With These Five Tips, You Will Ignite the Performance Boost of Your Affiliate Program

You are already active in Affiliate Marketing as an advertiser and operate a partner program? Then you are in the right place. Malte Hannig from xpose360 presents a few suitable tips & tricks in this guest post to sustainably increase your affiliate sales, keep an eye on performance in a meaningful way, and thus elevate your partner program to the next level.

1. Maintain your partnerships

Affiliate Marketing is People’s Business! This is one of the standard phrases in the affiliate world – and it's true. Affiliate marketing is not an online marketing channel that you can turn on at the push of a button and the sales just “sprout” in. Therefore, it is even more important to build long-term partnerships with affiliates.

Know the top partners

To quickly become successful with a new affiliate program, you should onboard the largest affiliates per vertical at the beginning. Why? We often talk about the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your sales are generated by 20 percent of the affiliates. Even if you try to break this “rule” by forming new partnerships, the large affiliates will certainly play a very important role in your partner program.

The best thing to do is to create a list of the top three to five affiliates per vertical that you want to work with. That can look like this, for example:

• Content: Utopia, Finanztip, remind.me, werstreamt.es (depending on the industry)

• Deals: mydealz, Dealdoktor, UNiDAYS, Urlaubstracker

• Cashback: Shoop, iGraal, Getmore, aklamio

• Loyalty: Payback, DeutschlandCard, Miles&More, &Charge

With these potential partners, you then go into personal exchange and try to convince them of a partnership with your shop. If an affiliate initially declines a partnership, it can help if you offer exclusive actions with exclusive offers for the affiliate's users, commission increases or the like.

For voucher pages, it is no longer enough to just know the individual players on the market. The voucher pages operate several voucher pages in many cases, for example in cooperation with news portals. Here is an excerpt about voucher providers and their voucher pages:

• Global Savings Group: FOCUS, Chip, CupoNation

• Checkout Charlie: Sparwelt, gutscheine.de, DER SPIEGEL, RTL, n-tv

• Webgears Group: Gutscheinsammler, Bild, Computer Bild, Welt, Urlaubspiraten

Inform yourself about new developments in the industry

The so-called “whitelabel voucher pages” also change from one voucher provider to another – and suddenly sales can shift dramatically. This is just one reason why you should always be up to date and inform yourself about news from the industry. Other important topics you should always be informed about include tracking and data protection.

And here's where you can get information:

• Blogs and newsletters of the Affiliate networks (e.g. Awin, Tradedoubler & Co.). For the area of tracking & data protection, I recommend the blog from the private network provider easy Marketing.

• General industry portals: affiliateBLOG.de, affiliate-deals.de, performancein.com

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2. Active action planning

As already mentioned, you cannot simply press a button or increase bids in affiliate marketing to increase traffic and sales. A large part of sales is generated through exclusive actions with individual affiliates. The aim is to be promoted prominently on the affiliates' channels. This can be achieved through exclusive customer benefits or commission increases, for example.

Rough action planning for a year

At the beginning of the year, sit down and consider what the seasonal highlights of your shop are. These can be holidays (Easter, Christmas) or a specific season (last minute travel season, car insurance change).

Also, the affiliates plan many specials to match the season, the most famous of which is probably Black Friday. It is therefore obvious that you should promote your products to match the affiliates' specials. Of course, you should also arrange actions outside of your peak seasons.

From rough action planning to detail

Once you have made the rough action planning, approach the partners and schedule the actions firmly. Of course, you should not only plan actions at the beginning of the year, but also act spontaneously, depending on your own ideas or market conditions.

Therefore, create an action plan (e.g. as an Excel table) with all the actions you are planning. Here are a few tips on what you can record:

• Which partner is running the action?

• Duration of the action

• Placements at the affiliate (e.g. blog post, newsletter placement and Instagram story)

• Are there additional costs (WKZ or commission increase)?

Evaluation

You should evaluate all actions. How many clicks, sales and turnover did the action bring? Was there an uplift compared to the previous month without action? In this way, you will gradually gain more insights and a feel for which actions work well with which partners. Similarly, you can adjust during an action if it is not going as planned.

