What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a way for online stores to pay partners for bringing in new customers. The partner earns a commission whenever someone they refer to the store makes a purchase. It’s a way for both the store and the partner to make money.
Affiliate Marketing Guide & FAQ Table of Contents
Who is Involved in Affiliate Marketing?
- Advertiser / Brand / Retailer: A person or company who has a product or service to sell online or in-store.
- Publisher Partner / Affiliate: A person or company who partners with an advertiser to promote their product or service and then receives a commission from the advertiser whenever agreed-upon outcomes occur.
- Affiliate Network / Platform: An intermediary between advertisers and publishers who operate affiliate programs.
- Consumer: A person who purchases products or services.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing works when an online website visitor (or reader) clicks on a link with affiliate tracking tags and is then directed to an advertiser’s website. When the reader completes an action, like making a purchase or submitting a qualified lead form, the affiliate partner (the referral partner who placed the tracking link) is then compensated with a commission for the action that the reader took on the advertiser’s website.
In other words, affiliate marketing is based on the promotion of brands and their products while compensating referral partners on a per-action basis through referral links (affiliate tracking links) that include tracking tags to monitor when the desired actions have been made.
Note that in practice, advertisers generally work with more than one affiliate partner to get the maximum amount of exposure from the marketing channel, provided they’re the right partner for that brand (but more on that later).
It is through this method that the affiliate channel has generated billions of dollars in sales . It has also made it possible for a wide variety of partners—from kids reviewing toys to news publications providing information to social media influencers offering product reviews—to make a significant income without ever having to actually own or distribute the inventory or facilitate the ecommerce transaction.
According to Harvard Business Review back in 2012, affiliate marketing was considerably more valuable (6x!) than conventional marketing in part because the advertisements were targeted to online spaces with traffic types already interested in the specific product or service. Today, affiliate marketing is firmly positioned at every stage of the buyer funnel—from awareness to conversion—offering valuable, quality content to buyers at every touchpoint.
As Investopedia explains, affiliate marketing existed long before the internet (think: word of mouth advertising). However, digital marketing and publishing, along with the ability to track cookies and use analytics, has truly propelled it to a new level—and it’s likely to evolve even further over the coming decades. That’s why, if you’re a brand or advertiser looking to leverage affiliate marketing to promote your products or services or if you’re a publishing partner aiming to generate or increase revenue, it’s important to understand the current state of the industry and how it’s developing.
In this white paper, we’ll look at brief history of affiliate marketing and discuss some important points to keep in mind in relation to SaaS ( s oftware a s a s ervice) and affiliate services providers. We’ll also take a closer look at what’s really happening in the industry and offer some statistical takeaways to provide an accurate picture of how affiliate marketing is developing and what’s to come.
When Did Affiliate Marketing Start?
To many experts, affiliate as we know it today, can be traced back to 1989 when William J. Tobin set up an internet affiliate program for his business, PC Flowers & Gifts. He patented his idea in 1996, and the patent was granted in 2000, as Medium reports.
In 1996, affiliate marketing was then popularized by Amazon when it first started paying bloggers and other partners commission to drive traffic to its site via its Associates’ program. Other affiliate programs soon followed, including BeFree, Linkshare, Commission Junction and the Clickbank Network. Initially, many brands gave commissions simply for driving traffic to their sites. Later, especially after the devastating dot com crash in the early 2000s, affiliate marketing became increasingly driven by viable leads and sales.
Note that the development of cookies—small pieces of data that track what a specific user is doing in their browser—greatly accelerated the use of affiliate marketing, as they made it easier for advertisers to see where their traffic was coming from. This in turn clarified which strategies were and weren’t working as well as which publishers drove a lot of traffic—and which did not—to advertisers’ sites.
What is an Affiliate Company?
An affiliate company is a technology company or platform that connects affiliate marketers with advertisers by facilitating the promotion of products and services. These companies are essential for modern affiliate marketing, offering a simple way for affiliates to earn commissions through advertising. Learn more in our guide to affiliate marketing companies.
Does Affiliate Marketing Work as an Advertising Channel?
