(It’s worth noting that for many publishers, there is meaningful overlap between these two revenue sources. Publishers typically consider affiliate advertising to be a part of their total ecommerce revenues. In that sense, it’s possible that survey respondents may not have strongly distinguished between the two.)
Publishers’ focus on ecommerce content is timely, as brands and agencies face greater pressure to show measurable results from marketing activities, partly due to the pandemic-induced recession.
As more purchases have shifted online during the pandemic, marketers will need to find new ways of reaching customers and prospects in order to drive online conversions. According to a May 2020 survey conducted by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, 84.8% of US CMOs said they’d seen customer openness to new digital offerings increase during the pandemic. But the bar for actual purchase has likely gotten higher—67.2% said they’d observed lower likelihood to buy, and 58.8% said they’d seen customers engage in more digital research before making a purchase.