1. Do Incentive Sites Drive
Incremental Value?
Mark Ash, Commercial Director- TMN (Mutual Points)
David McDermott, Affiliate Manager-Mindshare
David Harding, Customer Acquisitions Manager- Argos
Daniel Powel, Head of Account Management- Commission Junction
Chris Hodgson, Co-Founder-KidStart
Mads Ellengaard, Co-Founder, aGoodCause.com

2. What motivates users to use
incentive sites?
Price
• Best Price
• Search, Voucher code, Price Comparison
• Result: Purchase behaviour is ‘rational’
Value
• Price + Emotional component
• Earn points towards something emotional
• Special offers and discounts
• Belong to community, getting ‘information’
• Giving to charity, supporting causes
Result: Purchase behaviour becomes ‘irrational’ since it is associated
with emotion

3. Emotional and personal incentives
Emotional and personal incentives
through AidMaker and aGoodCause
through AidMaker and aGoodCause
1. Visit our website and install the AidMaker software
2. Shop at the same prices as everyone else.
(in more than 5000 online shops e.g. Dell).
3. Your shopping makes donations for a charity of your choice
(e.g. Save the Children).

4. What motivates merchants to use
incentive sites?
• Access to a new customer base
• Growing consumer awareness and adoption
• Being where you competitors are
• Easy entrance into new markets for smaller brands
• The economic climate: Lower COS
• US market
• Potential increases average order value
• Potential increases in average transaction frequency
• The flexibility in CPA

5. What is incremental value?
In quantitative terms:
• Driving new customer sales
• Increasing CLV of existing customers
• Increasing AOV
Untracked:
• Driving awareness and adding value to the brand....

6. Measuring the incremental value of
incentive publishers?
• Assessing the new customer benefit
• The sales benefit cannibalisation vs incrementality
• Comparing channel measurement
• Incrementality over time
• Assessing the incrementality of varying activities
• Impact on Average order value
• Impact on transaction frequency/loyalty
• The customer journey

7. How do incentive sites add value?
• Access to a large community of brand-affable shoppers whose
loyalty to their incentive site is passed on to the merchant.
• Generating groups of highly influential, vocal brand champions.
Perfect viral marketers
• Providing advertising responsive customers eager to hear about
the latest products/offers. Cross/Upsell & Lapsed conversion
enhanced by incentive sites
• Generating tactical exposure as and when required
• Influencing the initial product comparison process and helping to
close the sale
• By offering the perfect remedy to an economic crisis

8. How can we demonstrate It?
Quantitative
• Analysing network tracked sales data – only one piece of the puzzle
• Working with incentive site to analyse site member purchase
behaviour
• File-aging, Recency/Frequency, New vs. Existing , Creative Response behavioural
analysis.
• Combine data with other online/offline datasets to get 360 degree
overview of affiliate effectiveness
Qualitative
• Site traffic analysis
• Focus Groups
• Consumer blogs/Forums feedback

9. Monitoring traffic value
“The farther backward you can look, the
farther forward you are likely to see.”
Winston Churchill

10. Monitoring traffic value
What is the Is the ‘last How can I
value of an click wins’ measure the
influencer? route to
method fair?
purchase?
How do you Will I be
determine duplicating
an influencer? my budget?

11. Emotional and personal incentives Through
AidMaker and aGoodCause
1000 visitors
No Emotional
incentive incentive
Conversion rate 2% Conversion rate 6,7 %
20 sales of 50 Pounds 67 sales of 50 Pounds
1000 Pounds 3550 Pounds

12. Better Traffic Understanding?
• Industry needs to consider additional tracking mechanisms and
alternative ways to assess affiliate value
• More robust and transparent forms of research into what drives a sale
is required
• Deeper network level analysis of user journeys
• Test your affiliate mix. Bear in mind the breadth of different types of
incentive sites and how to use them for different marketing strategies
• Steer away from reliance on Last Cookie Wins and focus towards
other more equitable forms of sales attribution
• Purely online problem!

13. Designing Incremental Traffic
• Make sure you have the right mix of incentive publishers
• Target demographics to match products
• Hit different incentive “verticals”
– Commercial? (cashback)
– Community? (rewards, competitions, single merchant)
– Ethically (charity, causes)
– Product
• Help the affiliate provide a good user experience!
– Resolve queries
– Special offers

14. Case Study: The Argos approach
to measuring incrementality
• Recruited a select number of incentive based publishers
• Close communication to devise a launch plan and ongoing
promotional calendar
• Launched a limited 6 month incrementality trial assessing:
– Incrementality at the outset and how that evolves over time
– Incremental value of various promotional activities
– Compare incrementality with that of other affiliate business
models
– Comparing cross-channel incrementality
– AOV benefit of incentive based affiliates
– ATF benefit of incentive based affiliates
• Conclude and devise the most profitable and incremental future
strategy for the Argos

15. Conclusion
• The right offer for the right audience!
• The right mix of incentive sites can you give
broader coverage without overlap
• Proper analytics can help you understand
exactly how incremental the traffic is
• Incentive sites do bring greater reach for your
brand
• Incentive sites are a cost efficient way to drive
incremental sales.