3. Keep an eye on performance

If you evaluate your actions individually, you already have an overview – not bad. But in general, you should always have an overview of your numbers. This way, you can react at any time if it is going very well (intensify) or if things are not going so well (adjust).

You should also have statistics from large to small in view:

• Year, month & day basis

• Across all partners, by vertical and by individual affiliates

Network APIs

Of course, you can look at the numbers directly in the network. This is also still clear with only one network and one country. However, this quickly becomes confusing with several partner programs. The Affiliate networks all offer interfaces through which you can save all numbers in a database. From there, you can pull them into internal dashboards or work with Excel and pivots in a classic way.

Use of external tracking tools

Almost all shops use general tracking systems such as Google Analytics. By appending parameters to the affiliate links, you can also keep an eye on performance there.

Practical: Affiliate networks can dynamically pass on the partner ID or advertising space ID of a partner in a parameter. This way, you can also keep an eye on individual partners in external tracking systems. Here is an example of how the parameters could be attached to the Affiliate network Awin:

beispielshop.de?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=awin&utm_campaign=!!!affid!!!

Instead of the !!!affid!!!, Awin then fills in the publisher ID.

Even more extensive analyses are possible through customer journey tracking tools, such as Exactag. In most cases, online channels are only considered according to the last-click logic – because it's simple. But it does not reflect the actual advertising effect. So to assess the actual value contribution from the affiliate channel or individual affiliates, we recommend using a customer journey tracking tool.

4. Eyes open for suspicious affiliates

Affiliates are paid on a commission basis. Among many reputable affiliates, however, there are also a few black sheep that want to “grab” these commissions. And you should preferably not let these black sheep into the partner program at all.

Careful partner approval

Affiliates must first be admitted to the partner program by the shop before they have access to the corresponding affiliate links and thus commissions. And this is where you have the largest leverage to prevent fraud.

When approving, you should pay attention to the following things:

• Is there an imprint?

• Location of the website & accessibility: If the website is based in China or Russia, for example, this does not have to be bad. But it's a reason to look more closely.

• Content – does it match your shop thematically?

• Currency of the website / when were the last posts written?

• Understandability of the business model: If only a technology is promoted on the specified website with which your shop will be promoted in return, take a closer look. If you don't understand the technology, initially forego the partnership or inform yourself even more precisely about what the affiliate is doing exactly to promote your shop.

Monitor SEA ads

A method of receiving unlawful commissions is so-called brand bidding. Here, an affiliate places SEA ads on the shop name, which is generally not desired. Sometimes the SEA ads also link directly to the shop and not to the affiliate website. Ad hijacking, where the shop's SEA ads are copied 1:1, is even cheekier.

Of course, you can manually google your shop name and see which ads are being played out. But it is also possible that the affiliate does not place ads in your city or only on weekends, so you don't notice.

You can recognize these methods with Brandwatch tools such as AdPolice. These providers “monitor” your ads or certain search terms – and that at any time of the day and from many different locations.

Keep an eye on meta networks

A special form of affiliates are meta networks. These are Affiliate networks in an affiliate network. These offer their sub-affiliates additional tools to integrate affiliate links very easily or to adjust them automatically. Particularly deal pages like to use these services because it allows deal contributions from the community to be monetized without actually having an affiliate link.

However, dubious websites can also hide behind the meta networks. Therefore, my advice: have your active meta networks set up a login and check there exactly which pages are promoting your shop. If necessary, individual verticals or conspicuous affiliates should be excluded.

As said, there is only a very small proportion of affiliates who work unscrupulously. But of course, you should arm yourself against these few so that you don't lose your appetite for affiliate marketing.

5. An extra tip: Put yourself in the position of your affiliates

If you are ever unsure about how to approach something, here's a universal tip: Put yourself in the place of the affiliates. If you do that, you can answer many questions yourself.

Typically, affiliates want the following:

• Exchange on an equal footing

• Timely action planning

• Safe tracking

• Secure income, possibly through an advertising allowance

• Exclusive offers for their users

• And of course: making money

These points can help you with action planning, communication or commission design – but of course also with many other topics around your partner program.