Officially launched in 2010, Affiliate Marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies to promote business sales and generate income. If you are struggling whether affiliate marketing is safe and legal? Read these affiliate marketing statistics to know its popularity and volume!
In this article, from some of the most interesting statistics on affiliate marketing, businesses will have a better look at the powerful impact that Affiliate has had on both B2C and B2B businesses globally.
✅See also: How to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer? 7 Essential Affiliate Hacks
1- Affiliate Marketing is a Billion Dollar Industry
According to Statista, affiliate marketing budgets in the US alone are expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022 ( and they did), more than three times higher than 10 years earlier. According to the Awin report, advertisers invested $13 billion in affiliate marketing in 2017 alone.
These numbers and a consistent uptrend demonstrate that Affiliate will continue to thrive through 2021 and beyond.
2- The strong shift from advertising to affiliate marketing
Rakuten claimed in the Forrester report:
81% of advertisers and 84% of content creators have used affiliate marketing. And more than half of the affiliate publishers surveyed in this report say that affiliate marketing accounts for more than 20% of their annual revenue.
Marketers today have begun to move heavily towards joining affiliate networks that can leverage affiliate content to increase awareness of their brand, encourage customer engagement, and drive sales.
Over 80% also spend more than 10% of their marketing budget on affiliate programs.
Based on Google Trends data, the search trend for the query “affiliate marketing” has been steadily increasing over the past few years. Between 2015 and 2020, search results related to this query have grown by more than 200%. This trend is consistent with the rise of online shopping and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail.
This trend had become stronger, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic forced some spending and shopping habits to change. As people spend more time online, they also start looking for alternative sources of income, leading to this search trend.
✅See also: Affiliate Marketing Guide: How to Get Sales in Affiliate Marketing?
4- The largest affiliate networks have more than 100 thousand active affiliates.
Many businesses lack the financial resources to promote their business, products, and services. They cannot invest in online marketing effectively. That’s why they create affiliate programs to drive brand awareness and actual sales.
Since it is easy to become an affiliate marketer and the number of affiliate marketers is increasing tremendously, thousands of small and medium businesses, as well as large, depend on affiliate marketing as an additional sales channel.
The largest affiliate networks today can be mentioned as follows:
- Amazon Associates: 900,000+
- ShareASale: 700,000+
- Awin: 205,000+
- ClickBank: 100,000+
5- Using a price comparison site is the most popular Affiliate Marketing activity among users
A study measured the value of the UK affiliate market, IAB UK, and PwC, concluded that using price comparison sites was the most common linking activity among web users in the UK between 2015–2018. In 2021, this trend could increase again as the complicated developments of the pandemic continue to change in countries worldwide.
Other affiliate activities with high rates, such as visits to get discount codes, loyalty websites, etc.
6- 85% of online shoppers check Google before making a purchase
Today’s consumers are starting to use more reviews before purchasing online products. Not surprisingly, the most common way to find more information about such items is to enter a search query on Google. This is where affiliate reviews, comparisons, and guides have a better chance to convert than other types of writing.
A research article by Kenshoo reports that 85% of online shoppers turn to Google to search for information and read reviews before making a purchase.
This makes visibility in search results very important to affiliate marketers, especially considering that these users have pre-existing purchase intent, but the rate depends on reviews.
✅See also: Is Affiliate Marketing Safe: 8 Information about Affiliate Marketing
