Do Coupon Affiliates Drive Any Value?
What’s included in the Coupon Affiliate Case Study?
Coupon Affiliates fall into 3 groups
Grouping all coupon-type affiliates into one coupon category really no longer works.
Coupon aggregators, who supply consumers with ALL the coupons; these are traditionally what people think of when they say “coupon sites.”
Paid search arbitrators with coupon sites, which includes affiliates who want trademark terms to bid on and drive the vast majority of their traffic this way; a better way to describe them may be “search affiliates.”
“Best of web” deal sites, which cultivate the best deals on the web for many categories; these guys rely on this cultivation to create an environment where consumers discover new brands and products.
Advertising waste
Why is this a problem worthy of discussion rather than just a common grievance? According to a Rakuten Marketing report, “Waste is still prominent in marketing spend in 2018. According to our study, marketers estimate they waste 26% of their marketing budget on the wrong channels or strategies. Advocates exceed this figure by 2%, while Architects are only prepared to admit to wasting 18% of budget.
Incremental customer acquisition
Comscore and Google released a much-anticipated study at CJU that spoke to this very issue (thanks to CJU for supplying this). In the study, Google shared that 94% of transactions driven by coupon affiliate paid search ads were incremental—meaning, the customers were not already on the retailer’s site before they searched for a coupon. Just 6% of purchasers were already on the retailer site before clicking on a coupon ad.