Today, more than 80% of brands —including many common household brands—have affiliate marketing programs. So why is this method of marketing so successful? The main reason is that it enables advertisers to diversify their marketing, supplement existing marketing programs and pay for performance rather than paying for access, as found in other paid digital channels. Blogs and social media—including YouTube and the wildly popular TikTok , just for examples—have changed how the public consumes information. Knowing that, it’s not surprising that affiliate partners are also bloggers, YouTube stars, social media influencers and general thought leaders—each with their own vehicle for promoting the product or service—for example blog posts, YouTube videos, Instagram posts or op-ed pieces. And it’s precisely this variety of content that makes affiliate marketing such a resounding success.
Today’s consumers are as savvy as they’ve ever been and hold brands accountable in ways they never have before. Nowadays, transparency is key, so advertisers must find ways to promote products and services without sounding too pushy or salesy. To accomplish this, many modern brands leverage their core values and beliefs as the cornerstone to their messaging. For example, TOMS shoes built their brand on giving back by forwarding portions of their proceeds to provide shoes, sight and safe water to those in need. Working with partners who share the same belief and mission is paramount to TOMS’ awareness, messaging, branding—and conversion success. The ability to be an effective storyteller is also critical for both brands and partners and they need to be harmonious when it comes to the story they’re telling.
Ultimately, the key is finding the right partner for your brand: one that has built a solid audience who is also interested in the products or services you’re selling. Since these partners are able—and highly motivated by potential commissions—to create engaging content while promoting products or services, the traffic generated from their sites is more likely to be high-quality and therefore, more likely to convert.
By incorporating affiliate marketing into their strategy , partners can generate quite an impressive revenue source. In fact, affiliate commissions now account for as much as 20% of partners’ total revenue. At the same time, it’s important to note affiliate marketing is responsible for around 16% of e-commerce sales while being poised to grow to $6.8B by 2020. For these reasons, both advertisers and partners have grown to rely significantly on affiliate marketing networks and platforms—online marketplaces where advertisers and partners can connect, engage and manage every aspect of their programs, from tracking to payments.
And all things considered, in today’s world of commerce, affiliate marketing plays a critical role in the buyer’s journey. To illustrate: A recent Forrester survey cited 83% of advertisers use an affiliate network or platform to coordinate deals with partners. In short, brands understand the power of word of mouth advertising and it’s hard to top the affiliate channel as the digital age’s strongest form of word of mouth advertising.
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What’s the Difference Between Affiliate Marketers and Influencers?
The difference between affiliates and influencers comes down to their goals. Affiliates, also known as affiliate marketers, aim to drive sales and earn commissions through unique tracking links, while influencers, also known as influencer marketers, focus on building brand awareness and trust with their social media followers. It is worth noting there’s some overlap with both types of marketers. Some influencers will use affiliate links, while not all affiliate marketers will have a large social media presence. Some affiliates, like bloggers or content marketers, rely on search engines to drive blog traffic to their affiliate links instead of social media posts.
You can learn more in our influencer marketing guide.
Is Affiliate Marketing Legit?
Spoiler Alert: It is.
Unfortunately, despite all the positive impact affiliate has made on modern marketing including being one of the first channels to monetize Instagram and social pages while also infiltrating podcast advertising, there are still several misperceptions that surround it—and in the past, have lent to a less-than-savory misconception about the channel at large.
The first misperception being that affiliate marketing is a scam. In addition, some people believe that the affiliate channel leads to low-value traffic and few sales concluding a “we would’ve gotten the customer anyway” mentality. However, nothing could be further from the truth. As we outlined earlier, affiliate marketing is a mainstream channel that generates a significant portion of all e-commerce sales. In fact, 16% of all online orders can be attributed to the contribution of affiliate marketing.
An additional misconception is that affiliate is a lower funnel, perhaps lower-value channel and this perception was largely devised post-recession when consumers were looking for all the savings they could find. As a result, thanks to these savvy and fiscally-conscious consumers, coupon and loyalty dominated the last-click position and unfairly, the channel garnered a reputation for not really adding any incremental value. Couple that with the fact that brands’ and retailers’ attribution and measurement systems were already generally setup on a last-click model, meaning the last click received the credit for the conversion event and it’s easy to see how the true value of affiliate was missed altogether.
