Why affiliate marketing needs Business Intelligence

Welcome to the first ever blog post of AffiliateBI.

AffiliateBI looks to address the intersection of affiliate marketing with Business Intelligence. That is I believe that the current state of affiliate marketing could be far more advanced than what it is today. 

I believe this to be true and I know others in affiliate marketing share that same sentiment. 

Just think about some of these questions or facts about the industry as a whole.

• How many affiliate managers and operators know the conversion rate of all their landing pages?
• Why does it seem that most affiliate programs do not have API to give data back to their affiliates / publishers?
• Why do most affiliate programs give their affiliates gif banners which are easy for adblockers to block and the conversion rates drop every year?
• How many broken tracking links exist?
• Why can’t I find a lot of data analysts working in affiliate marketing?

These questions are just the starting point. The conversations about BI in affiliate marketing are happening but they are rarely recorded and talked about. We all should be making better decisions with the help of data and data is going to change all aspects of affiliate marketing. 

What is Business Intelligence? BI explained

You might have seem the acronym BI which is short for Business Intelligence. The term has been around since 1865 according to this article on Business Intelligence in Wikipedia. It was first referenced in the Cyclopedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes by Frazar Kirkland. The phrase was attributed to banker Sir Henry Furnese in this sentence;

“Througout Holland, Flanders, France, and Germany, he maintained a complete and perfect train of business intelligence.”

The topics discussed in this book are immense and it features some famous last names such as Rothschild, Vanderbilt and Tattersall. You can take numerous snippets of this book that would be very relevant today.

BI goes hand in hand with data. That is to make data-driven decisions. 

How much is the BI industry worth? More than you think

It has been written that the BI industry was worth USD 27.11 billion in 2022. It is expected to reach USD 54.27 billion by 2030 with a CAGR of 9.1%. 

How much is the affiliate marketing industry worth?

• Affiliate marketing valued at USD 17 billion in 2023
• Affiliate marketing valued at USD 36 billion in 2030
• Global affiliate tracking valued at USD 1.5 billion in 2020

Affiliate marketing stats & data at a glance

• Shareasale listed $200M revenue and 270,000+ active publishers in 2022
• Amazon Associates having over 900,000 affiliates
• Over 10,000 affiliate programs in existence and hundreds of affiliate networks

What is affiliate business intelligence?

We are excited to share our content here. We’ll go deep in a wide array of topics and we want to educate you and bring insightful lessons to you. There will be many discussions on both sides of the fence from publishers to affiliate program content.

Advanced topics in affiliate marketing related to data

This is just a small sample of what we’ll cover at AffiliateBI.

• BI tools (such as Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Salesforce, Zoho Analytics)
• SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Surfer SEO, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, GTM)
• Dataviz (Tableau, R Studio)
• AI & ML
• Adtech (affiliate link tools, track traffic)
• UX / UI design
• Conversion rate optimization (Hotjar, VWO, Optimizely, Hubspot)
• Affiliate program software (Cellxpert, Intelitics, Tune, Impact.com, Post Affiliate Pro)

What is interesting is all of these tools can be used to improve the performance of a website that would have a direct result of improving your referral commissions.

Where things can get more interesting are doing data audits using some of the BI and dataviz tools.

The new AffiliateBI Podcast

We will be launching a weekly podcast that will feature numerous personalities within the world of affiliate marketing analytics as well as people and companies in the BI space. Look out for the first edition of the podcast this May. 

AffiliateBI Summit

That is right, coming soon we’ll be putting together a series of virtual events addressing the many tangents in BI in affiliate marketing. If you want to know what they are, you’ll simply have to follow us on LinkedIn to find out more. 

This site is everyone in affiliate marketing from affiliates to affiliate managers and more.

How can I get involved?

Reach out me, John Wright on LinkedIn and send a DM. All of us want to collaborate with more people whether you are in affiliate marketing or work in some aspect of BI whether data analytics, data science, data visualization, etc…