Sleighing the Season: Unwrapping Affiliate Expectations for Holiday 2024

As the 2024 holiday season approaches, affiliate marketing is poised to play a meaningful role in driving sales and capturing consumer demand. The affiliate industry is growing and evolving rapidly, expected to generate 16% of ecommerce sales globally. Innovation across affiliate technology and partnerships has enabled the channel to adapt to the evolving economic, retail, and consumer landscape, and will serve as the catalyst for several developments and opportunities in the industry this year.

The shift toward early holiday shopping patterns has accelerated, with 43 percent of consumers beginning their shopping before November, according to the National Retail Federation. Holiday shopping is expected to start earlier than ever this year, driven by both consumer behavior and retail promotion strategies, with the latter meant to capture market share before competitors, mitigate supply chain disruptions, and contend with this year’s shorter holiday season. 

For affiliate marketers, this shift means that operational agility and the ability to make data-driven decisions is imperative. A shorter shopping season compressed into a few key weeks will necessitate rapid adjustments to optimization strategies, earlier campaign launches, and continuous monitoring based on real-time data. 

We also anticipate that the election will have an impact on early November affiliate holidays, including National Cashback Day (11/7) and Singles Day (11/11) with slower demand on the days around Election Day (11/5) and a rebound in the week after the results are settled. Affiliate marketers who can adjust their strategies in real time based on election-related consumer sentiment are poised to have a significant advantage in maximizing demand and efficiency.

Beyond last-click sources of truth data, it'll be critical for affiliate marketers to operationalize recent tracking and tech advancements in the industry to establish advanced measurement that enables high-impact decision-making, including: 

AI-driven incrementality analyses and forecasting to measure performance lift

Competitive benchmarking data to understand real-time share of wallet and voice

Consumer journey reporting to gain insight into the partners initiating and influencing transactions

As ‌competition for market share intensifies, the role of high-quality content and influencer partnerships to drive mid-funnel engagement has become more important than ever. Across the affiliate marketing ecosystem, content-driven strategies are proving to be highly effective. These efforts are particularly valuable during the holiday season when consumers are seeking inspiration, recommendations, and validation before making purchasing or gifting decisions. Armed with content-driven strategies, brands this season will be equipped to reach diverse, high-intent, in-market shoppers, often while those shoppers are still brand-agnostic but have an established need or interest that content such as gift guides, product reviews, and holiday-themed articles can help address.

The authority that a trustworthy content site or creator has lends itself to building audience trust and therefore making their recommendation or endorsement more compelling. As consumers increasingly rely on trusted voices for purchase recommendations, affiliate marketers who effectively partner with these creators or publishers will be well-positioned to capture mid-funnel interest and drive toward conversions. Planning needs to start as early as possible and detailed briefing is paramount, with many top partners requiring six- to eight-week activation lead times and shorter approval windows.

This holiday season, lower-funnel partners like cashback and coupon sites are once again expected to be the most competitive battleground as consumers actively seek out additional incentives and value as they near conversion. A recent CJ Shopping Intelligence report revealed that cashback revenue grew by +6% year-over-year while coupon revenue grew +13% year-over-year. This year is expected to follow suit as economic pressures impact consumer spending.

With rising media costs being recorded across these partner groups, affiliate marketers will need to focus on strategic investments that maximize incrementality and protect efficiency. This environment has increasingly become a "pay-to-play" arena, where best-of-web rates, prominent media exposure, and personalization are key to breaking through the noise. Utilizing robust measurement and attribution models can help distinguish between incremental sales and those that would have occurred regardless of affiliate involvement, enabling marketers to focus their efforts on the partners that are most influential throughout the purchasing journey.

At its core, affiliate marketing allows retailers to engage with a vast range of publishers to influence and convert in-market shoppers. As such, it's important to have a diverse publisher set within your affiliate program to tap into a broader audience across the funnel.

New and innovative publishers are transforming affiliate marketing beyond traditional models, including TV Scientific in the CTV space, retail media networks such as Rokt, and networks of niche communities across the internet. Emerging publishers and partner models should be considered when building a full-funnel holiday strategy to best elevate the reach of your affiliate program across the fragmented media landscape. 

Buy now, pay later providers and card-linked offer networks are among the most popular emerging publisher models, and are expected to dominate this year’s affiliate strategies. Each of these models supports shoppers and brands alike. Buy Now, Pay Later appeals to price-sensitive shoppers by allowing them to spread out payments, which not only encourages larger purchases but also attracts consumers who might otherwise delay or forgo shopping altogether​. Card-linked offers, which directly tie discounts and rewards to consumers' credit cards, provide a seamless omni-shopping experience that can significantly increase conversion rates and drive traffic to stores, enabling business continuity after shipping cut-offs, and capitalizing on peak holiday shopping weekends.