sources via those publishers who work with mobile traffic and are no longer afraid of “losing” their leads.”
There is a conviction that big data is only for industry titans. But with all the cutting-edge cloud tracking softwares which provide with almost unlimited opportunities for collecting traffic data, even middle and small sized affiliate networks and agencies can take the advantage of analysing big data to find unique opportunities in target segments and ad campaigns promotion.
Tanya Gripachevskaya, Head of Customer Success, Affise:
“In the coming years we will see a huge growth in demand for analytics and BI tools to process the data affiliate marketers collect every day. Processing huge amount of data is a core need of any affiliate network: A/B, A/A email and landing pages tests with the split of promotional period, narrow region targeting, demographics along with the performance analysis of converted banners, devices, carriers etc.
But the real power of data is not in the quantity. It’s in in the ability to build hypotheses based on it and test them immediately. So, I see the future in predictive analysis and determining the reasons of successful conversions, achieving ads campaign goals, ROI and cost predictions based on the collected data.
That’s why my advice is to start collecting all the possible data, even if you do not plan to work with it right now. In the future it will turn into the key strategy for your affiliate business”.
No matter what 2019 holds for us, we are sure that affiliate marketing will continue to evolve and thrive. We expect that 2019 will be the year full of changes as the industry gets smarter, more strategic, and transparent. And we’ll keep adapting to all these changes like we did before, and make our best to take online advertising experience to the qualitatively new level.
Head of PR and Marketing Communications
Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.
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