However, we now know that this belief simply isn’t true, and that affiliate occupies all stages of the consumer buyer journey. Thanks to an emphasis on transparency, there is visibility into traffic and sources of referral and reporting is available, easily exportable and usable in brands’ system of record, MTA, etc. Affiliate marketing has gone mainstream with more and more publishing houses are monetizing their digital editorial content with affiliate marketing, a testament to affiliate occupying all stages of the funnel—not just last click.
Brand safety is also a paramount concern in the affiliate channel. How could brands be certain that publishers are representing their products in their likeness? Today, protection tools are in place to provide compliance monitoring, domain monitoring and fraud detection to ensure that proactive steps are taken to understanding how brands are promoted by publishers/partners.
So where do these misperceptions come from? According to Shopify , in the early years of affiliate marketing, fraudsters would often employ harmful methods to increase their commissions or obtain data. Black hat SEO, cookie stuffing, link farms, typosquatting, brandjacking, spyware, spam and trademark infringement were just a few of the strategies they employed. Later, scripts were written that fraudulently generated multiple clicks—and as a result ramped up earnings.
Fortunately, with significant advancements in affiliate technology, these practices have been drastically eliminated—and that means by and large, the affiliate marketing industry of today is transparent, above board and a highly-effective marketing tactic.
That said, along with advancements in affiliate technology, there are also several notable trends in the channel today.
- Carefully honed campaign tracking tools: Today, it’s possible to track referrals from a range of media, including phone and coupon codes. You can even track in-store purchases that result from online referrals, as well as referrals across multiple devices. As a result, it’s easier for advertisers and publishers to see what does and doesn’t work.
- The rise of influencers: Certain social media figures have great influence on their audiences—so much so that they inspire them to purchase specific products or services. As Social Media Week explains, a growing number of publishers are moving away from blogging and instead choosing Tik Tok, YouTube and Instagram as platforms for their content. Think of the success of Jason Stone, who generated more than $7M in affiliate sales through his Instagram account @Millionair_Mentor.
- The use of mobile push notifications in affiliate marketing: Although push notifications are verboten on iOS devices, there are marketing workarounds that produce pushes through apps that you have elected to download on iOS. While it may be tricky to master push notifications due to permission restrictions and general character length restrictions, it’s proving to be a good way for newer advertisers with small budgets to enter the market as the audience is targeted, having already installed the app on their device.
What Do You Need to Know About SaaS Providers Within the Channel?
Software as a Service—or SaaS—is a rapidly expanding industry, and due to its fixed-cost model, it’s one that’s attractive to affiliate marketers. According to MarketWatch, the SaaS market will grow at a CAGR of 21% through 2022 and be valued at $117B by the beginning of 2023. Key players in this industry include Salesforce, IBM Corporation, Oracle Corporation, Microsoft Inc., and Google Inc. Think products like Microsoft’s Office 365, which offers business software—such as Word, Excel and Outlook—along with cloud storage to users for a monthly fee. And every day, new SaaS providers are appearing on the market offering everything from CRMs to online bill collection—and affiliate marketing platforms are no exception. But does this SaaS model make sense for everyone? Yes and no.
Traditionally, many marketers who are versed in affiliate marketing, are also accustomed to the channel operating on a pay-for-performance model, which proves attractive for some, but not necessarily for all. Case in point: There is safety in a model where costs are only absorbed upon conversion. But as conversions scale, volume becomes a key consideration—and predictability is lost.
In short, it’s simply not enough for customers to assume an affiliate provider is fine-tuned to their precise needs—so they must do the homework to know what they’re signing up for. And that’s something that both advertisers and publishing partners need to consider when choosing their affiliate technology provider.
What are The Latest Affiliate Marketing Industry Statistics?
To truly understand the present state of the affiliate industry, where it’s headed and why it’s here to stay—firmly planted in any sophisticated marketers’ arsenal—we’ll leave you with some quick and insightful statistics :
- Affiliate marketing programs are projected to continue to grow by 10% each year for the next two years.
