A previous post addressed why the question of incrementality is often applied to the affiliate channel. This edition, specific to cashback affiliates, shows how you can go about finding out if sales attributed to these partners are ones you would have gotten anyway.
Why should I offer cashback?
What if my customer decides to buy, and then discovers at the last minute that they can get cashback? They then go back to a loyalty site and click through to my site again. I was getting the sale anyway, but now I’ve had to pay commission for it.
This is, of course, a frustrating concept. But we don’t have to draw assumptions here – we can use the wealth of data at our fingertips to understand the customer journey in the finest of detail:
- Use multi-channel funnel tracking to gain a deeper insight into the customer’s journey to your site.
- Analyse the click to sale latency of cashback sales – how long after the click does the customer convert? Compare the data from cashback affiliates to the average for all your affiliates. If it’s significantly shorter, you can probably assume that an element of this is taking place.
After conducting your analysis, even if you can conclude that a proportion of your cashback customers check for an incentive at the very last point in the purchase process, don’t be too hasty in taking action.
Remember that customers who use cashback sites are savvy shoppers, and only 35-40% of customers who begin a transaction online will complete that transaction (data sourced from Ve Interactive). If 5% cashback is the final push that customer needs to convert, we think it’s a small price to pay. Do you agree?
Our next post will be about working with cashback partners to gain new customers. Watch this space!
