You can’t avoid working with Amazon and TikTok affiliates any longer.
As more product discovery happens on TikTok, Instagram, and other social platforms, social media influencers have become an essential layer of product marketing.
Brands should be constantly sending free product samples to influencers within their niche, as well as to major digital and audio publishers.
The trouble comes with measuring the effectiveness of all of this marketing. In order to set affiliate commission rates, and to assess your sampling costs, you need to understand the ROI of your affiliate marketing.
Of course, that’s much easier said than done. Affiliate marketing is notoriously difficult to trace effectively.
Don’t just compare ACOS to commission rates
Affiliate marketing doesn’t work the same way as traditional advertising, so you can’t just compare the TACOS on your Amazon or TikTok ads to the commission rates you’re paying to creators.
Your commission rates for influencers on TikTok will probably be higher than your TACOS on TikTok Ads—and that’s okay.
Influencer partnerships are a high-funnel, discovery-oriented genre of marketing. They’re bringing totally new people into your orbit.
And because good influencer content is so personal, affiliate marketing is designed to generate a brand halo that delivers long-term value.
We can see this in the data. The shoppers you convert through influencer marketing tend to have higher lifetime values and repeat purchase rates.
In our recent webinar, Lyle Swartz of Levanta presented research that $9 in commission spend on affiliates translates into $150 in customer LTV.
How do you improve measurement for TikTok and Amazon affiliates?
A lot of the ways that your affiliates influence shoppers is submerged from view—but let’s start with the measurement that is actually available to you.
Lean on direct reporting from marketplaces. When you send products to influencers through creator marketplaces, like Amazon’s Creator Connections or TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, you have access to that platform’s internal reporting.
This is a valuable, if imperfect, data source.
Amazon’s Creator Connections, for instance, tells you how many of your products were purchased through each affiliate partner, and what the ROAS was for each influencer campaign.
These are useful metrics—but the limitation is that Amazon, TikTok, Instagram, and the other creator marketplaces are only able to track sales via direct clicks on an affiliate link or buy button.
That’s a problem because many shoppers aren’t going to click direct links. The influencer content may just be their first of multiple touchpoints with you on their journey.
These multi-touch journeys are a lot trickier to measure.
Understand each product’s life-time value. Because influencer marketing is designed to give your product a long-term brand halo, you want to measure the effectiveness of influencer marketing partly through the lens of lifetime value.
It helps to have a general handle on the life-time value of your products. If your products tend to have high repeat purchase rates, you know that influencer marketing is going to be worth a lot more than those pure ROAS numbers let on.
Amazon’s 5-year look back window in AMC makes it easy to assess your lifetime value. And we have dashboards for the 5-year lookback directly available in Intentwise.
Run—and track—ads alongside affiliate content. When a particular affiliate’s content is working well, you have every reason to boost it with paid ads.
Personal, product-oriented content is always going to perform better than your in-house ads, so don’t be afraid to put some ad spend behind affiliate content that you like.
Seeing how those ads perform, compared to your traditional ads on that platform, can also give you a glimpse of the effectiveness of the affiliate content.
If you switch these ads to a first-touch attribution model, and you find that the ads are showing up in many paths to purchase, then it’s safe to say the affiliate content itself is an essential first touchpoint in your shopper funnel.
Know the benchmarks—but don’t be beholden to them. To give context to the metrics you’re seeing, it helps to have a sense of the averages in your category.
Affiliate commission rates and conversion rates vary widely across categories: they’re a lot higher for electronics than for apparel, for instance.
Levanta showed a detailed breakdown of commission and conversion rates by category in our webinar. Stream it now to see those metrics, and many more.
But it is also important to allow for flexibility with these benchmarks. You might have particular creator or influencer partners whose content performs exceedingly well for you—and there’s nothing wrong with paying out above-average commissions to them.
How do you factor in sampling costs?
To get your product in front of a bunch of creators, you’re going to need to send out product samples widely.
Getting your products into the hands of influencers usually pays for itself. Affiliates have a vested interest in pushing your product if they like it, since they’ll get a cut of commissions.
Scale is the only way to win on a platform like TikTok Shop—you want dozens of creators, rather than just a few, posting about your content.
But how do you ensure the costs of manufacturing and shipping all these free samples don’t actually outweigh affiliate-attributable revenue?
As before, you can look at the reporting from Amazon Creator Connections or the TikTok Creator Marketplace to guide you.
See how much revenue is directly attributed to your affiliates, and compare it to your manufacturing and sampling costs. If you’re barely breaking even, you might want to rethink your strategy.
But again, we recommend leaving room for flexibility here. Remember, many of the affiliate-attributable sales won’t involve direct clicks and won’t be traceable in creator marketplaces. They’ll happen further down in the funnel than you’re generally able to see.
And sometimes it’s important to hold out—all it takes is one really successful creator post for your entire sampling infrastructure to pay for itself.
Only 1 in 300 samples you send might generate a popular TikTok video—but that video alone just might be valuable enough to justify all of the costs.
