Pepperjam, a Partnerize company, and leading affiliate marketing technology and services solutions provider, announced today that content publisher partners on its Ascend™ Affiliate Cloud platform have demonstrated material year-over-year growth throughout 2020, as measured by the Pepperjam Affiliate Marketing Sales Index. The growth trends validate the emergence of content partners as key contributors in the channel, signaling a milestone in the channel’s journey to earn its seat at the CMO’s table.
Year to date, traffic from content partners on Ascend™ grew 43% year-over-year (YoY), while the average revenue growth exceeded 64%, resulting in an average 52% new-to-file customer rate. Data also indicates a 17% revenue shift away from last-click partner types, increasing content’s share of revenue growth by 26% year to date, representing even greater marketing maturity in the channel.
“For too long, scale within the affiliate category was only easily identified and activated with coupon and cash back partners, thereby limiting the utility of the channel to marketers who embraced purely transactional acquisition strategies,” said Pepperjam CEO, Matt Gilbert. “Technology innovation has empowered marketers to move beyond the legacy network model to easily identify, recruit and activate diverse partner types through automation, while advanced commissioning and attribution capabilities have enabled proper measurement and compensation to equitably reward partners’ actual contributions. Pepperjam continues to work hard to expand the population of marketers creating operating leverage from the channel and assist them with the critical mission of turning their partnerships into a profit center.”
A key driver of the rising revenue growth for content partners was Pepperjam’s influencer partner discovery and recruitment solution, which brings over 250,000 unique influencers into the platform’s Discover supply database. Marketers are responding by investing over 41% of channel spend with this partner segment—more than any other type. For content partners, technology advancements in the Ascend™ platform enabled these publishers to establish new revenue streams through the performance channel. With Amazon’s Associate program commission cuts earlier this year creating even more pressure to monetize, content creators turned to Ascend™, signaled by the influx of social media and content partner sign-ups to the platform—averaging 95% over the last six weeks.
“Following a migration from a SaaS only provider, Pepperjam recommended content partner optimization as a key component of our affiliate strategy. Their team of experts leveraged Ascend™ to identify and activate content and social shopping partners, a segment that represents over 76% of overall program traffic,” said Heather Kaminetsky, Chief Brand Digital Officer of M. GEMI. “As a result, we’ve been able to reach new audiences, with content partners driving a 74% new-to-file customer rate.”
To learn more about content partner performance trends and insights on Pepperjam’s Ascend™ platform, download the ebook “In Affiliate Marketing, Content is King”.
