Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

6 November 2019
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Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

To create a successful ad campaign that will monetize well, it won’t be enough just to pick up an offer and develop quality content. You’ll also need to decide which GEOs to choose for your affiliate marketing campaign and do it rightly.


All available GEOs can be broken down into three tiers based on the cost of traffic and users’ purchasing power. Tier 1 and Tier 3 comprise the wealthiest and poorest countries respectively, while the second tier can be viewed as the middle ground between the first and third tiers. Tier 2 regions are characterized by lesser competition and large traffic volumes, and therefore are a good place to start for beginner affiliates.

Today, we would like to discuss Greece, an often overlooked Tier 2 country, from an affiliate’s perspective and break down some of the characteristic features of this GEO.

General information

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

Official name: Hellenic Republic

Location: Located at the southeast end of Europe, Greece is the southernmost country of the Balkan Peninsula and borders the Aegean, Ionian, and Mediterranean Seas. Its closest neighbors are Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, and Turkey.

Population: Currently, the Republic’s population accounts for over 10.7 million people.

Capital: The country’s capital and the largest city is Athens with an estimated population of over three million people.

Languages:

  • 99.5% of the total population speaks Greek, the country’s official language.
  • The most common minority languages include Albanian, Turkish, Armenian, Macedonian, Aromanian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Ladino.
  • The most learned foreign languages in Greece are English (48%), German (9%), French (8.5%) and Italian (8%).

Religions: Greek Orthodox (98%), Muslim (1.3%), other (0.7%).

Time zone: Greece is in the Eastern European Time Zone (UTC+2:00). As a member of the European Union (EU), Greece abides by EU Daylight Saving Time rules (UTC+3:00).

Currency: Euro

State of economy and living standards

Greece is listed as a Tier 2 country and ranks 31st by GDP per capita ($29,592) among other OECD member states. Historically agricultural, the Greek economy has seen industry replace agriculture as the country’s main source of income. Currently, the most important industries in Greece are tourism, shipping, industrial products and food and tobacco processing.

Although the numbers seem to indicate that Greece is a relatively wealthy country, they fail to capture the weakness of the country’s economic institutions and its malfunctioning fiscal system. These structural issues ultimately lead to a massive default in 2015 when Greece failed to repay €1.6 billion it owed to the IMF.

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

In 2018, the reforms made during the crisis enabled Greece’s economy to grew by 1.9%, its fastest rate since the recession struck. The 2019 OECD Economic Outlook projects that the economic recovery will maintain its momentum, with GDP growing at approximately 2% in 2019 and 2020.

Even though the economy in Greece has started to show signs of recovery, the past instability continues to impact Greek consumers’ purchasing patterns and advertising trends. For instance, the E-commerce sector has demonstrated stable growth over the past few years. In 2017 alone, E-commerce sales reached about $6.15 billion, despite the financial crisis. The main reason behind this is income reduction that made Greek consumers more price-sensitive. Research suggests that bargain hunting and the opportunity to compare a wide range of products in a short time will continue to drive Internet retailing in Greece.

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

Advertising compliance

Businesses wishing to promote their products in the Greek market shall comply with the country’s regulatory framework for advertisement to sustainably develop their business plan and employ the most efficient marketing strategies.

At a statutory level, advertisement in Greece is regulated by Law 146/1914 on Unfair Competition, Law 2251/1994 on Consumer Protection and the Greek Code of Advertising.

The practices prohibited under Law 146/1914 include misleading advertisement, defamation, exploitation of other parties’ goodwill and other unfair competition behaviors.

Aggressive advertising practices fall within the scope of Law 2251/1994, which aims at protecting consumers from advertisements that use harassment and coercion to impede the consumer’s freedom of choice and lead them to transactional decisions they wouldn’t have made otherwise.

The Greek Code of Advertising regulates the majority of illegal and misleading advertising cases. As to what shall be considered misleading advertising, Greece follows Directive 2006/114/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, which defines it as “any advertising which in any way, including its presentation, deceives or is likely to deceive the persons to whom it is addressed or whom it reaches and which, by reason of its deceptive nature, is likely to affect their economic behaviour or which, for those reasons, injures or is likely to injure a competitor.”

Best Affiliate Practices

OS and device market share

In 2019, Internet penetration in Greece accounted for 72.9%, or 8,115,397 users. Studies show that the majority of Greeks prefer to browse the Internet from their computers, as desktop traffic makes up more than 62% of the market share. Mobile and tablet devices occupy the rest of the market with 33.43% and 3.83% respectively.

The following graph shows the market share of operating systems in Greece from September 2018 to September 2019:

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

Overall, Windows makes up more than half of the market. However, Android also continues to demonstrate a strong presence, having grown from approximately 17.4% in October 2016 to more than 31% in October 2019.

Traffic sources

To begin with, let’s find out which search engines are the most popular in Greece. Statistics show that Google continues to lead the pack and makes up 98.33% of the total market share. Bing and Yahoo account for the majority of the resulting percentages with a combined share of a mere 1.28%.

The market share of browsers in Greece from September 2018 to September 2019 is described by the following graph:

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

Overall, we can see that Chrome takes the lion’s share at approximately 70.12%, while Firefox and Safari also demonstrate a firm presence in Greece with 10.87% and 6.72% respectively.

Let’s have a look at which sites are most often visited by Greek Internet users:

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

Image courtesy of affiliate network HypeOffers

This list reveals that Facebook and Instagram are the most popular social networks among Greeks. In September 2019, there were over 6 million Facebook users in Greece, which accounted for more than half of its entire population. The majority of them were men (52.4%), while the largest user group were people aged 25-34 (25.7%).

Other web resources frequented by Greeks are news and media websites, adult platforms, E-commerce shops and YouTube.

Time targeting

Nowhere in Europe you will find so many celebrations, holidays and days off as in Greece. It often happens that one festivity leads to another, and so celebrations can last for weeks. The Greek penchant for holidays and partying is believed to date back to Festivals of Dionysis and is evident in the lively nightlife of Greek cities.

From 14:00-15:00 to 17:00, Greeks indulge in the pleasure of siesta and life comes to a virtual standstill. In these hours, streets get empty, the stores close. Urbanites and villagers alike eat their afternoon meal and take a nap. If you run your ads during siesta time, your conversion rate will be low.

Affiliate’s Guide to Greece

21:00 marks the beginning of nightlife in Greece. People go out to restaurants, taverns and bars or throng the embankments to grab a drink and chat with their friends.

To reach your target Greek audience at the right time, it is recommended to serve ads from morning hours to 14:00-15:00 and from 17:00 to 21:00.

Best products to promote

Today’s Greece has one of the highest obesity rates in the world. In 2019, about 25% of the country’s population had excessive weight, with over 40% of Greek boys and girls being either overweight or obese. This implies that various weight loss medications enjoy quite a popularity among Greece’s population, as well as anti-baldness pills and ointments for joint treatment.

Greece has the highest rate of tobacco consumption in the EU. Although Greeks are now abandoning cigarettes in record numbers, smoking still remains one of the main causes of preventable diseases in the country. Hence, it would be a reasonable idea to promote teeth whitening gels, heart and lung drugs, male enhancement pills and other medications against the diseases causes by excessive tobacco consumption.

Greeks have long got accustomed to the hot Mediterranean climate, scorching sun rays and drought spells. Nevertheless, various skin diseases are a widespread health problem in Greece, and so hyperpigmentation creams and papilloma treatment remain popular in the country.

That’s all we wanted to say about Greece today. Of course, we have discussed only some of the country’s characteristic features that affiliates should account for when setting up an ad campaign. If you have some comments or questions left, feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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