Finding best practices in affiliate marketing

Although well established by now, affiliate marketing is new enough that marketers are still looking for best practices. Consultant Shawn Collins annually surveys marketers who use affiliates--sites that drive traffic to e-retailers' or other marketers' sites. His AffStat 2005 report is just out and the range of answers reveals the wide variety of approaches that marketers take. Among the interesting data is that 75% of marketers manage their affiliate programs in-house, 30% have reduced the size of their affiliate networks in the past year and 28% allow affiliates to bid on the marketer's own brand name in search engines. Here are a few other findings from the 30-question study: