In a marketing channel saturated with a variety of talking points that revolve around optimizing advertiser performance, there are many ideas on how to improve revenue and ROI. But one of the most effective ways that we can boost effectiveness is in how we work with our partners to drive better results.
Where we can go wrong
Many advertisers ask a variation of this basic question:
How are you going to make this new program easy for my publishers?
But focusing all our attention on that question can make us miss the best opportunities for growth, because we can forget to ask how we are going to help their partners be better. After all, making programs more effective for everyone is a far more important goal than just making them easy.
At Performance Horizon, we focus a great deal of attention on this important concept, particularly when we migrate customers from legacy networks to our platform. I personally know that migrating a performance marketing channel to a new provider requires some work, but it also provides strong opportunities to do things smarter. One task that creates just such an opportunity is when partners change their links. This is actually where Performance Horizon starts to help them be better.
One of the benefits of Performance Horizon is that when we introduce new features for our advertiser clients, we introduce them to partners as well. Recently, we released an article about 5 Ways Insurance Brands Can Optimise Their Affiliate & Partner Programmes,and one of the points covered was “Optimizing Placements and Media Buys”.
Our technology actually makes it easy to understand performance at a far more granular level, so you can work with partners to help them improve performance for different types of placements. That sort of insight can be invaluable because it actually makes it possible for them to optimize every aspect of a program.
How does our technology allow partners to do this?
I’ll focus on how the benefit of one single parameter in our click tracking links allows partners and advertisers to analyze the performance of different partner marketing tools. This marketing parameter is called the Traffic Source. Here are just a few examples of such sources: Rich Media, Social, Email, etc..
During the migration of a current affiliate network to a Performance Horizon partner program, we can work with your partners to add these source types to their click tracking links. This will open the door to using the more robust reporting toolset built into our technology.
Placement reporting flexibility
Users of Performance Horizon’s technology can see the benefits of this source type data directly within the reporting suite. Our reporting is very flexible when it comes to analyzing each placement and placement type. There is built-in pivot and filter functionality that will allow users to view the clicks and/or conversions based on what they want to measure:
Demo Reporting Suite Showing Placement Pivots
If partners classify links or marketing efforts into individual channels, they can then analyze those channels in a real-time aggregate. This placement reporting flexibility can also be filtered down to specific placements so that only clicks and/or conversions driven through them are visible:
Demo Reporting Suite Showing Filtered Pivots
This flexibility goes even further because you can add pivots across more metrics. And it allows partners or advertisers to see the data in a way that tells a complete story about performance.
Performance optimization
Effective performance optimization goes beyond just measuring eCPA or eCPC as a whole. Marketing performance needs to be measured by channel by the partner. For example, marketers can analyze how effective (or ineffective) are the placements for a particular source type, like email marketing. The same question can be asked about every marketing channel used by the partner.
By using this metric, partners can see how effective the traffic from email blasts is when sending traffic to their advertising clients. Since this metric is available at the time of click, you can track how different marketing channels interact during the same user journey. By looking at this data in real-time, or period over period, marketing efforts can be optimized so that the eCPA and eCPC improve.
Ease of implementation
Importantly, It’s easy to implement this sort of granular classification and analysis. Performance Horizon has made the process straightforward, and offers training and clear documentation.
As an actual working example, here is a click tracking link using a sample traffic source tag:
https://prf.hn/click/camref:i9dG/tsource:Affiliate
By adding this standard tag to partner tracking, you enable all of the benefits described above. Simply changing this “tsource” parameter’s value, or removing it all-together for different channels, will improve reporting analysis.
Summary
Not all partners offer multiple types of placements, but the industry is certainly moving in that direction. As the partner marketing channel broadens from traditional affiliates to a full range of business development partnerships, reporting flexibility becomes more important. By offering partners and advertisers the ability to look at their traffic more effectively, they can be ready for this. And they can get better results regardless of the placement type.
