135,509 affiliate partners. 558,768,814 clicks sent. 1,604,128,711 billion dollars in client affiliate channel sales. 300% user growth. 9.3 times increase in revenue. 14,415,517 products sold.
On Purply and Advertise Purple’s landing pages, these numbers color the screen from top to bottom. As you keep exploring, you’ll see things like, “observational vs actionable data,” “10,000,000 data points,” and “conversion data.” You might think, dang, that’s a whole lot of data, and understandably so.
With more than $1.12 billion in incremental revenue generated through affiliate channels, Purply and Advertise Purple have been collecting conversion data for campaigns, ads, links, and offer combinations for about 10 years. One thing’s for sure—all of this data is what allows us to be effective. But how? And as someone relatively new to the affiliate space, what does this data mean?
Who better to ask than Purply’s Vice President of Product, Rowland H?
Why is data so crucial in affiliate marketing?
Data is the tangible representation of both our past successes and failures. It informs our decisions and helps us prioritize our actions to make sure that we’re making the most impactful decisions on behalf of our clients.
What is the impact of 10 years of data on the Purply platform? And how has it led Purply to become what it is today?
Without data, there would be no Purply. In its infancy, Purply was a data aggregation platform and without that foundational component, we wouldn’t have been able to evolve it into the platform that it is today. Every feature in Purply is built off of that data. The Commission Recommendation report lets clients know if they’re paying too much or too little to an affiliate, Campaign Reporting answers the question of how an optimization compares to itself or other optimizations, and the Communication Tool tells us what messages clients have received that others haven’t.
How does Purply use all of this data?
I think the better question would be, how doesn’t Purply use the data? We analyze both micro and macro trends on clients, verticals, sub-verticals, affiliates, campaigns, products, links, communications, finance, and so much more. This data is two-fold in the way that clients not only get information about their program (e.g. what top affiliates were producing last month that aren’t now), but also data about their vertical (e.g. what top affiliates are in their vertical and how they contact them).
How have 10 years of data allowed Purply (and Advertise Purple, for that matter) to be effective?
Data aggregation at scale is something that no other agency has. It allows us to better understand the affiliate space, better understand the needs of our customers, and ultimately deliver industry-leading service.
What is the true power of data?
I believe the true power of data is being able to quantify our successes and failures as a business. If we’re unable to analyze our actions and improve on them, it’s difficult to continue to drive increased value for our clients. That said, in addition to the more introspective take mentioned above, data allows customization of service, and to better understand both the needs and the strengths and weaknesses of our clients and our employees.
————
Thanks for dropping all that knowledge, Rowland. For someone still getting acquainted with affiliate marketing, it’s been eye-opening seeing how far this data goes beyond numbers. Hopefully, this gives you more insight into what these 10 years of data bring to the table! From where I stand, transparency and insight into the optimization of affiliate programs are just two of countless benefits.