- Currently, the global affiliate industry is worth more than $12B.
- Affiliate marketing now accounts for 15% of digital marketing revenue.
- Affiliate programs generate an average of between 15% and 30% of all sales for advertisers.
- In 2017, users clicked over five billion times, and worldwide, affiliate networks and platforms performed more than 170M transactions.
- More than half of all affiliate-referred traffic originates with mobile devices.
- Between December 2017 and June 2018, the search term “affiliate marketing” was used 44 percent more frequently than in the six months prior
Here is an infographic of the latest affiliate marketing statistics
As of May 1st 2023, Google Trends shows interest in the search term “affiliate marketing” is at an all time high with a 40% growth in its popularity year over year
How to Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing
Over the past few years, affiliate has become an increasingly popular marketing strategy among many marketers who may have once considered it a ‘non-traditional’ marketing channel (at least in comparison to other paid channels like search and social). In fact, there isn’t even an absolute consensus on what marketers call the channel. Some refer to the channel as ‘affiliate’, while others call it, ‘commerce’, while still others know it as ‘brand partnerships’.
Naming conventions aside, there has also been an influx of what many of these marketers may consider ‘non-traditional’ publisher partners stepping into affiliate—taking best practices from the traditional publishers—and, of course, creating some new best practices of their own to generate the most revenue possible. But no matter what type of publisher partner you consider yourself to be, here are some quick tips to keep in mind as you ramp yourself up to becoming a revenue-generating affiliate publisher.
1. Know Your Audience
There is nothing more critical to your success as an affiliate publisher than knowing who your audience—and the brands you’re partnering with—are. Brands come to you because you offer something unique, something no other publisher can offer or deliver in quite the same way you can. Use this to your advantage and incorporate brands and products that you know your established audience is already interested in. Once you’re in sync with the makeup of your audience, and their demographics (think: age range, gender ratio, household income, etc..) as well as what they view, click on most, etc., you can offer them more relevant brands and more tailored products.
2. Communication is Key
There is a lot to be said about creating a direct line of communication with your brand partners. This is the best way for you both to foster a growing two-way partnership that drives mutual revenue. Proper communication lines also afford the opportunity to discuss what offers or new products are available to you and in return, let them know about new promotions you’re working on for your audience where they can be included or featured.
3. Be Proactive
Don’t wait for the most relevant brands, products and offers to come to you! Instead, take an active approach and seek them out to create purposeful, more meaningful partnerships. Many of the top performing partners (traditional and non-traditional) are creating interesting opportunities on their sites and apps and are proactively pitching brands.
4. Negotiate (& Re-negotiate) Commissions
Many brands set ‘base’ commission rates to get partnerships kicked off quickly. If you see that this partnership is going quite well (or even better than expected!) and generating solid revenue, ask to negotiate your commission rate(s). Most brands are very happy to reward high performing partners with better commission rates to keep the partnership growing strong. Where it makes sense, you can also ask to set opportunities to collect bonus payments if you hit certain revenue goals that the brand is looking to achieve.
Keeping these 4 quick tips in mind: knowing your audience, keeping lines of communication with your brand partners open, being proactive, and negotiating (and re-negotiating) commission rates, will help you ensure that you’re in demand and making money online as a publisher within the affiliate channel.
5 Reasons Why You Should Leverage Affiliate Marketing
If you’re considering incorporating affiliate marketing (also known as performance marketing) into the mix but still aren’t convinced that the impact will be worth the effort, then you’ve come to the right place. Forrester reports that performance marketing is currently a $4.2 billion industry expected to reach $6.8 billion by 2020. Moreover, Forrester estimates a compound annual growth of nearly 10% by 2020.
As brands begin to recognize that traditional forms of marketing are no longer working as well as they once did (hello, sign of the times!), performance marketing commands an increasingly larger slice of marketers’ budgets. Forrester also lends us insight into where marketers are looking to spend budgets citing over 80% of all marketers currently allocate 10% of their marketing budget to performance marketing. But what does this mean for your business?
