Marketing Survey Results

What are the most often used marketing methods? Which marketing methods are most successful? These were the few questions we gave to our visitors in our Affiliate Marketing Survey. Do you want to know the results?

Voting for used marketing methods

Merchants were able to check several methods of advertising they use. It's probably not a surprise that the most widely used marketing method are Pay-Per-Click campaigns on Google AdWords, Yahoo, and similar.

The second most widely used method of marketing is having own affiliate program, closely followed by Opt-in newsletters, Link exchanges, Article and PR submissions.

Most successful marketing methods

Merchants gave the same amount of votes to Pay-Per-Click and own affiliate program when they had to decide what is their most successful marketing method. It shows the strength of having own affiliate program, when it is run professionally.

Interesting is that there are quite many people out there whose most successful marketing methods are Opt-in Newsletters, Article and Press Release submissions, which means methods that are usually free of cost.

If we consider the top two marketing methods from our survey, each of them has its strengths and weaknesses. Affiliate program is generally the most effective marketing method, because you (usually) pay commissions only for referred sales. However, it is only up to your affiliates if they are able to deliver any visitor.

Pay-Per-Click campaigns on the other side are able to bring lots of visitors in a short time, however effectivity of PPC campaign depends on conversion ratio of your website. You can easily spend lot of money on clicks without any result in sales.

Experience with affiliate marketing

In the second part of the survey, visitors had to rank their experience with affiliate marketing and management of affiliate program.

Majority of the participants ranked themselves as beginners in affiliate marketing. Despite being beginners, majority of merchants want to manage their affiliate program by themselves.

You can find the whole survey results with exact graphs on our website http://www.QualityUnit.com

Maros Fric is CTO and co-owner of Quality Unit, a software company specialising in consulting & development for web marketing and web data mining.

He is behind the creation of http://www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliatepro/, one of the most powerful affiliate tracking software available on the market.