Глубинный анализ аффилиатов в сфере путешествий на основе данных компании «Авиасейлс»

With the rapid development of modern technologies comes the rapid change in consumer behaviour as well as development of both digital marketing in general and digital marketing tools in particular. Indeed, digitalisation leads to more knowledgeable and demanding consumers and diminishes the span of consumers’ attention, which means that sellers need to find more and more exquisite ways to stand out. Moreover, the internet-based marketing approaches galore have switched consumers’ attention to pieces of advice, opinions and various kinds of suggestions expressed online. At the same time on-line marketing usually requires much less investments than traditional marketing and together with a thought through digital strategy can bring substantial results. Therefore, the rise of such digital instruments as affiliate marketing is an expected and understandable phenomenon.
Affiliate marketing is the type of online marketing where a commission is earned by a third party (affiliate) for the promotion of other people’s or companies’ products (merchant). Affiliate marketing defined as performance marketing and associate marketing. Affiliate marketing integrates with three parties: Advertiser/Merchant, Publisher/Affiliate, and Consumer/Buyer. Merchants can be selling any type of company’s products like electronics, books, clothing, and air tickets online or could be insurance companies selling policies etc. Publishers are the ones who forward advertiser’s products or services through its website, blog or social media account. Consumers are the party with the major share of power. They represent a very prominent part of this cycle since they are the ones attracted by the advertisements and making an action. Clicks from publisher’s website to advertiser’s website and purchases of the product afterwards are called conversion.
Affiliate marketing experienced rapid growth in 2010 and has been popular ever since, remaining one of the most popular ways of mutual collaboration aimed to drive sales, increase brand awareness and generate passive income. Nowadays, affiliate marketing has turned into a billion-dollar industry and more and more companies are considering using it in their practice. In 2016, U.S. retailers spent $4.7 billion on affiliate marketing. Astoundingly, by 2020 U.S. affiliate marketing spend is expected to rise to $6.8 billion.
Therefore, it can be said that affiliate marketing has truly become the buzzword of the 21st century and, thus, research connected to it will contribute to the development of modern
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marketing strategies. This thesis will contribute in both theoretical aspects of affiliate marketing, as it will address a substantial research gap, and a practical or empirical one, as the investigation is based on the data from the existing company.
Research gap
Despite affiliate marketing being a popular and even trendy topic in the business community, the academic literature devoted to it is quite limited. Researchers have devoted their attention to the economic benefits of affiliate programs, studied remuneration mechanics and the issues of trust in the context of affiliates. However, the number of academic papers is modest and, thus, as a result of conducted literature review several research gaps have been identified.
Although a couple of authors attempted to classify affiliates, those endeavors have been based on the guts and experience and were not supported by case studies or in-depth analysis. Even more, the main object of the research in academic literature is, in fact, predominantly advertisers and not the affiliates. Another issue is generalisation: only a few papers are considering affiliate programs through the prism of a certain industry. The situation can be explained by the fact that though many businesses are interested in understanding the affiliate marketing tool, they prefer to keep the results of the analysis in-private as it can be considered as a source of competitive advantage.
Aviasales partnership
As it was mentioned, lack of case studies and industry specific analysis for the major problems of current affiliate marketing research. That is why the partnership with Aviasales in terms of this thesis increases the contribution of this paper into the global affiliate marketing knowledge. It is necessary to mention that Aviasales is the largest Russian flight tickets metasearch, otherwise known as aggregator engine. The basic mechanism behind every metasearch engine is that the aggregator sends queries to several search engines, but the results come into one list categorised based on where they came from. Therefore, from the very idea of how the company works and what they do, the topic of affiliate marketing and its characteristics is of a particular interest.
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Research questions
In terms of this study we will focus on questions of how companies choose affiliate programs: namely, whether the content or type of their website influences the number of programs or the type of the affiliate verticals they participate in.
The thesis will be divided into two parts. Firstly, the hidden patterns of the data will be investigated and the unifying characteristics of affiliates will be identified. Secondly, in accordance with Aviasales requirements the main types of the affiliates considered will be content sites, service sites and cashback and promo code sites. Thus, the main analysis will be provided in terms of this viewpoint. Furthermore, peculiarities of English and Russian language sites will be investigated. The partnership with Aviasales will allow to test hypotheses on real-life data and to find both business and academic insights.
Based on the research gaps mentioned above, the following formulation of the thesis is: ‘In-Depth Analysis of Publishers in Travel Affiliate Marketing Based on Aviasales Data’. It naturally divides into two sub-questions:
1. Which types of websites most often participate in the affiliate programs? In how many affiliate programs?
2. Is there any specific pattern between the type of an affiliate and a vertical of advertiser?
Aim of the paper and object of the research
The aim of this paper is to study in-depth which characteristics possess the affiliate part of the affiliate marketing and how they can be used by Aviasales. This will lead to investigation of the quality of such forms of partnership as affiliate marketing. In particular, the main focus will be on the compatibility of the industry between the company that offers an affiliate program and the type of an affiliate. And Aviasales data, thus, will be the object of the research. The business result of the research will be the managerial insights that will allow Aviasales to adjust its marketing strategy to each class identified.