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Affiliate Marketing in the Netherlands[/caption]
After the a4u expo Europe 2013 – Europe´s largest Affiliate and Performance Marketing Conference – in Amsterdam, we would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to affiliate marketing in the Netherlands. Therefore we interviewed Dave Kallenbach of Daisycon who gave relevant insider tips about the Dutch market.
Source: Screenshot of http://www.affiliateblog.nl/affiliatetop10-2012/[/caption]
During the Affiliate Awards 2013, the merger of Zanox/M4N was nominated best affiliate network. The network Daisycon was voted most popular network by Dutch publishers for four consecutive years (2009 to 2012) based on functionality, personal contact, high service level and the special pay-out structure.
The most important publisher models in the Dutch affiliate market are content affiliates with a share of 42%, followed by email publishers (13%), coupon publishers (11%), price comparison websites (11%), cashback sites (10%) and SEA affiliates (10%). The social media publisher play only a minor role with 2%.
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Source: http://twinklemagazine.nl/nieuws/2013/05/nederlandse-affiliatemarkt-groeit-tot-131-miljoen-euro/PresentationAffiliateDag_26052013v2FL_studio_015.pdf[/caption]
“Performance based has become the industry standard. Both, Cost per Sale and Cost per Lead, are common. These two have almost rendered CPM (Cost per Mile) obsolete. Hybrid models are also used, for instance: a combination of a low CPC and high CPS.” says Dave Kallenbach.
The best performing sectors in the Dutch affiliate market include financial services, travel, as well as retail and fashion. This thesis is based on the numeration of all Zanox/M4N advertisers. Furthermore the current Online Ad Spend Report of Deloitte and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Netherlands confirm this assumption based on the revenue share of each industry in total affiliate sales 2012.
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Source: http://www.iab.nl/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/03/Online-Ad-Spend-2012_nieuw.pdf[/caption]
As in Germany, logos in combination with text links are very common in the Netherlands. “Product feeds have become an important part of affiliate marketing in the Netherlands. Product feeds are used for comparison-websites, apps and larger publishers who use them for their content sites. A good product feed improves speed and quality on the publisher-side.” Another tip is the banner with the size 500 x 500 pixels which is often used by email publishers. However, the format is rather unusual in the German market but a Must Have in each Dutch banner collection.
Large scale fraud is not common in the Netherlands, says Dave. The efforts of the Dutch Platform Affiliate Networks (PAN) have contributed to this. The members continually strive to improve /evolve the business. Click fraud has become rare. Nowadays this is easy to detect. “Brand bidding” and unwanted keyword marketing do happen in the Netherlands, though both the networks and advertisers have developed countermeasure tools.

Demographics, internet usage and ad spends
16.7 million inhabitants currently live in the Netherlands. 94.9% of the overall population use the internet according to a research of Eurostat, which exceeds the European average of 63.2%. Dave states that “in contrast to 2011, the number of online purchases per user grew 8% in 2012, although the average order-value dropped 4%. Already 70% of the internet users have done at least one online purchase in the last 12 months. Hence, the growth potential of e-commerce in general is not so much in getting more people to buy online, rather increasing the frequency and order value.” The mentioned factors point out the very high internet affinity of the Dutch. This is also reflected in the advertising budget of the companies. In 2009 and 2010 more advertising budget was spent in print, however there has been a change in 2011. Nowadays, the majority of the budget spent (€ 1.257 millions) flows into online marketing. Affiliate marketing benefits from this development, as in 2011 € 127 million were invested in this channel, which increased last year by 3.3% up to € 131 million.Affiliate Marketing Insights
According to the revenues, the combined networks Zanox/M4N, Daisycon and TradeTracker are the biggest networks in the Netherlands, which is also illustrated in the following graph : [caption id="attachment_13173" align="aligncenter" width="563"]

