Affiliate marketing spends growing steadily in India to touch $835mn by 2025

Are you looking to grow your business and scouting for the right marketing tool? Then, affiliate marketing could help you in driving your profitability.

According to a white paper, released by Tata Strategic Management Group (TSMG) in association with IAMAI on the sidelines of ‘India Affiliate Summit’, affiliate marketing is growing over eight times and is expected to touch USD 835 million by 2025 from USD 96 million presently.

The market hardly unheard of in India is steadily growing momentum and accounts for 10% of digital marketing spend, against 15% in some matured markets. With companies raising their digital marketing spends, affiliate marketing is gradually gaining momentum and companies are also looking at it as an imperative marketing tool.

It is a performance-based marketing in which one or more affiliates is rewarded for each customers influenced by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts, or in other words, affiliate marketing is the practice of an advertiser paying a third party to publish ads on their web page.

Not, only e-commerce, but affiliate marketing is being adopted by a wide range of sectors such as BFSI, FMCG, Entertainment, among others today. In fact, affiliates are also expanding their presence offline and studying consumers’ behavior, says Sourabh Gupta, EM, Technology & Digital, TSMG.

He adds: “Industry often takes a myopic view on affiliate marketing by limiting it to sales. We at TSMG believe that technology evolution would not only drive but also re-shape affiliate marketing in India. Companies across industries should re-align their conservative outlook towards affiliate marketing thus driving disproportionate results.”

Affiliate marketing tries to influence customers’ purchase cycle and improves transparency and reduces frauds. Higher penetration of affiliate is inevitable due to increased penetration of mobile phones. And these are some of the factors that would drive the affiliate marketing industry.

According to Parul Bhargava, CEO, vCommission Media, “Currently, the technology in the mobile space is not able to effectively attribute sales to the affiliate which drove the last click. I strongly believe, with the power of the media, performance marketing on mobile platform will gain further prominence and the mobile ecosystem would evolve to mirror the internet based ecosystem for affiliate marketing.”

“KPIs for the ad campaigns are evolving from CPM, CPC, CPI, CPA to CPE and the advertisers are keen to move towards performance-based payouts. Further with ads and offers, being able to be served to customers based on their geographical location in real-time, the performance metrics can be tracked to the finest details with the current available tracking techniques, which is a boon to the affiliate industry,” says Venkatesh C.R, MD & CEO, DCI, ADATHA, Galatta & GMASA.