Affiliate marketing is a symbiotic relationship between advertisers and publishers, and the affiliate software that brokers that relationship should support the needs of both parties.
The features of an affiliate platform should offer sophisticated tools for managing the merchant/affiliate relationship. Therefore, the software you choose to work with should facilitate this process with relevant reporting and proactive targeting tools.
Relevant Affiliate Reporting
Tracking reports are at the heart of success for both affiliates and the program they promote. Thus, a vital feature of reliable affiliate software is reporting that’s timely, accurate, accessible, and reports on all the Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”) of a campaign.
Current (e.g. daily) and accurate reporting is important because it allows both merchants and affiliates to monitor their campaign performance, and to make adjustments in a timely manner.
A graphical overview of these reports should also be accessible from the dashboard so that users can quickly get a sense of their KPIs at a glance upon login. Merchants and affiliates should also be able to adapt reports to their business needs through an Application Programming Interface (“API”) or by exporting them in Excel, CSV, TXT, or XML formats.
As for actual affiliate and merchant KPIs, reliable affiliate software should provide analytics on creatives (impressions), landing pages (click-through-rates), and conversions (transactions). This depth of intelligence provides insight into the full cycle of acquisition, allowing you to analyze where your strengths are in the acquisition process.
Hyper-Targeting
In addition to general marketing tools such as banner and flash ad management tools, affiliates need to be able to hyper-target their promotions in order to maximize promotions. There are two sides to affiliate hyper-targeting: (1) sending referrals to the most appropriate landing page, and (2) having customizable URLs so that affiliates can track and optimize their conversions.
Affiliates understand their traffic best; being able to choose what landing page to send their referrals to is essential to increasing conversions. Affiliate software that features deep linking tools helps affiliates achieve better results by allowing them to choose the landing URL/pages of their affiliate links. This enables the ability to adjust their call-to-actions so that they resonate with their customer-base.
As affiliates can generate and refer traffic from a variety of sources (SEO, PPC, Twitter, etc.), it’s also important that they have access to analytics that show how well each campaign converts into a referral.
Affiliate software that features custom affiliate tracking allows for the creation of tracking URLs with additional variables, such as keywords or campaign IDs. With these custom URLs, affiliates can then monitor how well each campaign is converting and optimize their efforts accordingly.
Software & Business Relationships
By providing merchant and affiliates with the reporting and marketing support they need to succeed, affiliate software can broker a prosperous business relationship.
Nicky Senyard is the founder and CEO of ShareResults.com, a relationship-focused affiliate network and software provider.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 7 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/17376069/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-7
FeedFront issue 7 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/08
