Anyone watching TV these days can’t help but notice the proliferation of advertisements for price comparison sites. What is less widely understood is what is driving this sudden growth, and how this is changing the customer purchase funnel (in other words, the way we select products and services to buy online).
In our previous blog post in the Curated Web series, we looked at the various types of vertical search site, how they make money and where they get their search results from. We touched briefly on affiliate marketers, mentioning the affiliate networks which they belong to and the affiliate fees which they earn. In this post we dive much more deeply into affiliate marketing, to understand why retailers are spending increasing amounts on affiliate marketing, what impact these rapidly developing vertical search sites are having on buyer behaviour online, and what these changes mean for major Web companies, especially Google. But first, we will explain a little more about what affiliate marketing actually is.
