10 Quick Wins for your Affiliate Programme
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10 Quick Wins for your Affiliate Program
Even the most developed campaigns fall at these simple hurdles. But by using this checklist you can blow your competitors out of the water and maximise your pay-by-performance programme.
1. Check your four vital stats
Every successful publisher programme is built on getting a few basic elements right. Four stand out in particular: conversion rate of publisher traffic; how quickly you can validate their commissions; the percentage of commissions that are approved versus those that are not; and the EPCs the programme generates. As well as being key to whether publisher s decide to promote you, these four stats also act as barometers to help you monitor the health of your programme.
2. Know where your traffic comes from
As an advertiser, these indicators also provide you with an insight into how your publisher s are performing and allow you to identify and resolve potential problems easily. If, for instance, you notice high clicks but low conversions from a publisher , it might indicate a problem in the messaging on their site. Check the referrer URLs of your publisher s’ traffic so you can see from which pages traffic is coming. Make sure you know how publisher s promote you and are comfortable with it.
3. Deep-link everything
Better understanding the job that publisher s do will help you work more effectively with them. The reality of being a publisher involves a lot of relatively mundane and time-consuming tasks, so the more you can help make these tasks easier the more successful your programme will be. A good example of a necessary but essential publisher task is building deep links, so ensure all the promo material you send to publisher s includes links to the relevant product page.
4. Sell your programme and your business
Your programme description is the first thing publisher s will see before they decide to join. It should serve both as a reference for existing publisher s and an advert attracting new publisher s to join. As well as describing the basics of your company and your programme – USPs, key products, commission rates – an easy way to go above-and-beyond what your competitors are likely doing is to put together a short PDF explaining what you know about your customers, their demographics and shopping habits. This helps publisher s match their traffic to your requirements and send you the most valuable customers. Make sure you have a link to join your publisher programme on your site, even if it only directs to your publisher network, as this will be the first place some new publisher s look.
5. Give publisher s the best tools to promote you
Creative and copy are the bread-and-butter of publisher promotion. Banners should be available in a range of the most common sizes and updated when new campaigns and promotions are launched. But nowhere more does this apply more than your datafeed, which should be updated at least daily to ensure publisher s are only displaying in-stock items that visitors can buy. Go one step further by making co-branded creative or landing pages to give new customers the confidence to purchase from publisher sites.
6. Keep your publisher s informed
A major grip amongst publisher s is that they are often not informed of important site changes or campaign launches. Making publisher s an integrated with your other marketing channels means ensuring they are aware of new campaigns and your plans around seasonal promotions. Site downtime is a common pitfall. Whilst some downtime is unavoidable, publisher s hate feeling neglected, so when maintenance is scheduled insure publisher s are notified of the outage in good time.
7. Commission on value
Know what kinds of orders publisher s are driving, and make sure your commission rewards most on those that are of greatest value. Rather than a crude flat-rate commission, or tiered in percentage increases, segment what you track as finely as possible and pay different amounts on different products to reward on value rather than just on volume.
A quick way to assess value is to look at average order values different publisher s produce. This might be more revealing than a comparison solely on the basis of number of sales attributable, and can be compared against other channels. What kinds of publisher s are encouraging customers to spend more? Lag times between click and the transaction are also a revealing indicator of customer interactions. Shorter times suggest the publisher has engaged the customer well enough for them to buy quickly.
8. Plug leakage
Phone numbers, URLs in banners, and even links to other retailers are all potential points where your publisher s’ traffic can get lost and conversions hit. These can be easily removed just for publisher -driven visitors, so ask your network to help you do this.
9. Use codes smartly
Instead of setting voucher codes to expire on the last day of the month, run short-term offers backed by the maximum promotion encouraging visitors to transact quickly, and track when a code is used. Remember that you do not have to discount your products in order to work with discount or voucher sites: one of the most consistently successful voucher codes an advertiser can offer is on free delivery.
10. Get feedback
It is worth remembering that the publisher community is a hotbed of people who know about your market and know what converts. Elicit their feedback even if they don’t work with you or drive the highest sales.