Do media portals actually drive sales — or just brand awareness?
Advertisers often assume that portals like news sites are good for branding campaigns, but that real sales come from other channels. Is that fair?
Absolutely not — at least not based on experience at major media groups. Large media portals are visited by users at every stage of the purchase journey. That creates enormous potential both for building brand awareness and for generating direct online sales. This is confirmed by the growing number of e-commerce partnerships run on performance models.
But isn't the cost-per-sale higher on portals than with typical affiliate publishers?
You can't directly compare the CPS from content commerce or display advertising on a portal with the CPS from sales-closing tools like retargeting or discount pages. In the latter case, the CPS will be lower — but those sales wouldn't happen without the upstream marketing activities that initiated the purchase decision in the first place. In other words, the CPS paid to last-click tools is only part of the real cost of customer acquisition.
So in simple terms: portals initiate the customer, affiliate channels close the sale?
That's a significant oversimplification. Large media publishers have unique ad surfaces and tools, millions of users whose behaviours they understand deeply — and the capability to use those assets for both initiating and closing sales.
Most affiliate programs use a last-click model. Is that a structural problem?
The effect of the last-click model is the dominance of publishers whose entire business model is capturing that final decisive click. I don't want to negate the role of closing tools — but without high-reach marketing activities at the top of the funnel, their effectiveness would be minimal.
Some e-commerce players are moving away from last-click attribution. Is that about lowering CPS or something else?
It's not about lowering CPS — it's about measuring it accurately. The cost of a sale depends on all the effort required to generate it. In a last-click model, a significant portion of a publisher's contribution goes unrecognised.
What's the overall impact of moving to multi-touch attribution on an affiliate program?
Properly measuring the role of top-of-funnel publishers gives them the ability to operate at a much larger scale with a broader set of tools. That means more new customers and higher sales volume for the program. When the program grows, the advertiser benefits, publishers benefit — and even other partners benefit, because scale offsets the need to share commission.
Should attribution become standard practice in affiliate programs?
It's hard to say whether it applies to every program. But it's certainly worth examining purchase paths and analysing how revenue should be divided among partners. Ideally, that analysis would include traffic from outside the affiliate program too. Attribution could potentially bring more channels under the affiliate umbrella, enabling holistic acquisition management. It's a demanding task — but every serious e-commerce business will eventually have to tackle it.