When compared to more traditional marketing channels including: search, display, email and paid social, one key differentiator that sets affiliate marketing apart is its uncanny ability at relationship creation/optimization. When considering the value that affiliate can bring, it’s important to understand its strength, or what lies at its core. Above all else, affiliate marketing is rooted in the idea of creating and strengthening relationships. These relationships aren’t only between advertisers and partners, but they’re very much about the relationship that consumers have with partners and brands.
Read on to learn about the top 5 reasons why you should leverage an affiliate program now.
- It touches all forms of marketing
And by design, this is a key differentiator in making affiliate marketing unique. Affiliate isn’t a channel that dwells in a silo—it touches much more than just the last click of a transaction, something it’s traditionally known for. Take for instance content sites, bloggers and influencers who may serve as the greatest point of impact in the buyer’s journey, yet, don’t receive the recognition they deserve. There are also instances where the affiliate channel doesn’t impact the first or that last-click models, yet still resides within the clickstream, still warranting credit. In affiliate marketing, a partner can leverage paid search and SEO tactics to monetize their content through affiliate links, making it unique to other channels. Knowing how affiliate marketing works in tandem with the other channels, is a critical component to your success with this channel.
- It is a pay-for-performance channel that minimizes risk while maximizing returns
Proving the value of the affiliate channel brings us to our next point. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing (at its face value) is that it’s a completely pay-for-performance channel. This is not to imply that it’s an effort-free channel, it’s simply bringing light to an often-overlooked perk of affiliate: partners or influencers only get paid a commission once they make a sale. Additionally, affiliate—despite whether a sale is made or not—still serves as free advertising or additional branding that brands wouldn’t have had otherwise.
- Affiliate offers customization and connects you with your target audience
As mentioned earlier, one of affiliate marketing’s greatest strengths rests in its ability to create and nurture relationships. One of the most critical of these relationships lies between the partner and their audience. Partners spend considerable time creating quality content that they know their audience will connect with. Knowing what resonates best, enables partners to recommend campaign elements that brands may not have thought of, or perhaps put on the backburner including: certain product offerings to push, ad messaging, etc. Partners also understand well their audience demographics and, in some cases, can target subsets of these audiences to further tailor brand messaging. A great example of this is major apparel and accessories brand, Puma who didn’t realize that a famous pop star’s collection would be so wildly popular within the Asian market. However, top Asian partner, Dealmoon, knew otherwise and highlighted this collection to their primarily-Asian audience to great success! Doing so, skyrocketed the relationship between Puma and Dealmoon and together, they continue to achieve great success.
- It builds brand credibility
Remember how we mentioned that partners know their audiences best? This knowledge evolves in large part from the trust that they’ve worked hard at building with them. This means that when audiences trust what partners say—especially about a product—they are far more likely to purchase the products they recommend, essentially building a brands’ credibility. Affiliate marketing is all about partners working diligently on a brands’ behalf to endorse products and services in a way that sounds natural and that resonates best with their established audience. They can bring a new perspective and level of credibility to a brand that the brand isn’t able to do on its own. If this all sounds a lot like third-party validation, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.
- It encourages brand loyalty
While word-of-mouth has been one of the most effective methods of endorsing products or services since (basically) the dawn of commerce, it makes perfect sense that partner sites, bloggers and social media platforms would only intensify this means of marketing. From written reviews to live product demonstration, outlets like these are affording would-be consumers to see and “test” products like they’ve never been able to before. This isn’t the brand directly selling a product to them, but instead it’s someone they trust the opinion of endorsing the product on a brands’ behalf. The partners’ excitement transfers to the audience and with the help of all the proof points or the case they’ve built for why this product is best, consumers make purchases and more importantly, they make repeat purchases. This only strengthens their affinity towards a brand and ultimately, creates loyalty. Loyal consumers loyally spend on product because they can see the value, and affiliate marketing can serve as the catalyst in making this happen.
The affiliate channel just makes plain sense (and dollars)
Over the past 20 years, affiliate marketing has evolved, matured and grown into a well-developed, sophisticated form of marketing that in many ways has given more traditional channels a true run for their money. It’s the perfect low-risk, high-reward channel for both content and influencer marketing.
