Feedback

Tag cloud

What's your question? Be descriptive and concise.

By: Asked from United States of America

What's the difference between PPC and affiliate marketing?

What’s the difference between PPC and affiliate marketing?


Thanks for your help!

Add comment viewed 1,652 times Latest activity about 1 year ago

NN comments
or Cancel

3 answers

  • 1

michaelcyger [ Admin ]

PPC is pay per click. You go to websites, like Google, and you set a price to have your advertisement (text or banner) listed. Every time someone clicks on your advertisement, it is deducted from the amount of money that you paid to have in your account. When your account balance is too low to afford another click, your advertisement stops being displayed.


Affiliate marketing is the process of having others (third parties) do your marketing for you. You may provide some marketing collateral (banners, text, etc.) but the third party is responsible for the marketing. They drive people to a specific webpage on your site that records both the sale information and the affiliate’s information. You then provide sale reports and commissions (5-50% or more) to the third party.

If you have time to do the marketing yourself, and can optimize your sales process, it’s probably less expensive to do PPC marketing through something like Google Adwords.

If you a) don’t have time for creating, monitoring and optimizing your own marketing campaign, b) want to build the power of tens or hundreds of third party sales people/companies, and c) have a product that allows you to pay higher commissions (digital products like software or ebooks), then affiliate marketing is definitely the way to go.

You can go look at Commission Junction [not an affiliate link] to get an idea how to list your product and/or become a third party affiliate marketer. I believe you can set them up to be your third party distribution channel too. I’ve never used them, so please do your own research.
NN comments
or Cancel
  • 0

dan reed

The answers here are pretty much spot on, so not going to repeat :P. All I would say, though, is that I think PPC could be more expensive than affiliate marketing.. it really depends on your target demographic.

For example, I’m in my mid-20s and I can tell the difference between a sponsered link (the highlighted link at the top of Google) and an organic search result (the normal ones after). I hardly ever click on the sponsered link and prefer to go to the organic (maybe because I know it’s gonna cost someone money and I’m nice :P). However, where I work our target demographic are the over 50s, and without being sterotypical they just click whatever, which is generally the sponsered link. This heavily pushes up our PPC rates, as many are returning customers!

With affiliate marketing, however, you will only pay them for a sale that they have driven to your site. While it may cost you more in terms of what you are giving for each sale, try and look at is like this: you won’t be paying them a penny for a sale that was not 100% driven by them.

Hope this helps!

NN comments
or Cancel

Question's Contributors

Related Questions