The April 2005 issue of the Internet Retailer magazine published several interesting graphs based on the AffStat Report conducted by Shawn Collins Consulting, an annual survey of marketers who use affiliates. The survey shows the variety of approaches that marketers take to make effective use of their affiliates.

Some of the interesting data of the study are:

• Most effective method for recruiting affiliates. Email is considered the best way to recruit affiliates (25%) followed by phone (18%) and advertising in affiliate program directories (14%).
• Percent of total transactions affiliates generate. According to survey respondents, 28% of affiliates generate only less than 5% of total transactions, while 20% are responsible for 5-10% of transactions. About 14% of respondents say that affiliates make up for more than 40% of transactions.
• Acquisition of New Affiliates. On a monthly basis, 26% of the respondents say that they are able to recruit 51-100 affiliates a month; 23% say they get 11-50 new sign-ups; while 22% say they have 101-500. About 19% say that they only get less than 10 affiliates a month while only 4% say that they receive more than 500 new affiliate signups in a month.
• Conversion rate for affiliate program. Less than a fifth (18%) of the marketers say that their affiliate program conversion rate is between 0.5-1%, while 14% say that their conversion rate is greater than 5%. About 16% of the marketers surveyed say that they do not know the conversion rate of their affiliates.
• Rewards offered to affiliates. Majority of respondents (40%) offer tiered commission increases; 26% say they have contests rewarding their top affiliates; and 25% say they give their affiliates special access to marketing materials such as data feeds and PPC keywords, among others.