So, what are you waiting for? Let’s keep this conversation going by reaching out to us here .
4 Tactics to Improve Your Affiliate Channel Strategy
To set your brand up for success, consider these four key tactics to boost your ROI. Being well-versed in each will elevate your affiliate marketing plans and ensure they are your most profitable yet.
- Leverage Advanced Attribution
Marketers should utilize attribution to award each publisher that played a role in the path to a purchase based on their value to the sale. Advanced attribution tools can provide you with insights into how, when and where publishers influence customers across devices and channels so that you know which to reward, and how much to pay them.
- Incorporate Seamless Consumer Engagement
Engage consumers and increase conversion rates by offering multiple transaction types:
Mobile Applications
Geo-Targeting
Beacon Technology
Pay-Per-Call
Buy Online, Pick Up In Store
Push Notifications
Card Linked Offers
Online to In-Store Coupons
- Customize Commission Rates
Not all influencers along the path to purchase are equal—so why would you reward them equally? Dynamic Commissioning enables marketers to define incrementality-based tracking to customize commission rates for:
- Transaction type
- SKUs
- Coupon Code
- New to File vs. Return Customers
- Device Type
- Category
- Monetize Instagram
Publishers can now send their Instagram followers to advertisers’ product pages, driving high quality traffic and revenue through the affiliate channel. By taking advantage of our Curalate partnership, content publishers are able to monetize Instagram posts and make images shoppable.
How to Start An Affiliate Program
Any e-commerce brand can utilize affiliate marketing, but the recipe for starting a successful affiliate program involves several ingredients. For starters, following an OGSM (objectives, goals, strategies and measures) model provides the necessary framework for identifying the overarching objective and the layers of support needed to develop a well-designed program. OGSM is a planning framework that specializes in helping people and organizations actualize their long-term outcomes and strategies by tying them to shorter-term goals, actions and measures. It enables progress tracking along the way so you can adjust course as necessary and is extremely effective at keeping focus on the tasks at hand.
When it comes to your affiliate program, establish the program’s objectives and goals then develop the strategies to support and the measures that need to be taken to ensure those strategies are executed successfully. For instance, when defining your objectives, you may want to consider whether your brand wants to use affiliate to ultimately gain more brand exposure or is the main focus more on revenue growth? It’s questions like these that help establish the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) and allow you to develop the short-term strategies that map directly to achieving your overall objective. Setting these objectives and aligning on expectations in the beginning is critical as it allows all other initiatives to flow from this central starting point.
Next, it’s critical that your affiliate marketing efforts aren’t siloed but instead work in conjunction with other components of your digital marketing mix. This allows for cohesion when it comes to the brand’s messaging, promotes consistency and is essential to creating a symbiotic marketing campaign that will yield optimal results across the board. Coordinating your affiliate efforts across your broader digital marketing mix, is not to be outdone by another main ingredient: effective communication. Strong lines of communication across the broader affiliate team and partner themselves, is vital. If there’s one thing just about every affiliate marketer can agree upon it’s that a healthy and successful affiliate program is built on the shoulders of strong relationships with publisher partners. This includes leveraging relationships and ensuring fair commission rates so that publisher partners are incented to deliver quality traffic and coveted conversions.
Finally—and this a point that we believe strongly in as a key pillar to building a successful affiliate program—is establishing a diversified publisher partner base. Having a diverse publisher partner base will help your brand reach a broader audience, bolster brand exposure, drive new customer acquisition, and build meaningful customer lifetime value (CLTV). This means having a program that includes all the major publisher partner business models including loyalty, coupon, deal, content, shopping comparison (CSE), sub-affiliate networks, abandonment and Asian-focused. This robust base of publisher partners will help you create strategic value and reduce risk: a win-win for everyone.
The takeaway? Every brand has an important story to tell and affiliate marketing is the vehicle to deliver your brand into the hands of ready and waiting consumers. Following this simple yet effective recipe will help set you and your brand up for a successful, healthy and lasting affiliate marketing program.
Is an affiliate business system the same as an affiliate program?
No, an affiliate business system and an affiliate program are not the same.
