Interesting discussion that has come to my attention over the last 6 months. To give you a bit of background I have been examining the possibility of display partners re-targeting “shopping basket abandoners” (as they are known in the re-targeting world) with display messages on CPA (click cookie, not PI).

My opinion on whether affiliates get a cut of the retargeting CPA is dependent on how this activity is carried out. The most important aspect of re-targeting is getting the data with the relevant user profile information. There are two ways in which this can be done:

1) Tag put on the advertisers page to capture the profile data of every non – converter (traffic from PPC, SEO, direct to URL etc) then ALL who did not buy are re-messaged.

In this scenario then it is difficult to justify giving affiliates a slice of the retargeting CPA because they are up against all other channels that have played a role in driving traffic and this would be very difficult to attribute. However the volumes for the partner doing the re-messaging will be huge.

According to my research search re-targeting campaigns have had conversion rates of up to 3%. Let’s think about this from the clients’ point of view for a second and look at the numbers.

Client X 2,000,000 unique visits per month
Conversion rate of 5% = 100,000 transactions
Non-Conversion rate 95% = 1,900,000 unique users not buying
Average order £100

3% conversion from re-targeting messages
1,900,000 X 0.03 = 57,000 transactions
57,000 X £100 = £570,000 in potential revenue for the client

2) If a client with network and or an agency choose to target those “shopping basket abandoners” that were referred from the affiliate channel then it is different, I believe affiliates should get paid a finders fee.

To get this data an append is put onto an affiliate networks’ tracking URL and all affiliate referred traffic that has not converted can then be re-targeted. Volumes would be lower than the scenario above, however it could still have a big impact on the volume of sales over a 12 month period.

There are operational challenges however:

• Getting a client to put a tag on their site (can be very challenging sometimes!!)
• When a retarget ad can be served
• How to attribute paying affiliate refferal fees

Despite this, both are a valuable source of sales that advertisers could investigate and moving forward will help drives efficiency from their marketing spend.

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310&hl=en_GB. So.. . Google’s Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to display ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests