Last week I gave a couple of presentations at the A4U EXPO, the affiliate marketing conference held annually by the A4U Forum.
Suprisingly (given the vast developments being made in APIs) this was the first presentation of its kind, and the turn out for the main presentation was vast.
I rocked up 10 minutes before the presentation was due to begin, palms a bit sweaty, stomach slightly knotted, thinking about all the things that could go wrong. After checking my flies several times (hopefully discretely), I opened up the session and presented to the audience my take on APIs and what they mean for affiliate marketing and service providers alike.
The 20 minutes whizzed past and before i knew it I was listening to a round of applause as I left the podium and took my place on the panel.
This was a great experience for me, for which I can share my knowledge and thoughts.
What are my thoughts?
Well, I think that APIs will diversify the affiliates that promote advertisers, both in the way that they drive traffic (as their approach can be made more unique through innovative mashups) and in terms of the actual group that will be driving the traffic.
Becuase of the Service Orientated Nature of APIs and their owners, they lend themselves well to an industry that has traditionally been heavily reliant on the manual resource behind managing data. This is not just the management at client (affiliate) side on a day to day basis, but also the management earlier in the chain, at both the network and source itself potentially.
Facilitating a transition to delivering data through an API as supposed to datafeeds will remove the requiement for labour intensive data management, allowing affiliates to focus on the core elements of their strategies. This core strategy is ofcourse what will drive traffice and generate revenue, and therefore being able to focus more on this than the “how to” stages will provide obvious benefits for those involved.
Along with this, networks and service providers will be able to offer stronger products that further instil trust in their services. If networks are the sole party responsible for the management and upkeep of the data recieved from advertisers, they can commit to ensuring that data integrity is achieved, through both enhancement (refining the data as its recieved) and enrichment (adding data to fill in the gaps).
I think that with the increasing number of technology companies that are moving towards providing a service and faciliting this transition to APIs, there is a lot of diversification that will happen next year.
APIs are definately the future, and offer both affiliate and advertisers a lot more potential to streamline their online relationships. I think that the role that networks play will be crucial in helping to develop this, offering a variety of services that continue to drive ROI for both sides of the fence.