Here’s how they are different.
An affiliate program is a defined performance-based marketing framework where a business pays individuals or companies (known as affiliates or publishers) to promote their products or services. The affiliate program outlines all of the rules and terms for this type of partnership. Essentially, the affiliate program is the agreement and mode of doing business between the affiliate and advertiser. It covers the commission structure, tracking methods, terms and conditions, and shared marketing resources like banners or ads.
An affiliate business system is a larger piece of the affiliate landscape picture. It is the entire system or process an affiliate uses to run the marketing of their affiliate business. This includes choosing a niche, building a website (or social media channel), creating content, getting traffic and continuously optimizing their strategy. Essentially, it is a systemized list of activities for an affiliate business.
The Affiliate Marketing Services Rule of Thumb
Affiliate marketing service practices should by just as unique as the affiliate marketer.
There is an old proverb claiming what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. It means simply that whatever treatment is appropriate for one case, is by default, appropriate for another case. This may be swell advice if affiliate marketers lived on farms but we know in digital marketing, the landscape is very different from a farm. In affiliate, figuring out what level of service a retailer marketer needs is just as unique as the marketers themselves and in many cases, the thought of managing an affiliate program in-house, is highly appealing. After all, in-house management allows brands to retain control of all the day-to-day aspects of program management. From strategy to execution—marketers remain in the driver’s seat.
This in-housing approach, in theory, may be appealing for others but the thought of hiring an experienced in-house affiliate marketer coupled with the internal stakeholders’ own limited knowledge of the channel, may make outsourcing affiliate program management likely the only viable option. Then again you may be a marketer who ultimately wants to insource affiliate management but needs to outsource temporarily while you acquire the education and skill set necessary to execute an affiliate program effectively.
No matter which type of marketer you are or which type of affiliate program you’re looking to manage, Partnerize has a perfectly balanced solution for you including a specialized track designed for the growth marketer looking for a guided and comprehensive affiliate management education with flexibility to move in-house—based on your timeline.
Learn more by downloading our quick guide to in-housing your affiliate program and discover the solution that’s right for you today.
Best Practices For Creating Affiliate Links
Building a library of accessible creative ensures that your publisher partners have access to the most relevant and accurate content to promote on behalf of your brand. Text links, or text hyperlinks, are one of the creative types you can create foryour publisher partners to promote your program in their placements, including store pages, category listings, newsletters, social media and more. Having a solid base of text links is a critical component to any successful affiliate program. Text links should include your brand name, new product lines, offers such as free shipping, coupons, % off discounts, and much more. All affiliate links should be in line with your marketing and promotional calendars therefore, it’s very important to refresh them regularly, so promotions are accurately updated, and brand guidelines are followed correctly.
To help keep you organized and prepared when it comes to text links, the following are some best practices to keep in mind, especially as we navigate through Q4 and the busy holiday shopping season:
- Be mindful of the c haracter l imit
- Text links are limited to 255 characters. This might sound like a lot but it it’s easy to go over when including offer details or branding information. Be as direct and as clear as possible to get attention and drive action.
- Call out your brand
- Your brand is the most important asset – it’s also the easiest to leave out when building text links. Make sure to lead (or close) by mentioning your brand name in the text link. This can be used as part of your call to action.
- Call to action (CTA)
- Every text link should include a call to action, or a prompt to complete a desired step. Links are interactive and the call to action reminds shoppers of this. It never hurts to include your brand in a call to action either (e.g. Shop MYSITE now!).
- Make sure the link has a clear focus: product, category, collection, offer
- Product or category-specific links are a simple way to draw your partners (and therefore your consumers) to a targeted item or collection on your site. Building these links is an effective motivator for partners and can draw attention to an item with extra inventory, a sale section or a new product launch just to name a few. Product and/or category-specific links and sitewide offers are useful in driving consumers exactly where you want them. You can also build sale messaging into these unique product links.
- Sitewide links work well with high-level sales, free shipping offers or general updates (think free shipping thresholds, re-stocked best-sellers or new customer acquisition campaigns).
