"Content" Affiliates and Digital Advertising through Online Sales Channels

Digital advertisers can use affiliate related sales channels to drive more qualified and targeted user traffic to their websites. This study examines the nature of these online sales channels, their role in the customer... [ view full abstract ]

Digital advertisers can use affiliate related sales channels to drive more qualified and targeted user traffic to their websites. This study examines the nature of these online sales channels, their role in the customer journey and different attribution models that can be applied in an environment of incremental sale. We employ online transaction data provided by a large online sales firm to investigate these questions. We find that affiliates are most likely to act as a converter. We subsequently investigate what financial value an affiliate program brings to a company under the most commonly used the “last-click” attribution model, and compare it to the Shapley value based attribution model. The analysis of these models allows conclusions to be drawn on whether affiliate revenue significantly differs between the models. As we find, average affiliate reward significantly decreases when changing from last-click to the Shapley Value based model. Our study of affiliates can be understood as an example of the ways online content creators can monetize their content that flows into commerce.