May 5, 2020
All Publisher Categories on the Rise in our Trends Overview for Feb vs. March
As Director of Partner Success at PartnerCentric, I am always looking for new publisher opportunities for our clients as well as ways to optimize and grow existing relationships. In this monthly series, I will be monitoring trends across publisher categories that I can then share with you. Contrary to the economic uncertainty around Covid-19, the performance marketing industry as a whole is thriving. Looking at February vs. March 2020 across our entire client portfolio, publisher performance was up 47% Month-over-Month!
Here are some key takeaways:
Deal and Coupon Are Back in a Leadership Position
- Increases across all top deal and coupon sites are showing us that people are at home, shopping online and looking for the best prices.
- A top Best-of-Web deal site had a +120% increase in revenue Month-Over-Month as consumers are researching online best pricing.
Substantial Increases for Loyalty
- More desired by consumers than ever in this economy as another way to earn some money and incentives for purchases.
- Four top Loyalty publishers saw over +100% increases in revenue February vs. March.
- One sub-category of Loyalty sites, Employee Malls, did see a drop in revenue. Our top-performing Employee Mall had a -69% decrease in revenue and this could be due to layoffs as well as less access to the employee portal.
All About the Content
- Another vertical seeing large increases and (surprise, surprise) two of the top increases come from travel publishers. Both have been generating revenue in March after showing no revenue increases in February.
- Finance-related content sites are a mixed bag. Our top Financial advice publishers had over +200% increases in revenue whereas an investment specific publisher had a slight decrease (-9%) Month-Over-Month.
Search is On The Rise
- Mostly all of our Search publishers showed higher revenue, averaging an increase of 169% MoM.
- We’re seeing more and more advertisers move their search budget into the affiliate channel and running search on a CPA model, realizing a more effective Return-On-Ad Spend (ROAS).
In our upcoming installment, we’ll look at March vs. April 2020 trends so stay tuned. Want to chat with Tracie? Get in touch.