Affiliate Marketing Blog: Where ASOS Get's Its Traffic From

Thursday, 5 April 2007

Where ASOS Get's Its Traffic From

Again, looking at the March Hitwise newsletter there's an great piece about social networking sites and fashion retailers.

The text from the email is (I hope they don't mind):

TopShop.co.uk and ASOS.com received more than twice as much traffic from MySpace than from MSN and Yahoo! Search combined in the week ending February 24. The #2 source of UK visits to TopShop.co.uk was MySpace, accounting for 5% of traffic. MSN UK Search and Yahoo! UK Search each accounted for just over 1% of visits, whilst MySpace was the #5 source ofvisits to ASOS.com. Visits from MySpace to TopShop.co.uk are up five-fold year on year and up two-fold to ASOS.com.

Although Miss Selfridge and New Look attract a similar demographic profile of young women, these websites do not enjoy the same volume of traffic from MySpace. TopShop has a profile on MySpace with a blog that includes special offers and discounts, and ASOS and TopShop are mentioned on several profile pages.

This offers a great example of creative brands that are engaging withtheir audience on the terms - and turf - of their audience.

So perhaps they don't need affiliates? Or are they just concerned that all these people linking to them for free will convert their links to affiliate ones and end up costing them shed loads of cash? It's frightening when you think the number of visits from MySpace to ASOS have doubled in the past year.

Do this however, provide an opportunity for MySpace to hijack these links? Think of the potential revenue. And with News Corp. behind them now, I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't considered it.

However, ASOS should be thinking of the opportunities, MyTravel climbed 22 places from 34 in the list to 12 - I wonder how much was from the efforts of affiliate marketers?

Ooh those grubby geeks with no social skills hey? Nearly as bad as pubescent teenagers writing about what clothes they want. We're not much different are we, we're both passionate about what we do, but us affiliates are more interested with making money than making friends - it's a shame that ASOS only seem to be concerned with making enemies!

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5 Comments:

At 5 April 2007 at 22:41 , Dio Bach said...: On a number of my sites the Myspace to Yahoo / MSN share is ten times that - but I know which traffic is going to earn me money / convert. It ain't the MySpace stuff... ;)

Good luck to 'em.
At 6 April 2007 at 08:05 , getvisible said...: Hi Dio

I agree with you on the conversion issue. It's something i did'nt think of. But i'm sure they'll benefit: 'pester power' and in the long term, future potential users?

It would certainly be interesting (and hitwise can show it) to see the demographics of ASOS's MySpace traffic.
At 6 April 2007 at 10:31 , Dio Bach said...: Brand recognition would probably be the largest benefit - and I suppose being in that space would also have 'cool appeal' - I wonder if they are actively spamming, sorry, sending bulletins to all the friends under them. :)

In the end though, it may not be Murdoch who puts the affiliate links on there. If anyone is going to make money from the companies advertising at MySpace, I think Google will be smiling when their CPA model kicks in. :)

Of course - over a month or so, you could test out the TopShop's friends willingness to spend money. Theoretically, you could add all the friends under TopShop (at least those who ain't using it for their own links.)

With a sizeable chunk, you could do a survey of who's buying from the site - or better still, offer them your own affiliate links to click. ;)
At 16 April 2007 at 19:37 , getvisible said...: Yo Zak!

Back off to OT for the Sheffield game tomoz but don't think it'll be as easy as some think ...

As for ASOS and MySpace I think most of their presence is from kiddies and teens whacking up crap about what clothes they want and which celebs are wearing what ... I could be wrong too tho ???

About time I bought you a pint though ...

Lee
At 18 April 2007 at 16:35 , Anonymous said...: It's all about how you spin the figures. I used to think I got alot of traffic from myspace for a fashion site I ran, then realised that people were hotlinking my images and that was what was causing the hits. If I added it to my traffic data, I could have said I got 4 times as many 'hits' from myspace as from google but in terms of real traffic that's going to convert to sales, I'd say myspace was about one tenth of google - me suspects this is what is going on over there but then again, I am merely an affiliate (and I know what ASOS thinks about us(insert angry smiley here) )