See the Data! What Happened When an Online Retailer Stopped Affiliate Marketing for Two Weeks

by | Sep 17, 2018 | Affiliate Marketing, Blog

eAccountable has been in the digital marketing agency and affiliate marketing space since 2000. During this time, we’ve seen clients go through a variety of significant business issues ranging from bankruptcy and closing up shop overnight, to unexpectedly firing the ecommerce lead – or even the entire marketing department.
Recently, one of our client’s suddenly asked us to pause an affiliate marketing campaign that had generated $1M+ in trackable revenue during the 12 prior months.
The client’s reasons behind this pause were twofold:

    • Budget concerns
    • To determine the incremental lift (incrementality) of the affiliate channel related to  other marketing channels

When eAccountable received this notification, we immediately informed all affiliates to cease program participation; we deleted all banners and links, and all affiliate communications efforts stopped.
Amazingly, only two weeks later, eAccountable was asked to restart the program. Banners, links and affiliate relationship and communications efforts were reinstated. We were able to rapidly restart the program and regain the momentum from the prior affiliate program’s success. Here’s what happened in the immediate aftermath of the relaunch:
389% Increase in Clicks after Affiliate Program Relaunch
After reinstating the affiliate marketing program, clicks to the retailer site saw an increase of 389% when comparing the highest yielding day after reinstatement to the clicks from the prior two-week period.
381% Increase in Revenue after Affiliate Program Relaunch
After the relaunch, revenue to the retailer site saw an increase of 381% when comparing the highest yielding day after reinstatement to the revenue from the prior two-week period.
Conclusion
Over a very short period of time the affiliate channel incrementality was validated by our customer and budget was restored to the campaign. Thankfully, the program was strong enough that the original momentum was regained and the campaign continues to show excellent growth and be important to the customer.
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