Choosing the right affiliate marketing partners can be a difficult job for publishers. Owen Hewitson, Client Strategist, Affiliate Window & buy.at, lists 5 key qualities to help the decision making process easier…
Given the breadth and variety of affiliates and the different methods of promotion they use, this is not an easy question to answer. Indeed, it can be argued that because of this there is no such thing as the ideal affiliate. But it is nevertheless possible to highlight a number of qualities that the best affiliates share and what advertisers can look for in the affiliates they plan to partner with.
1. Goes beyond a single promotional method.
It is very often easy to pigeon-hole affiliates into pre-defined promotional types, usually according to the way your affiliate network groups, classifies and correlates them. But this model should be challenged. Instead, advertisers should ask themselves what activity each affiliate undertakes to promote them. To take just a single example: there are many voucher code sites in the affiliate marketplace and the temptation is to decide to work with all or none. But a quick look at the conversion rates, EPCs or proportion of returning customers each brings will reveal vast differences between them. Rather than being a simple directory of codes, some such affiliates differentiate themselves in the promotion they conduct around their core voucher offering.
Vouchercodes.co.uk, for example, partners with The Guardian and Confused.com to power their voucher channel; writes a lifestyle magazine – ‘Most Wanted’ – with 300 original articles; has an email newsletter with 3m subscribers; and has a significant presence on Facebook and Twitter. Even an advertiser not offering voucher codes may wish to take advantage of one of these means to promote a new product launch or seasonal sale.
2. Reads and adheres to the Terms & Conditions of your programme before joining.
This is as much for the affiliate’s benefit as it is for an advertiser’s. For example, the best affiliates will understand how an advertiser’s de-duplication policy can affect their own methods of promotion, and thus their earnings from a programme the amount of long-term commitment they are able to profitably offer in supporting campaigns.
3. Sees their relationship with you as genuinely two-way.
Until a few years ago, there was something of a gulf between affiliates and advertisers. All the power was in the hands of the latter, whose task was to pick from the vast reserve of networks’ databases a handful of affiliates that they wanted to work closer with. This situation has not been reversed, but the relationship is much more equal, with advertisers respecting the fact that affiliates are businesses themselves with their own marketing plans and campaign schedules. The ideal affiliate is thus one that is eager to meet with you to present their own marketing plans and explore how they can complement your own.
4. Has a proven track record in your specific sector.
Advertisers are increasingly picky about which affiliates they want to work closest with. Whilst a proven track record in your sector is not always strictly necessary, without a demonstrable appreciation of the market an advertiser operates in, and a method by which they can target it, it might fairly be asked what benefits their membership of the programme could bring.
5. Will share insights into their own users to help advertisers identify suitable traffic sources.
Whilst this kind of information is readily available (think of how it would help an advertiser to see analytics data from an affiliate’s site) it is too often not shared. Mature affiliate programmes have something of a feedback loop established between advertisers and affiliates. There are in fact two feedback loops operating. Firstly, just as the affiliate is sharing information on what kind of traffic it can offer, the advertiser is also sharing information on what constitutes a high value customer. Some sales and some customers are more valuable than others, so it is up to the advertiser to inform their affiliates how this is decided (for example, new versus existing customers, frequently-returning customers, high spending customers, etc). It is up to the advertiser to feedback to the affiliate, via the network, how the kinds of customers affiliates refer perform against these metrics. Secondly, once this information has been provided to key affiliates, it is up to them to refine and optimise the traffic they send to advertisers in an effort to perform better against the advertiser’s value metrics.
Fundamentally, the reason why it is worth asking the question of what constitutes an ideal affiliate is because of the disparity between the number of advertisers and the number of affiliates. Because no programme should become too dependent on a small number of top revenue-drivers, when seeking out fresh partners it is worth asking how well they fit against certain the criteria, some of which this article has sought to outline.
By Owen Hewitson
Client Strategist
Affiliate Window & buy.at
www.affiliatewindow.com/