- Considerations w hen building offer – based text links
- Include a code, if necessary. We recommend capitalizing the code, so it clearly stands out and is used correctly, creating a better user experience.
- Include offer duration in the link anchor text. Feel free to play around with this, by leaving out the end date to create a sense of urgency.
- Drive to a specific landing page.Be aware if the page expires, the link will no longer provide a seamless user experience. Specific landing pages are generally not recommended for evergreen links for this reason.
- Input date ranges to ensure links expire properly. By including a start and end date when creating the text link, the creative will automatically expire and negate the need to manually revisit your account for cleanup. This works best for sales, codes, seasonal collections or themed pages.
- Public , Private and Exclusive Text Links
- Public links are available to all publishers. These should reflect what is currently available on your site, to save publisher partners time when verifying valid offers.
- Private offers are available to assigned publisher partners. These should be saved for unique publisher optimization opportunities.
- Exclusive Codesare an Ascend™spend allocation tool that enables the assigned partner to receive the reward for each redemption, regardless of if they appear in the click stream. Because a click is not required for the partner to be rewarded, Exclusive Codes are valuable components for tracking campaigns in podcasts, print, radio, television and more. This spend allocation tool can be exchanged for additional or enhanced publisher placement opportunities, both online and offline.
B onus tips for advertisers on Pepperjam’s Ascend™ Affiliate Cloud platform to keep in mind
Make sure to select a promotional type, so your text links have the correct details listed in Pepperjam’s offer feed. This gives your link the opportunity to be featured for publisher partners that leverage filtering logic in the platform.
- Use description fields to describe the offer if you believe extra info is needed. Providing your publisher partners with additional information such as offer exclusions ensures that there is no confusion regarding what partners are promoting. If no extra details are needed, you can paste the anchor text in that field to simplify partner access.
- Make sure to press ‘Save’. Text links do not autosave as you build them, so be sure to click save when you’ve entered all of the necessary details.
- Bulk uploads are available by using .CSV files. This feature gives you the opportunity to quickly and easily add a group of text links to your account. Required fields for the CSV upload can be found in Ascend™ under Creative>Text>Upload Text Links.
Remember, building text affiliate links is one of the most practical and useful topics that you can be knowledgeable about to provide the best possible experience for both you and your partners. Additional help file on creating text links can be found here .
Affiliate Marketing 101
How Do They All Work Together?
Step 1: Pat wants to make some extra money.
“Hm… I blog about hats that I like. Maybe I can make some money while doing that.”
Step 2: Pat joins an affiliate network.
“I can add links to my blog and get paid for it. Now this is what I’m talking about!”
Step 3 : Andy wants to get more business.
“Maybe I can get bloggers to promote my products for me.”
Step 4: Andy joins an affiliate network.
“Now I have an affiliate program and publishers will promote my store for me!”
Step 5: Pat joins Andy’s affiliate program.
“I can join this program & use the affiliate network’s tools to promote it.”
Step 6: Pat adds a banner to his blog.
“Now people will see this ad for Andy’s Hat Store and maybe they will shop there.”
Step 7: Sue reads Pat’s blog & sees the banner.
“Wow, I love Pat’s blog! Oh, Andy’s Hat Store? I think I will check this store out!”
Step 8: Sue clicks the ad & buys a hat.
“This is the cutest hat I have ever seen! I am going to buy it right now.”
Step 9: Andy sells a hat & Pat gets a commission.
“Thanks to Pat, I sold a hat! Now he will get a percentage of the sale.”
Step 10: The affiliate network pays Pat.
“Wow! I got a percentage of a sale from Andy’s Hat Store! That is super!”
The Partnerize Solution: Ascend™
At Partnerize, it’s our mission to help advertisers and partners realize their objectives by providing premier technology and leading services. By doing so, we aim to propel like-minded marketers into the future of affiliate.
Introducing Ascend™: An integrated and comprehensive affiliate marketing lifecycle platform that gives performance marketers access to category-defining discovery, recruitment, attribution, commission, fraud prevention—and payment capabilities—in a single-stack solution.
Contact us today to learn how you can harness the power of an affiliate platform built with the needs of today’s marketer in mind.
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