I think it’s such an interesting question. I mean, obviously, being in marketing I write a lot of content and success and defining it is something that I try to talk about quite a lot, because it’s so unique, it’s so different for everyone.
Whereas, back in the day, it probably was very simple. It was to grow revenue by X percent. But this channel has evolved so much that the way we define success is just so different now. And I think that’s, that’s one of the things I love working at Partnerize is, you’re right, we do have such diverse customers.
We’ve got everyone from fashion retailers to foreign exchange to airlines to buy now pay later, it’s all so different. So you can’t possibly define success in the same way for all of those types of brands.
Something that we have been talking a lot about lately at Partnerize is defining a success above success. So whilst you will have your own sort of unique goals and metrics, like then kind of elevating this channel to something bigger.
Something that we’ve been talking to customers about quite recently, at the end of last year and start of this year, has been ‘how is your affiliate partnership program defined to be successful alongside your other channels?’. For example, especially here in Australia, a lot of the people who manage these programs, they don’t just manage partnerships, they manage paid search, or SEO, or social or multitude of other digital acquisition channels…
Those channels are fantastic, but they’re getting more and more expensive, and the ROAS is getting lower and lower year after year.
Something that we have been putting to market is the modern marketer. And that’s going… ‘How do I take something like Partnership, which has great ROAS, is very outcome based, and take some of the profit from that and help it to fund my other acquisition channels so that success is across the board?’
Once you’ve achieved that level, it’s then really diving down into, okay, what’s unique to me, what specifically do I want to achieve in my business?’ For example our customer Farfetch, won the Best Performance Marketing Campaign for APAC (at the IPMAs). And the reason they won was because their success metrics for that campaign were just so different. But they have a really established affiliate program, and they wanted to take that model and use it for their media partners and bring them in.
And they did that very well, it helped them to win the award! And I think that that is the prime example of what I’ve just said. That’s going to be super different to if you’re an airline, if you’re Virgin Australia that started to bounce back this year. Or if you’re a Buy Now Pay Later that’s new into the channel, success is going to be so different every time. It’s just about two areas at that high level: how is success defined as part of your wider acquisition strategy? And then how is success defined uniquely for your program and your business?