This is a bit of a recap of my recent video blog which can be found here. Anyway for those of you not comfortable with looking at me squirming in front of the camera, the story was that an old colleague of mine called to discuss the affiliate industry in Europe and the differences between the continent and the UK.

His company has a tool for de-duplicating sales, but was meeting resistance in getting this implemented as according to a couple of high level affiliate networks (who’ll remain nameless,) much of the European affiliate market still has a high proportion of post impression sales. At this point, I feel that some of you will be scratching your heads asking what on Earth is a post impression sale.

A post impression (or PI sale) is when a sale is counted after an advertisement has been shown. So say that you see an advert for British Airways on Yahoo!, don’t click through, but later book anyway. This then would be counted a PI sale.

In the UK it is now rare for advertisers or merchants to pay for PI sales, and when they do it is often at a much reduced rate. In Europe from what I understand (and I would be happy for someone to put me right on this,) it remains more popular than over here.

There are a number of reasons why this, but to me the most prevalent would seem to be that it does offer an opportunity to rewards publishers on some sort of performance metric for the work that they have carried out. The problem is that to put it simply the more popular the site and the more popular the advertiser the greater number of sales that will be generated.

This is to my mind due to the fact that activities carried out independently of each other by users will then overlap. Yes you were going to check the news on Yahoo! and you were going to book tickets to Rome on BA, but there was no connection between the two visits.

Post Impression does provide a handy way for renumerating large sites for the activity that they undertake, but disguises the fact that it is not generating targeted or incremental traffic. It is in short not a tool that will stand up to much scutiny.

Something is needed though in order to help those sites with large volumes of unique visitors, back catalogues of content and enviable Google footprints. A recurring theme in this blog is that this is the year that I expect there to be the start of significant change in the make up of the affiliate landscape, let’s see if I’m to be proved right.

Rob MD, One.