The Month in Affiliate Marketing: April 2019

It’s been yet another busy month in the world of affiliate marketing. Here are a few things that caught our eye during the month of April…

Mozilla to pull away from push?

Push notifications remains one of (if not THE) the fastest growing traffic sources in affiliate marketing, but fears over spamming have caused Mozilla Firefox to carry out tests that they hope will cause an end to such concerns.

The web browser have said recently that around 20 million push notification requests were generated on their browser alone in the first month of 2019, and with Mozilla Firefox having a market share of just 5%, billions of requests are likely  to have been processed in the opening quarter of the year.

There are also question marks over the performance of such requests, with only 3% of them being approved by users, and around a fifth have caused users to disappear from the site of origin completely.

To combat this, Mozilla are trialling interaction-based push notification funnels, meaning a user must instigate actions on a site before they are met with a push notification request, as opposed to being displayed with an opt in request as soon as you hit the site. We’ll keep an eye on how this one progresses, with Mozilla yet to publish their full findings.

SnapChat on the grow

Image-sharing social media app SnapChat released its first quarter figures for 2019, and they will provide welcome reading for shareholders. An increase of around 4 million daily users compared to the final quarter of 2018 show that there’s still plenty of legs in the platform as a source for affiliate marketing traffic *COUGH, COUGH*.

The news has in fact come as something as a surprise to many, with forecasters predicting another difficult few months with the brand after a turbulent spell at the end of last year that saw its number of active monthly users plummet.

But things now appear to be back on an upward curve, and they have also reported an increase of nearly 40% in their average revenue per user, meaning advertisers are reaping the benefits of leveraging influencers to promote their brand.

Bye Bye Bing!

Well, not really.

The backend of April saw Microsoft announce they would be changing the name of their advertising platform to a much less inspiring Microsoft Advertising.

The news has coincided with the firm launching two new products which should help to enhance the user experience for affiliate marketers. First up is a Sponsored Products feature that gives brands enhanced visibility on search results, while updates to the Microsoft Audience Network will allow affiliates to optimise their campaigns much easier, largely thanks to a re-shaping of image management and impression metric tools.