Decoding 2021 and Affiliate trends for 2022

The online industry witnessed some extraordinary changes in the year 2021. The behavioral change and adaptation of more online shopping in consumers benefited both the advertisers and publishers. For the year 2021, we have onboarded 250+ advertisers and more than 9000+ publishers. Categories like E-commerce, fintech and financial services saw a up-swinging but at the same time, the major traffic types also saw a surge and demand among consumers. 

Admitad Affiliate have generated 850 crore GMV, which is 141% more than previous year whereas overall earnings of publishers grew by 132% with the total earning of 89 crore. Through this report, we would bring to you the best campaigns, top traffic type and earnings for the year 2021. Apart from 2 major traffic sources is that cashback and coupon sites, social networks, messengers, loyalty programs and affiliate stores were the traffic sources that caught eyes in the year 2021.

Trending Traffic Sources

Let’s have a look at the trending traffic sources for the year 2021:

• Social networks are skyrocketing in popularity. Many marketers have turned towards social networks to look out for fresh consumers. Online services and E-commerce stores were the 2 prime segments which benefited from this traffic type. The publishers earned nearly INR 22 crore while promoting products from the categories like electronics, homeware, and pharmacy.

• Messengers are also a big trend and  are usually employed as a supplementary part of the  sales funnel.  It has proven to be a good source for segments like e-commerce, financial services and even online services verticals. Over INR 2 crore was earned by publishers  while promoting marketplace and fashion categories.

• Brands when looking to target new customers, loyalty partners can be incredibly lucrative, high-value partners for them in almost every vertical. Financial services and online services were the top segment for this traffic type. INR 1 crore was the approximate earning of the publishers for this traffic type.

Leading traffic sources 

A look at the leading traffic sources for the year 2021:

• Cashback has been the leading traffic source for years and as always outshines other traffic sources this year as well. Electronics, internet  services and fashion were the prime category for this traffic type. With promoting these categories publishers earned 36 crore.

• Coupons are still going strong and are the most traditional traffic type for all. With the total earning of 7 crore of publishers through Admitad platform, coupons also contributed a major chunk to the advertisers with online services and E-commerce stores being the major segment.

• Mass Mailing still exists and is even doing well. Many marketers have turned towards this traditional traffic source to warm up the audience especially during a pre-sale period. 3 crore was the earning amount of publishers for the year 2021 where the top categories were credit services, health and pharmacy and marketplace.

Definite trends for 2022 

Now let us unwrap some events that are likely to shape the industry for 2022.

Buy Now, Pay Later is a short-term financing service that is sold as a product allowing customers to spread out payments for a purchase, usually without any additional interest. It will allow customers to buy immediately and delay the payment by a few days or months, or repay the amount over several installments at no additional interest, so long as the customer pays up on time.  Over the time, these platforms are emerging as a new traffic type in the affiliate industry. Such traffic types are surely to be in the trends for the benefits they provide to the consumers and are expected to work best especially financial services offers along with few other categories and any lead generation campaigns.

The rise of Instagram as an affiliate channel has boomed in recent times. Beauty brands have found that Instagram promotions have helped them create a special place in audience life. Instagram has become one of the top social media platforms with everything going viral in a moment. Partnerships of micro influencers, content creators and trending community groups with affiliate networks turning out as a cost effective method and win-win strategy for both brands and creators, thus creating a long term impact. 

Monetizing with Content. We all know content has always been the most important and integral part in any sorts of marketing and in affiliate marketing content sites have played a significant role in driving performance to the advertisers, and it becomes easy for marketers to target quality audiences. With this the content sites have expanded into various forms like regional and videos based contents, podcast, review sites, and driving sales while understanding how affiliate marketing helps in generating additional revenue.

Offline coupon redemption has been in talks for a long period of time. For certain consumer brands in the likes of pharmacy & health, beauty, electronics and groceries offline partners have enabled/assist them to reach a large segment of audience. Affiliates under this traffic type helps advertisers in achieving their desired KPIs over the period of time. It has also been observed that the marketers are slowly shifting from traditional coupon & cashback towards these traffic sources.

With the exception of these trends, advertisers have started adopting alternate solutions to enter the cookie-less world like API, Server to server integration which will eventually help out the publishers to keep a track of their earnings. 

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