2023 Affiliate Marketing Trends: Top Insights From Affiliate Summit West

Last week, The Stable’s Affiliate Marketing team attended the biggest affiliate marketing event in the world: Affiliate Summit West. Affiliates, advertisers, eCommerce sellers, networks, and tech suppliers gathered in Las Vegas for cutting-edge, tactical sessions delivered by industry experts. Keep reading for a few key takeaways:

The Partnership Economy is evolving at a fast pace, always reinventing the affiliate business model to adjust to the changes in shopping behaviors.

• 80% of advertisers will invest more in affiliate marketing and performance-based campaigns in 2023 and in building direct partnerships with affiliates. 
• Roughly 10% of media spend should be invested in building organic content and assets that can be repurposed for paid media campaigns.
• Brand-to-brand partnerships will continue to develop in the affiliate space with more co-marketing campaign opportunities to enhance consumer shopping experience with brands they love.
• Hybrid payout models (Flat fee + CPA) will continue to be adopted by digital creators to solidify longer-term partnerships between advertisers and influencers and to have better transparency and control over costs and ROI.

2023 will be about exploring multi-touch attribution for the affiliate channel and giving more credit to upper-funnel publishers for their early influence and weight in shopper behaviors and final purchases.

• Winning affiliate strategies will include larger commitment to build commerce content partnerships and relationships with shopping-forward editorial publications.
• Cash-back, give-back, and in-store (online) credit promotions are going to support building customer LTV and engaged shoppers.

In exchange, top media partners will continue to invest in technology and tools to support shopping cart universality for consumers.

• Media publishers will also continue to form successful partnerships with advertisers and brands that align with their editorial voice, have high CTRs, search intent, and shared interests with their audience personas
• Therefore, they will give shoppers the choice with multiple buying options and monetize content by prioritizing channels that drive the highest intent and conversions (Amazon and Multi-brand retailers over direct-to-consumer sites)