The success of your affiliate program does not fall into one specific element. Your affiliate recruitment strategy, affiliate marketing partners,
the management of your affiliate program and last but by no means least the affiliate management software are all vitally important.
You can have the best recruitment strategy offering affiliates highly competative commissions and a product that converts traffic into sales, partners that will
continually drive endless traffic to your site, the best affiliate managers to look after your affiliates ensuring long term profitable partnerships but if your
affiliate management software platform falls short of current expecatations and requirements, your business will struggle to be successful in the corwded online
marketing world.
Your affiliate marketing software platform is a crucial management tool that enables you to operate your online affiliate program with all the latest marketing
tools, detailed reporting and account mangement service solutions. Your affiliates will interact 24/7 with your affiliate platform so most major industry standard
features and functions must be available to your affiliate partners. Professional affiliate partners will expect the ability to create unlimited named tracking campaigns
and detailed conversion and commission information. An affiliate software platform that extends the tracking functionality with additional data identification and even
external pass through information gives affiliates every tracking tool avalailable.
Enabling your affiliates to collect thier conversion data from multiple technical sources enables you to work with all levels of affiliate partmers. Access to an
affiliate account back office to view real time data with easy account management, send reports by email direct to an affiliates inbox, provide an API to integrate
into own data systems, fire a callback when the platform receives new data are what all affiliates expect and demand.
Detailed commission and financial reporting is key to your successful affiliate program management, affiliates must to be able to report on their commission earnings
and manage payments with ease. Integrated compliance documentation, terms and conditions and automated invoice systems are looked at favourably by affiliates.
Your affiliate partners will want to add thier own external codes (subid) to thier tracking links to integrate with their own back office systems. Publisher networks require this functionality by default when tracking performance dyanically across multiple sources. An additional option of passing through additional data through any traffic link goes one step further to providing solutions for every possible demand.
The ability to provide your affiliates with reliable tracking and report data is of paramount importance. With 3rd party on-the-fly tracking becoming increasingly unreliable you must adopt a seamless tracking and data collection solution delivering media for your affiliates through an integrated content delivery service, efficently track ad performance, conversions and financial information. The nost robust solution is to import data into your affiliate management platform through an hourly or daily api, whilst showing real time ad media performance reports.
With 90% of affiliate management tasks being administrative functions, automation of the key aspects gives your team more time for productive functions. From account signup process, trigger emails, tracking management, commission calculations and assignment, invoice management and more, automation is a key aspect that should never be overlooked.
Managing commission models and rates for your affiliates is vitally important and can become a complex and time consuming task without the correct tools. You must have the ability to set standard commission models and rates for all affiliate accounts whilst also enabling different commission models and rates for different affiliate accounts. Tiered commissions based on thresholds which automatically increase as the tiers are passed through for both revenue sharing and cpa models and a hybrid model to reward affiliates based on fixed deposit amounts and follow on revenue share for set periods or lifetime terms.
Reliable and granular data reporting is the lifeblood of your affiliate program. Unstable, incorrect or missing traffic and financial data to quickly see your affiliates loose patients with your program. Professional modern affiliate partners rely on the data you supply to enable them to maximise thier return on investment. With data being vitally important in todays marketing world you must supply your affiliates with as much data as possible for the to work with. Gone are the days of an affiliate blindly delivering traffic to an affiliate program, they test performance, report on results and subsiquently scale up thier investment based on the data you are able to provide. Additionally you also need to see a detailed overview of your affiliates performance from your back office in order to monitor your program results.
A successful affiliate program can have hundreds or thousands of affiliates based in different countries, using different commission models and rates. The ability for your affiliates to easily manage thier account from a powerful back office is very important. As the main user interface, affiiates shoud be able to create unlimited tracking campaigns, run reports, update account details and manage payments. If your affiliates can also access frequesntly asked questions, ask support questions or directly contact their assigned affiliate manager you will be well on the way to providing the tools that they need. Same for your affiliate managers, they will need to have an easy solution to view snapshot affiliate information and access thier accounts to provide management and support services.
In short, both running your own affiiate program with specialist software and integrating to an affiliate network has benefits and advantages. If you are running your own affiiate program software you will have full control over the affiliate recruitment process and own the affiliate accounts that you recruit. You fully manage every aspect of your affiliate program. If you decide to migrate to a different affiliate software platform, you would transfer the affiliates with you. That being said, any migration to a new platform comes with difficulties. An affiliate network benefits from a solution that has already invested in recruiting affiliates ready to market your product or services. Launching your brand within a network can see instant performance traction and results, but can also be difficult if you are competing with commission rates offered by other similar products or services available within the same network. If you decide at any time to exit the network, you will not own or have access to those affiliate partners any longer and you will effectively be starting again. A network can offer a quick and easy way to get affiliate partners working for you with a fully outsourced marketing solution and is certainly an ideal option for small sized operators with limited resourecs, however you will be putting your affiliate program results solely in the hands of a third party.
without doubt affiliate program marketing software has a long and important future but only software platforms that continue to develop nd keep up with new technologoes and market trends. Legacy affiliate platforms with old and outdated tracking, functionality and features will fade into history. Some of these platforms will argue that "it tracks perfectly and does its job" but the truth is without professional hosting (not an AWS shared server) the software will not have a solid uptime, outdated 3rd party tracking will not be reliable and as affiliates become more professional than they were in the past, you need to supply the tools that these affiliates demand. Server to server tracking solutions for real time account signup conversions are great but need to be backed up by stable data integrations as a failsafe at least. With privacy concerns and an industry trend to making 3rd party tracking cookies obsolete in the not too distant future, any solution you choose must reliable and future proof.