Affiliate marketing in the Netherlands: Research 2009

You hear it more often every day:  Affiliate marketing is hot! The market has been growing rapidly over the past few years and a increasing amount of networks is popping up in the Netherlands. Despite the grow in turnover and maturity, the affiliate market remains unclear for many people. Yonego once started as affiliate itself and now finds itself active in managing affiliate marketing campaigns for several large advertisers. Yonego therefore started a large annually research. The results of the survey tell us how to understand our affiliates better, this helps to improve the cooperation between affiliates, networks and advertisers.

Target group
Over 400 affiliates have yet participated in the survey. Almost all large networks and affiliate media have cooperated to push people to make the survey. Both private consumers and commercial businesses have given a anonymous insight into the ins and outs of their affiliate activities. 58% of the questioned appeared to be commercially active and specially men were active as affiliate (89,5%).

Despite this large amount are the affiliate activities limited to a part-time task. 69% limits their hours affiliate marketing to 20 hours each week. 17% spends 40 hours or more on affiliate activities. 21% of the affiliates has its own personnel. No less than 34% of the affiliates answer the question “do you also operate international” with a yes. 44,6% of the affiliates don’t make over €500 each month, but some exceptions  boost the average, 10,8% told us they make over €20.000 per month.

Work method affiliates
Focus appears to be one of the most important day tasks for affiliates. 55% limits their amount of promoted programs to 10. 45,4% admits they use paid campaigns to achieve this. Despite this, another question tells us organic search results still remain the most important source of traffic.

Holidays, telecommunication, consumer electronics, books/movies/music and clothing are the most popular branches amongst affiliates. Affiliates make their choice for a program based on the relevance  with already excising sites and the potential of the turnover. 59,1% admits that financial incentives stimulate the turnover best.

The network Daisycon comes from the survey as the absolute winner. 72,5% works with the Daisycon network, 62,1% works via Tradedoubler, 61,5% via Tradetracker and 55,3% via M4N. Next to all this it appears that 28,1% prefers Daisycon, followed by Tradetracker with 20,1%.

The future of affiliate marketing in the year 2010
The affiliates have hope for good results in the year 2010. 24% of the respondents expects a increase in turnover of over 50%! The networks see the year 2010 a little less optimistic. 59% of them expects that the market will consolidate.

Tips for the networks and the advertisers
The research shows that only 62,7% of the respondents is happy with the service that the Dutch networks provide. The satisfaction level of the communication is a little higher with 71,9%. The frequency of contact that the users wish with their affiliates differs severely. Affiliates prefer E-mail as main way of communication. 30 days of cookie-time is highly accepted and 62,6% of the affiliates uses tracking tools of the networks to measure their results. The technique, the interface of the network, the support and the communication appear the most important factors that give a network program a chance of success.

On the Yonego website you can read the complete results of the research (Dutch).